Link this, sucker!

Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born

Why is this a problem?You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland.

"That would be true except for the inverted age structure (more old people than young people) and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure," says Prof Murray.

The study projects:

• The number of under-fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.

• The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.

Prof Murray adds: "It will create enormous social change. It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter and I wonder what the world will be like."

Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

"We need a soft landing," argues Prof Murray. ...

Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option.
"To be successful we need a fundamental rethink of global politics. 

"The distribution of working-age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers."

‘We Teeter On The Brink Of Catastrophe’

"The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe."

The Revolution Is Winning
Radicals from the 1960s and 1970s now hold powerful positions in government and academia

Twenty Years A Fool: My Long Journey Home From The Left

Elizabeth Nickson’s story has all the makings of a Hollywood bio pic: A Westmount exile, who rebels against power and privilege, becomes a globe-trotting leftist journalist chronicling the great revolutionary narratives of her time. Then she sets out to discover the awful truth about her patriarchal 400-year-old colonist clan and everything changes. But Hollywood won’t touch her script because what she finds are eternal truths, about love, charity, sacrifice, Christianity and genuine freedom. ...

"The first thing I discovered was that they were Christian. And I mean very, very Christian. This was unnerving since on the intellectual left, faith in God, and particularly Christ, signifies a weak mind. But these people were anything but weak."

Historic Moon Landing Footage Has Been Enhanced by AI, And The Results Are Incredible

That is no exaggeration.

Why Rioters Will Eventually Turn Their Rage On Christianity If Not Stopped
The outrage over statues and the 'white' depictions of Christ is meant to detract us from the real endgame: the 'canceling' of Christianity itself.

The dream of Marxism is to eradicate Western civilization and replace it with itself; its reaction to the legitimate evils that have been committed by Occidentals is not reform but obliteration.

Marxism assumes that because the windows are dirty and cracked, the entire house must be demolished. We see this same hatred today in the insurrections occurring right now. There is no reason for mobs pulling down statues of Ulysses S. Grant or Hans Christian Heg or calling for statues of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator to be removed.

But if Western Civilization is evil, that means all the elements that went into creating Western Civilization must also be destroyed. That includes Christianity.

Connecticut pathologist’s study shows CDC coronavirus test kits generate 30% false positive results
Other issues with the COVID-count include motorcycle fatality classified as COVID-19 death, Rhode Island reporting 113 false positive results, and Florida labs lacking negative COVID-19 results.

Democrats, The Party Of Science (Fiction)
A record going back decades.

Has America 2020 become like Germany's Weimar Republic?

Yet there are some disturbing parallels, or at least echoes, of what happened during the Weimar years. First, the very emergence (or re-emergence) in the US of ideologically inspired rioting, looting, and street violence. Second, the fact that at least some of the violent factions – like Antifa – appear to be systematically organised and funded, with fairly sophisticated recruitment, training, and communications capabilities. Third, there is the truly disturbing fact that violence seems to winked at – if not actively encouraged – by sympathetic office-holders and by the ever-more-politically-one-sided media, in thrall to the political Left.

(In Weimar Germany, too, the political armies represented the political parties, and they were protected by office-holders – and also by the courts – which were sympathetic to them. In the Weimar Republic, it was especially right-wing governments and judges who winked at right-wing or Nazi violence. Hitler, for example, was liable for severe punishment, or even the death penalty, for the Beer Hall Putsch – his attempted coup by armed force in Bavaria in 1923. Instead, after a trial by sympathetic judges, he served less than nine months “fortress confinement” in Landsberg Prison, where he  was accommodated comfortably and free to write, or rather to dictate, Mein Kampf.) 

Politically-inspired rioting, looting, arson; bitter racial and ethnic grievances and divisions; deepening ideological antipathies. Colleges and universities that foster one-sided extemism. (The Nazis were especially strong in the Weimar-era universities.) Public officials and media who minimise or cover for violence – creating an atmosphere of impunity for one side in the political struggle. None of these are healthy symptoms.

History – thankfully – may not repeat itself. It’s worrisome though, or at least rather creepy, when it begins to rhyme.

Yes, I helped ruin America

I am a mid-gen Boomer, born 1955. I wrote in 2016 that my generation should be called the Meathead Generation (not a term original with me). And now The Atlantic has the facts and rationale mucu better than I did: "The Boomers Ruined Everything -- The mistakes of the past are fast creating a crisis for younger Americans."

Read the whole thing.

USA falling of the demographic cliff

Fewer babies as US birth rate fails to rebound with economy

 The nation’s birth rates last year reached record lows for women in their teens and 20s, a government report shows, leading to the fewest babies in 32 years.

The provisional report, released Wednesday and based on more than 99% of U.S. birth records, found 3.788 million births last year. It was the fourth year the number of births has fallen, the lowest since 1986 and a surprise to some experts given the improving economy.

The fertility rate of 1.7 births per U.S. woman also fell 2%, meaning the current generation isn’t making enough babies to replace itself. The fertility rate is a hypothetical estimate based on lifetime projections of age-specific birth rates.

Whether more U.S. women are postponing motherhood or forgoing it entirely isn’t yet clear.

In a first-world society, it takes 2.1 live births per woman to maintain a level population. The 1.7 average is an all-time low for the United States. But birth rates have been falling for, well, 200 years.

However, the decline in only nine years, from 1.93 to 1.7, is precipitous.

