Employers on strike

WSJ: Employers on strike:

Almost everything Congress has done in recent months has made private businesses less inclined to hire new workers. ObamaCare imposes new taxes and mandates on private employers. Even with record unemployment, Congress raised the minimum wage to $7.25, pricing more workers out of jobs. The teen unemployment rate rose to 26.4% in May, and for those between the ages of 25 and 34 it rose to 10.5%...

Ms. Romer said yesterday that to "ensure a more rapid, widespread recovery," the White House supports "tax incentives for clean energy," and "extensions of unemployment insurance and other key income support programs, a fund to encourage small business lending, and fiscal relief for state and local governments." Hello? This is the failed 2009 stimulus in miniature.

It's always a mistake to read too much into one month's jobs data, and we still think the recovery will lumber on. But if Ms. Romer wants this to be more than a jobless recovery, she and her boss should drop their government-creates-wealth illusions and start asking why so many private employers remain on strike.

How does "going off" help?

I find it absurd that Spike Lee told Obama to "Go off" in response to the oil spill:

One time, go off!" director Spike Lee urged on CNN's "AC 360°." "If there's any one time to go off, this is it, because this is a disaster."

Lee's sentiment echoes the frustration of people who want to see Obama get loud, take charge and inspire them like he did during his presidential run.

And pray tell, how will "going off" help? The oil spill is a problem that needs to be solved with a cool, level head, not screaming to "do something." I guess some of those on the left don't understand that just "feeling something" will not make it so. They are so used to screaming and demonizing people to get their way (because it works) that they think it will work in every situation. Unlike in the movies and Democratic politics where feelings dominate and seem to save the day, cool, rational thought is needed to deal with this particular crisis.

Neo-Neocon on the Gore's marriage breakup:

It’s almost always upsetting and even somewhat shocking to hear of a long, long marriage gone bad.

People are wondering why? WHY? You made it through all sorts of tough stuff, the way all couples married for forty-one years must. Couldn’t you just hold on till death do you part?

I don't know. I'm always surprised that people make it married this long. Just because you get older doesn't mean that you become a person willing to tolerate anything, just to "make it until death do you part." Maybe, if your marriage is not a good one, you figure you better get out before you die.

Dr. Wes: Providing health care will get you investigated.

How do you keeping from cracking?

Does the news upset you to the point where you feel it's hard to watch or read anymore? I think we all feel this way at times. For me, lately, I have a hard time reading about crimes or atrocities committed against men who have little recourse in the legal system or whose lives are deemed by society to be expendable. Readers mail in many of these articles and at times, I feel helpless and angry to the point where I wonder if there is much I can do. And yes, keep sending those in because I do appreciate hearing from all of you.

But when my anger and frustration get to be too much, this is when I decide to pursue more positive activities for a while until my mental state goes back to neutral and I can think more clearly. My positive activity