Births were down across racial groups, with small declines for Hispanics, whites, blacks and Asians. The number of babies born to native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders was stable.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also found:

—Overall, the U.S. birth rate for women ages 15 to 44 was 59 births per 1,000 women, an all-time low.

—Last year, there were 2% fewer births than in 2017.

Some observers of the trend say that the decline can partly be explained by the fact that women who bear children are doing so at an older average age, and that presently childless women will catch up as time passes. But that still does not account for the fact that women are still bearing fewer children than ever, no matter what age they bear them.

Demographers have pointed out that some European countries are gripped in a demographic death spiral, where the birth rate is so low that there is no realistic chance of recovery back to the 2.1 sustainment level.

What does America's falling birth rate portend? The WSJ explains (firewalled):

The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences. ...

Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

Simply put, a shrinking population means a bleaker, poorer, and less sustainable future.

The coming mosque of Notre Dame?

Bruce Bawer on the French government's response to  the fire of Notre Dame cathedral:

One thing that jumped out at me, as I watched Notre Dame burn in real time on BBC and Sky News, was the statement of some reporter or commentator or architectural expert that the cathedral could and would be rebuilt, although perhaps the new structure would be “more modern” than the old one. Later that evening, in his speech to the nation, President Macron vowed: “We will make the Cathedral of Notre Dame even more beautiful.”

More modern? More beautiful? My alarm bells went off, and they weren’t fire alarms. ...

 So it is that when one hears talk of a the construction of new Notre Dame that will be “more modern” or “more beautiful” than the original, it’s only natural – especially given that the cathedral, like all such structures in France, belongs not to the Catholic Church but to the French state –  to picture a building that, in the eyes of national and municipal officials, their interfaith advisors, and whatever cockamamie commission of postmodernism-loving architectural experts they end up putting together, ends up being some multipurpose multicultural monstrosity centered on a non-denominational worship area and/or containing different spaces for different faiths, with plenty of prayer rugs, wudu units, etc., for Muslims.

After all, in today’s Paris, Muslims already make up the majority of people who go to a house of worship at least once a week, n’est-ce pas? And given the way that these things work in most of Western Europe nowadays, it seems a foregone conclusion – barring some powerful, persuasive, and unprecedented movement to the contrary – that the voices that prevail as this project goes forward will be those arguing that the new Notre Dame must be a Notre Dame (although of course something needs to be done about that name) for the twenty-first century, for an increasingly non-Christian Paris, for an era of fundamental transformation in regard to matters spiritual. Why, after all, resurrect a cathedral that was already mainly a museum, a tourist mecca, a reminder of dead glories, when you can replace it with a spectacular mosque that will be a living place of worship for armies of believers, and will thereby serve as a dynamic, forward-looking symbol of the Paris, the France, the Europe of the twenty-first century and beyond, and hence affirm Paris’s place as the heart of a dramatically transformed Europe and – Allah willing – usher in a new Belle Époque?

Read the whole thing. I have maintained for double-digit years (though not on this blog) that Notre Dame cathedral will become a mosque during my lifetime. France's Muslim population is growing far more rapidly than ethnic French. In 2016, 8.8 percent of France's population were Muslim; in 2050 the figure will approach 20 percent.

Update: The question, "Why build it back the way it was?" is already being asked: How Should France Rebuild Notre Dame?

Much of the structure survived the blaze — but as rebuilding efforts move forward, the country will be left with a big question: What does the cathedral mean to 21st-century France?

And you better believe that a lot of answers are about to be offered.

Update: As the cathedral burned, there was jubilation from the strange alliance of Islamists and Leftists, because of what French philosopher " Bernard-Henri Lévy calls Islamo-Leftism, an 'anti-American religion' opposed to the existence of Western Civilization itself."

Meanwhile, Arab posts on an Israeli friend's Facebook page cheered Notre Dame's destruction: “This church was the HQ for the Templar Knights and was their operations room for carrying out attacks on Muslims wherever they were. We kneel (in prayer) thanking Allah and (hope) the same thing happens to the Vatican only this time the Pope is inside it.”

“God rain fire on it”.

“We’re all in solidarity with the fire. We are all the fire”.

Likewise, Social Justice Warriors posted taunts on Twitter:

“Notre-Dame burning is cosmic karma for all the historical sites and artifacts France destroyed and stole when being colonialist scum.”

"The most aesthetically pleasing visually (sic) I’ve ever seen.”

Which reminds me of destructors. "These persons simply must have an enemy, someone or some group who opposes them. For the 'my way' that destructors must get is inextricably linked to triumph over an opponent. That's why anyone who does not agree or assent to their demands is a target: the issue is not the demands, but the opposition."

Wokescolds, tribal victimhood identities, and class enemies

The Return of Ancient Prejudices, by Victor Davis Hanson, surveying the political and social landscape:

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

And what might those "noble purposes" be? IMO, they call come down to dependency on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of "class enemies."

Beria was Stalin's chief of internal security. He said quite simply that anyone could be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced without knowing anything about him or her except their Communist class identity. This idea is waxing strong in America today:

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational inquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person’s perspective is “valued” (a favorite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are “oppressed.” 

Favored classes have the virtue of having "revolutionary truth" ascribed to them, while unfavored classes have no redeeming virtue within or redemption without.

Party members signed death warrants for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s,collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was, “not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” 

As, for example, Caucasians and the concept of "while privilege." Inveighing charges against class enemies is the "noble purpose" behind the nearly-countless victimization hoaxes being perpetrated today. But the hoaxes continue - Jussie Smollett's arrest and potential prosecution do not signal the end. Why? Because, as Quillette explains,

[I]f you don’t follow conservative media, you may not have a sense of how often stories of hate crimes turn out to be false or a sense of what the false cases tend to look like.

Even fairly incompetent hoaxes might therefore succeed, which brings us to our second point: Hate crime hoaxes aren’t hard to pull off.

Especially with a compliant mainline media and Left-wing political establishment that wants the hoaxers' claims to be true.

No segment of American society is off limits for striking against class enemies. Recently, the Southern Baptist Church was stricken with details of child sexual abuse and assault made public, committed by some church workers and some pastors. That such acts deserve investigation and punishment surely needs no justification. But according to Stephanie Krehbiel, there is a class of church member who simply needs to be quiet, namely men. All men. Because an individual Baptist man may have abused or assaulted no one and so be personally innocent of anything -- except being a member of a class that is guilty of everything.

I covered earlier that we are seeing the the birth and growth of a new kind of social dynamic that never existed before: the victimhood culture. It never existed before because its birth and growth depend on social media and its enabling of instant tribal grouping across and without regard to bloodlines.

As Quillette explains,

... the third thing to know is that hate crime hoaxes thrive in a culture of victimhood. We use the term victimhood culture to refer to a new moral framework that differs from the older cultures of honor and dignity. Honor culture refers to a morality that revolves around physical bravery. In honor cultures one’s reputation is important, and it might be necessary to engage in violence to protect it. In the dignity cultures that replaced honor cultures, morality more often revolves around the idea that people have equal moral worth. Insults and slights don’t lower one’s status as they do in honor cultures, and people can ignore many minor offenses and go to the police and courts for more serious ones. Victimhood culture, which is in its most extreme form among campus activists, is different from both honor and dignity cultures. Its morality revolves around a narrative of oppression and victimhood, with victimhood acting as new kind of moral status, much like honor was a kind of moral status in many traditional societies.

Something like a hate crime hoax would make no sense in an honor culture. You might falsely accuse someone of insulting you so that you have a chance to display your honor, but you’d be trying to get them to engage in a duel or some other kind of fight. You’d be trying to demonstrate strength, to show you can handle your conflicts on your own. The last thing you’d want to do is claim to be a victim in need of help. Hate crime hoaxes make a little more sense in a dignity culture. Hate crimes are offenses against dignity, and perhaps you’d have something to gain by falsely claiming victimhood. But in a moral world less focused on praising victims and demonizing the privileged, the benefits are lesser and skepticism is greater.

It is in a victimhood culture that hate crime hoaxes are most attractive.

As I wrote before,

Victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids.

 A better explanation of how the child-students in college today practice this is given by Rod Dreher in "Life Among The Wokescolds," in which he recounts what a college professor-friend related.

In one of my classes yesterday we were talking about current events, and a student mentioned that the soldier in the famous Times Square kissing photo had died. “Yes,” I said. “Too bad. Such a beautiful image, and such a moment of joy.” One of my least favorite students, a smug know-it-all in the back row, piped up. “You actually like that photo?” she said. “Well, yeah,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “That’s an iconic image of a moment of unbridled joy.”

“And do you think she consented to that kiss?” she said icily. “No, no she did not. That is a photo of an assault. That man should have gone to jail.”

Now, this happens with some regularity in classes these days. I don’t use Twitter, but I’m familiar with the term “wokescold,” and it’s incredibly accurate. Most of my students are just pure scolds. They’re deeply puritanical (though they have no idea who the Puritans were, given their virtually nonexistent awareness of history). ...

It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. ... 

... We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity.

My students are generally pleasant, but they’re never any fun. Where’s the joy in their lives? They live to denounce. It’s like having 25 Robespierres around you three times a week. They’re always on the lookout for something to be outraged about. 

 I'd love to have some fine ending, full of hope and promise. But I do not. As Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen wrote,

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Hard to put a happy face on that. Want to watch the perpetual infantilism of our children in action? The consider no more than Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's visit by elementary school kids and adults where she encountered wokescolds of all ages.


Update: Commentary: Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation. Well, as Prof. Daneen said, that's what the education establishment considers its most important goal.

Democrats want to kill Democrat voters

I mean that literally: serving Democrat politicians want laws to allow the deliberate, pre-meditated killing of future Democrat voters. How else to explain the words of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who openly ...

endorsed infanticide and tried to make it sound as harmless as he could. When asked by a radio host if he supported Virginia legislator Kathy Tran’s proposed law to permit abortion while a woman was in labor, Northam replied:

This is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of physicians, more than one physician by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable. So in this particular example, if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.

Here is the video:


Please note that Northam thinks this is perfectly okay because, after all, "The infant would be kept comfortable" right up until it is destroyed. Maybe the SS should have taken that tack at Auschwitz because, "We will be nice to you right up until we brutally kill you" can't possibly be wrong.

The Federalist points out that the bull being discussed here was presented by Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran, who said this during a subcommittee hearing:

“How late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated it would impair the mental health of the woman?” [subcommittee chairman Todd] Gilbert asked.

“Through the third trimester,” responded Tran. “The third trimester goes all the way up to 40 weeks.”

“Where it’s obvious that a woman is about to give birth, that she has physical signs that she is about to give birth, would that still be a point at which she could request an abortion if she was so certified?” Gilbert asked.

“She’s dilating,” he continued, using the term for a woman’s cervix naturally opening to allow a baby to exit his mother during birth. “I’m asking if your bill allows that.”

“My bill would allow that, yes,” she said.

Which is to say, Tran wants the law to allow the mother to tell the doctor to kill the being-born or newborn (Northam: "the infant would be delivered") infant. While Northam said that more than one physician needs to be consulted, Tran insisted that only one be permitted for the go-ahead.

I do not know words nearly harsh enough to condemn the overt, public murderousness of today's Democrat party specifically and progressives generally. And on the same day that Gov. Northam, considered a rising star in the Democrat party, said that just-born babies should be killed on the mother's whim, the extraordinary hypocrisy of this party was on full display by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D.-Ohio, who said, talking about President Trump,

"Real populists don’t engage in hate speech and don’t rip babies from families at the border."

But the law already allows babies to be literally ripped - as in ripped apart - inside the womb and now Democrats want to allow living, delivered infants to be ripped from life itself.

The Left is already howling at we who explain what Tran and Northam said - accusing us, of course, of being the wrongdoers here.

I used to listen attentively to by left-of-center friends and ministerial colleagues on the matter of public policy, even though I hardly ever found that I could agree with their positions. But I did try to understand their point of view and how they justified it, whether on secular or biblical bases.

That door is now slammed shut. After Tran/Northam/Brown, there is no "understanding" possible that stays on this side of insanity. Starting now, I absolutely refuse to tolerate any lecturing by a "progressive" on the subject of morality on any issue, and this is now my number one reason why.

But back to my title for this post, "Democrats want to kill Democrat voters." Why do I say that? because according to the Guttmacher Institute (2014 data), of women who had an abortion,

Thirty-nine percent were white, 28% were black, 25% were Hispanic, 6% were Asian or Pacific Islander, and 3% were of some other race or ethnicity. ...

... three-fourths of abortion patients were low income—49% living at less than the federal poverty level, and 26% living at 100–199% of the poverty level.

Which means that minority infants were killed in the womb far out of proportion to the share of those demographics in the general population, and these minorities are by far super-majority voters for Democrats.Same with income levels - the demographic described as obtaining three-fourths of abortions are Democrat voters to a very high degree.

That's why I sometimes refer to the murdered infants as "Unborn Democrats." I New York City, for example, more black babies are killed in the womb than are born alive.

But Democrats won't talk about that because shut up.

Doctor Anthony Levantino performed 1,400 abortions until he abandoned that practice. Here is part of his testimony to Congress on how second-trimester abortions are done. (For third-trimester abortions, the baby is chemically killed in the womb and two or three days later the mother's body ejects the dead infant through the birth canal, usually with inducing drugs' assistance.)

When someone demands that a woman must have "the right to choose," remember that this is what that choice means:

  As Lincoln said about slavery, "If this is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." But "wrong" is far too wimpy a word to describe this. This is over the edge of evil.
Update: Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran says she was surprised by the pushback to her comments to the subcommittee and has tried to walk back her statements, but in so doing winds up more twisted around than an octopus playing Twister.

This is my shocked face: "No Democrats In Congress Seem To Have Heard Ralph Northam’s Abortion Comments," including this Democrat:


And yet, House Democrat warns ethics committee about Steve King promoting white nationalism website. In Democrat fantasy world, only Republicans have the duty to renounce members of their own party. When a Democrat does, every other Democrat pretends do not even know there is a problem.

Digital heroin addiction worsening

I have used, though did not invent, the term "digital heroin" to refer to people's addiction the glowing-screen devices, especially smart phone and tablets, and especially by children. A mostly-complete page of my posts is here.

Comes now further, abject confirmation. From the Daily Mail, "Generation of child web addicts: Youngsters are becoming so obsessed with the internet they spend more time on YouTube than with friends as parents struggle to keep control of their online usage."

Children have become such screen addicts they are abandoning their friends and hobbies, a major report warns today.

Researchers found under-fives spend an hour and 16 minutes a day online. Their screen time rises to four hours and 16 minutes when gaming and television are included.

Youngsters aged 12 to 15 average nearly three hours a day on the web – plus two more hours watching TV. The study said YouTube was ‘a near permanent feature’ of many young lives, and seven in ten of those aged 12 to 15 took smartphones to bed.

It concluded: ‘Children were watching people on YouTube pursuing hobbies that they did not do themselves or had recently given up offline.’

A growing number of parents admitted to researchers that they had lost control of their children’s online habits.

Next is a report on Nashville's local Fox affiliate, "Study: Increased screen time in young children associated with developmental delays."

A new study from psychologists and doctors in Canada found increased screen time in young children can cause issues with children reaching developmental milestones.

Researchers studied 2,441 mothers and children with higher levels of screen time for children aged 24 and 36-months-old. Researchers then examined developmental milestone test results in the same children at 36 and 60-months-old.

The study found on average, 24-month-old children were watching 17 hours of television per week, 36-month-olds watched 25 hours per week, and 36-month-olds watched 11 hours per week. The totals reflect findings children on average in the U.S. watch to 2 hours and 19 minutes of screen time each day.

For each age group, children with increased screen times showed poorer performances on developmental testing when they reached the next age group. Developmental evaluations included communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and personal-social skills.

The totals are well above the recommended 1 hour per day of screen time watching high-quality programs. Researchers say about one quarter of children are not developmentally ready for school entry and the trend parallels an increase in screen time use by children.

Parents are using glowing screens as a sedative to pacify their children I have seen this in public too many times to count. But people, these thing are literally addictive, and when children (a) learn they will be given a screen to stop pitching a fit, and (b) they cannot help pitching the fit anyway because they literally are suffering from withdrawal symptoms, then the parent-child-screen interface becomes a self-reinforcing do loop.

My kids escaped this, fortunately. Our youngest was 14 when the first smart phone came out and none of them got a smart phone until they were in college (if then). But I have, no kidding, seen infants who cannot even walk yet with their very own smart phones - and now you can buy those phones especially built for small kids (more accurately, for parents of small kids who visually identify those phones with toys, as the makers intend them to do).

Yes, this is sadly real - just click here.

What is the tie-in to these kids' futures? Well, consider that researchers both in the US and Europe have discovered that IQ scores are getting lower, and the younger one is, the greater likelihood his/her IQ is lower than a generation before. And while glowing screens do not seem to explain all the fall, they are absolutely part of it.

Falling IQ scores may explain why politics has turned so nasty

Western IQ scores are falling. Is it computers or something else?

Parents, take this seriously!

Why do Millennials love death?

Millennials would rather live in socialist or communist nation than under capitalism

A majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalistic one, according to a new poll.

In the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Annual Report on US Attitudes toward Socialism,” 58 percent of the up-and-coming generation opted for one of the three systems, compared to 42 percent who said they were in favor of capitalism.
The most popular socioeconomic order was socialism with 44 percent support. Communism and fascism received 7 percent support each.

Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said the report shows millennials are “increasingly turning away from capitalism and toward socialism and even communism as a viable alternative.”

“This troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society regarding socialism and the systemic failure of our education system to teach students about the genocide, destruction, and misery caused by communism since the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.

Millennials are more likely to prefer socialism and communism than the rest of the country. Fifty-nine percent of all respondents chose capitalism as their preferred arrangement, compared to 34 percent who said socialism, 4 percent fascism and 3 percent communism.

What is socialism, and what is the difference between it and Communism?  "The goal of socialism is communism," said Vladimir Lenin, and he certainly knew. So the 44 percent of those surveyed who said they wanted a socialist society were really say, though they aren't educated enough to know it, that they want a Communist society. At least seven percent were honest, though it's highly unlikely that they they actually know what Communism is.

What is Communism? It is this, and really, nothing but this:

Trudging through mud in sub-zero temperatures, digging the earth with their bare hands and heaving huge rocks with the most primitive of tools, these horrifying photos have revealed life inside Joseph Stalin's gulag prisons, where people were worked to death in Soviet labour camps through the mid-1900s.

This year marks 100 years since the 1917 Russian Revolution, which led to Vladimir Lenin taking control of the Soviet Union. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rose to power and became the state's authoritarian leader.

Between 1929 and the year of Stalin's death in 1953, 18million men and women were transported to Soviet slave labour camps in Siberia and other outposts of the Red empire - many of them never to return.

Prisoners worked in the most extreme climates, facing temperatures of -20C (-4F), as they cut down trees with handsaws and dug at frozen ground with primitive pickaxes.

Others mined coal or copper by hand, often suffering painful or fatal lung diseases from inhaling ore dust while on the job.

Labourers in the prisons worked up to 14 hours a day on massive projects, including the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and the Kolyma Highway.

By the time the last Soviet gulag closed its gates, millions had died. Starvation was not uncommon, as prisoners were barely fed enough to sustain such difficult labour. Other prisoners were simply dragged out to the woods and shot by guards.

Because equality, comrades!

Whatever you subsidize increases

It's one of the basic rules of economics: if you want more of something, get the government to subsidize it.

It works like this:

1. The government identifies a special-interest group that needs taxpayer money (or more taxpayer money) to buy something that the government wants them to buy. Let's say, for example, that the government wants more people to buy homes, but lower-half middle class earners and below have almost no chance to save at least the 20 percent cash down payment required for an ordinary mortgage,

2. The government establishes one or more programs to subsidize those persons' home purchases, especially for first-time home buyers.

The result? First-Time Homebuyers Decline by 40 Percent Since 2004

The reason is that the government thought it would subsidize home buying, but what it really did was subsidize home selling.

Ed Pinto, co-director for the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Housing Risk, said in a separate interview that housing prices are outpacing wages because the federal government has created artificial price increases by loosening credit requirements.

The federal government helps finance about 93 percent of first-time home purchases.

But subsidizing home financing does not subsidize home supplying. The pace of home building is finite and limited, while the government's cash coffer is neither. So:

Pinto used the analogy of buying a car: A car company is selling a car for $10,000, and the government is offering $2,000 in financing to make it easier for the buyer to purchase the car. But the car manufacturer is unable to increase the supply of the car, and the demand has increased because the buyer has more leverage. This means that the car may now sell for as much as $11,500. The closer the price gets to exceeding that $2,000 mark, the greater the benefit to the seller, while the subsidy decreases in value.

And the result:

In Atlanta, for example, housing prices for the lowest tier of income earners have jumped about 175 percent in the past six years, while the middle tier saw an 80 percent increase, and the top tier saw a 45 percent increase. This trend between tiers is mirrored in every other major city included in the index.

“The lowest-income individuals have the least ability to ride this roller coaster,” Pinto said.

Did anyone see this coming? Sure, conservatives did, but everyone knows that conservatives hate poor people and are racist Nazis to boot, so why pay any attention to them? Meanwhile,

The number of first-time homebuyers in the U.S. declined by about 40 percent between 2004 and 2015, according to recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. ...

Susan Wachter, a real estate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ... said with the current trajectory, the U.S. could conceivably see a market composed of 50 percent homeowners and 50 percent renters in the coming years.

Now, I do have to say that eliminating, or reforming or reducing the subsidies will not alone solve the problem. GDP growth rate has been less than 3 percent since 2005, and constant-dollar income trends have looked like this:

Until the economy gets back into gear, the home ownership rate will continue to decline. But that will require a major rethink of every aspect the government puts its hand into the national economy, and quite frankly, almost no one in either party wants to do it and they don't have the will, courage or intellectual capital to do it, anyway.

So the trend will continue and home ownership will increasingly become the privilege of the upper-income tiers. Because fairness, comrades!

The end of Blue Model Ministry

The Atlantic: "Higher Calling, Lower Wages: The Vanishing of the Middle-Class Clergy"

As full-time pastors become a thing of the past, more and more seminary grads are taking on secular jobs to supplement their incomes. 

Anyone familiar with the Blue Model that has been the rule in America since World War II - and its decline and the reasons why - will understand this. I explained it in the United Methodist context about five years ago in "Death Throes of the Blue Model Church." And the UMC is one of the bluest of the blue out there.

The Coming New Dark Ages: Millennials say why they are fragile

Millennial Offers the True Reason Her Generation is So Fragile

In a recent op-ed for Detroit News, millennial Kaylee McGhee offered an insightful explanation of her own:  

“Millennials are in a constant contest to one-up each other in showing tolerance, and when anyone or anything stands in their way, they collapse into temper tantrums.   

And the truth is, none of us should be surprised. My generation is a symptom of the society past generations have built — one characterized by immediate gratification, the breakdown of a moral code and the victim mentality. It’s the wreckage of past generations’ experiments with post-modern liberalism, and millennials are trying to wade through it.  

Millennials are desperately searching for answers to questions they’re afraid to ask. And because our predecessors failed to defend the moral code that once provided clarity, my generation replaced it with the morality of political correctness. The result is the snowflake-ification of a generation.” 

Millennials Value Tolerance Over Freedom

Pew Research Center, reports 40 percent of millennials believe government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive things to minority groups. A devout individual objecting to taking photos at a same-sex wedding could qualify for being offensive to a minority group. Thus, Millennials either keep quiet to be perceived as “tolerant” or supposedly fight for equality.

And politically conservative Millennials tend to fold like a tent rather than defend their beliefs:

Conservative Millennials have a tendency to discard their religious values to appease culture, like on the issue of abortion. In politics, conservatives consistently concede to culture’s vocal opposition to pro-life policies. ... millennials have a tendency to keep the peace with secular culture as its values seep into academic institutions and the workplace. Standing with the religious baker or florist objecting to an action to preserve their conscience may result in social ostracism.

All of which seems to me that this generation is relapsing into being ruled by honor-shame dynamics, in which the inner compass of conscience, objective moral codes and universal values are diminished - in fact altogether discarded. Instead, wholly subjective assessments reign supreme.

Jon Miltimore, whence the first link, responded to Ms. McGhee that her op-ed,

... relates to the thesis of Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal philosophical work After Virtue. In the book, the Notre Dame professor posits the theory that the Aristotelian moral framework that had existed in the West for over two thousand years was essentially destroyed during the Enlightenment, and efforts to unify it with a coherent Enlightenment philosophy failed, though philosophers failed to realize this.   

The result was that man still largely practiced and observed traditional moral values for generations, but did so largely lacking any understanding of the ideas that underpinned these values. MacIntyre, whose book was published in 1981 (the dawn of the Millennial Generation), concluded with an argument suggesting that man, almost entirely unbeknownst to him, had entered a dark age in which moral clarity and consensus were virtually impossible.

I have written about this quite a bit. What follows is an excerpt from my post, "Honor, shame, the Middle East and the American left."

The psychologist who uses the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved.

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

She illustrates the great difference between the two cultures by this matrix:

The key: if your principal concern is your standing in your community and what others think about you rather than your own inherent sense of conscience and personal sense of worth, then you are operating on a honor/shame model.

And that seems to be the social dynamic at work among the Millennials. If so, if Alasdair McIntyre is correct, we are indeed entering a new Dark Ages.

Dear President Trump: The West has already surrendered

In Poland Thursday, President Trump gave a speech that was truly historic. It was a speech that was near-Churchillian in focus and tone and world view. And it basically renounced successive American administrations of either party going back to at least Reagan's.

President Donald Trump waves to the crowd in
Krasiński Square, Warsaw, Thursday.

Speaking to a huge crowd in Krasiński Square, Warsaw, the president spoke of Poland's many decades of war against tyranny and oppression, but mainly he spoke thematically about what made Western civilization strong to begin with and why it must recover and reinforce its roots to prevail against Islamist imperialism, but also to suppress the waxing bureaucratic statism that grips every European country today. An excerpt:

Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger -- one firmly within our control.  This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles:  the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.  The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive. [Italics added]

Almost at the end, the president said,

 I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken.  Our values will prevail.  Our people will thrive.  And our civilization will triumph.  

Ah, how I want to like this speech. And at a very basic level, I do. A lot. But President Trump is sadly calling for ramparts to be manned that were abandoned decades ago and for which there are no human resources left to rebuild them. "Strong families" have disappeared from most of Europe, Mr. President, because families themselves are simply disappearing.

Put simply: Europe long ago broke itself. Its values will not prevail (they are barely hanging on now, and being weakened daily - by design and on purpose. See: Merkel, Angela).

And European civilization will not triumph. It is in full retreat now. Whether Western civilization can survive is still open to question, but if it does it will not be to Europe's credit and will almost certainly not survive there at all. Europe's future is distinctly non-European as history has known it and will be definitely non-Western.

Let's start with Poland. David Goldman posted on FB today,

There won't be a Poland in 100 years. At a total fertility rate of 1.29, Poland will have one retiree per working-age citizen by 2075. Poland in fact has one of the world's very lowest fertility rates, which means (in Mary Eberstadt's way of looking at the problem) that it is losing its religion. President Trump's speech was magnificent, but it brings to mind Schiller's dictum that history brought forth a great moment, but the moment encountered a mediocre people. Trump is doing the right thing, but we should remember that Europe is a case not for cure but for palliative care.

I have written a lot of demographic trends in the world, concentrating on Europe and the US. Nine years ago in, "What has NATO done for us?" In 2008, Russia was making military incursions into Georgia, on which Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin decided that NATO should bring Georgia into membership. I assessed not only why NATO is a strategic nullity but asked a pointed question concerning Europe's demographic death spiral:

There is another point that Mark Steyn touched on when discussing Sarah Palin's bright idea to bring Georgia into NATO. I can't find a link now, but Steyn pointed out is that Georgia's birth rate has tanked more than practically any other country in the world. In fact, by 2050 there will be only 100,000 Georgian women of childbearing age, if current trends continue. So, he said, if Georgians won't have children to grow up to defend Georgia, why should Americans have children to grow up to defend Georgia? I can't think of any good reason.

And the same question can be asked of every other European NATO member, except perhaps Britain and France. The birth rates of Germany, Spain, Italy and every other NATO country except Turkey are below the stable replacement rate of 2.1 average births per woman, most far below. Italy’s rate is 1.23 births per woman , for example, meaning that Italy’s population could shrink by one-third by mid-century. (Turkey’s birth rate is about twice as high as Italy's.)

Again the question for NATO’s countries: if you will not have enough children to preserve your country, why should American women bear children to make up your deficit?

Demographers agree that a minimum rate of 2.1 live births per woman is required to maintain a level population from one generation to the next. And what is the demographic trend across Europe?

When a culture decides not even to reproduce itself, then it had already surrendered. It had decided to go quietly into the night and fade away. That is what Europe is doing now. Despite the president's soaring rhetoric, there will be no recovery from this decision. There is far from enough time left to do so. Tens and tens of millions of women in Europe are not going to decide suddenly to start having and average of more than 2.1 children each. The Europeans economies cannot support such a change anyway. In fact, they cannot support their present, aging populations now, which is why so many Euro nations decided long ago to reply on "The Mohammed Retirement Plan" that will nail the continent's coffin shut.

Europe is not just millions of square miles of terrain. Our affiliation with Europe, and the reason our military shed so much blood on Europe's soil, was not to defend dirt. It was to defend and preserve a cultural heritage the was the wellspring of human flourishing of the modern era. That the Europeans themselves sometimes seemed hellbent on killing one another in carload lots did not negate the fundamental virtues of the Western heritage of faith and reason.

But those are the very virtues that most of Europe has abandoned. That is why I really want to like President Trump's Warsaw speech but cannot. It's at least 50 years behind the times and for all its rhetorical inspiration, there is almost no one left in Europe to hear it with understanding of what it really would have to mean, and I doubt that Trump himself knows, either.

Update: "... of the six founding members of what evolved into the European Union, five are now led by childless prime ministers or presidents." See more at Powerline.

Seniors abandoning America

Increasing numbers of American retirees are moving to Central or South America to live out their years. The main reason is financial -- huge numbers of seniors are broke.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found not so long ago that almost half of Americans die nearly broke. Of the general population, 46% of retirees die with savings of $10,000 or less. But that number climbs to 57% among retirees who are single.

Now when we take other assets, like homes, into account, the picture gets a bit less bleak. Still, 57% of single-adult households and 50% of widowed households had no housing equity to show for when they died.

The problem is that dying nearly broke isn't just a matter of denying one's beneficiaries an inheritance. Rather, it points to a frightening degree of financial vulnerability during retirement. If seniors are passing without much in the way of assets, it means that in the years leading up to their death, they're ill equipped to handle a major unexpected expense, such as a significant medical bill. In fact, in that same GoBankingRates survey, only 37% of seniors 65 and older claimed to have $1,000 or more in the bank.

And so: "Retirees flock to Latin America to live an upper-class lifestyle on $1,500 a month"

CUENCA, ECUADOR - To casual visitors, this colonial town in southern Ecuador looks like it was torn from the pages of history. With its cobbled streets, soaring cathedrals and bustling markets, it exudes a lazy, old world charm.

But Cuenca is also on the cutting edge of a very modern trend: providing a safe haven for U.S. retirees who have found themselves unwilling — or unable — to live out their golden years at home.

The growing wave of ex-pat seniors is not only upending notions about retirement in the hemisphere but reshaping the face of communities throughout the Americas. And the trend is expected to grow as waves of baby boomers exit the workforce ill-prepared for retirement.

There’s no accurate way to measure the phenomenon, but the Social Security Administration was sending payments to 380,000 retired U.S. workers living abroad in 2014 — up 50 percent from a decade ago.

In the Americas, records show that seniors are flocking to Canada, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador.

An American couple in the city,  Susan and Michael Herron, told the paper,

They had previously “retired” in Central Florida, Georgia, Alaska, South Carolina and Panama before finally settling on Ecuador — because it was beautiful and cheap.

“We could have survived [financially] in the United States if we had moved to a more rural area,” said Susan, 71, a semi-retired property manager. “But we wanted to take this chance while we were still healthy enough to be able to do it.”

In Cuenca, a city of about 350,000 people, they’ve found robust public transportation, an extensive museum network, solid healthcare and markets bursting with fresh fruits and produce. It’s a place where their two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath apartment costs less than $400 a month. They’ve found that for about $1,500 a month, they can live a solidly upper-class lifestyle, dining out frequently and traveling.

“In the United States, we couldn’t afford to go anywhere,” Susan explained. “We were having to stay home.”

These days even HGTV has shows about how to buy a home down south. Costa Rica has long been a popular place to retire for Americans with a good climate, low prices and the highest percentage of US-trained doctors in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States.

In the military-related forums I visit, there are often discussions about retiring in Latin America or a handful of other countries, mainly Asian (including Vietnam!). Military retirees have typically lived in other countries already by the time they retire and have learned to adapt to foreign cultures. I admit the thought has crossed my mind, too, although I still have a number of years to go before I retire from my post-military career. But the trend will continue.

How bad is the European demographic death spiral?

This bad: Eleven European countries have government-sponsored campaigns to get their men and women (not only married ones) to have more, um, intimate times together.

But the entire Western world, not just Europe, is in a demographic crisis.

Demography and the future

I have posted a lot about demographic trends in the world, mainly Europe and the US. So this caught my eye.

I have been reading Canadian journalist David Warren's work for a long time. His essay points out that the much higher birthrate among Muslims than Christian isn't "much" higher after all, and that.

... the Muslim acceleration dates only from about 1950. It is historically anomalous, and can be explained by several obvious external factors. All trends are reversible, as I like to say. 

My bet is they can’t keep it up.

Which may be true, but the real question is who will enter the demographic death spiral first, the rate that is so low that population recovery becomes so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. It is already a reality in a few Euro nations.

"The Coddling of the American Mind"

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

The Atlantic: The Coddling of the American Mind

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Read the rest, and consider that the article is two years old. Academia's psychosis had only deepened since then. And yes, some law professors now do refuse to teach rape law or any other law relating to sexual matters.

Plante is one of many academics who increasingly find themselves walking on eggshells to avoid offending their students. Some law school professors have stopped teaching rape law due to complaints from students who claim the subject is traumatizing—even though educating students about this important topic should be more important than making everybody in class comfortable all of the time. 

If professors want to warn their students before discussing particularly disturbing subjects, that’s fine. But it’s concerning that strenuous objection from the students is leading academic to stop teaching these subjects entirely.

But why stop there? Jesus died, but we can't talk about that:

Students in a Bible course at the University of Glasgow are being given trigger warnings before being shown images of the crucifixion — and permission to skip those lessons altogether if they are worried they’ll feel too uncomfortable.

Universities are significantly oriented therapeutically and this increasing trend is overwhelming the educational emphasis.

Outside of hospitals, the university has arguably become the most medicalized institution in Western culture. In 21st-century Anglo-American universities, public displays of emotionalism, vulnerability, and fragility serve as cultural resources through which members of the academic community express their identity or make statements about their plight. On both sides of the Atlantic, professional counselors working in universities report a steady rise in demand for mental-health services.

Among academics there is widespread agreement, too, that today’s students are more emotionally fragile and far more likely to present mental health symptoms than in the past. There is little consensus, however, about why this is so. Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin College, has more questions than answers on this score:

I don’t know if it’s related to the way we parent. I don’t know if it’s related to the media or the pervasive role of technology—I’m sure there are lot of different factors—but what I can tell you is that every campus I know is investing more resources in mental health. . . . Students are coming to campuses today with mental-health challenges that in some instances have been diagnosed and in some instances have not. Maybe, in previous eras, those students would not have been coming to college.

Observers of the educational scene have known for years that the very class of students demanding protection from being offended or being exposed to "triggering" material are also the same ones who very hostilely and sometimes violently strike back at persons they classify as aggressors or oppressors. The Atlantic's article calls this "vindictive protectiveness," and recounts how a student at the University of Michigan who poked fun at "what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything." Retribution was harsh.

A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.” When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

Understand that today's college students are tomorrow's business operators and future managers. They will bring this kind of disfunctionality with them. In fact, it's already been in the workplace for some years. Just a few days ago I met a man with whom I fell into a long conversation that rambled through many topics. At one point he said that he has a difficult time hiring young men or women in his business. "They can't communicate clearly and don't think ahead well." It's not going to get better any time soon, either.

Update: Your tax dollars at work and where else but the University of California system? I'm not even going to print the headline, so click here if you dare.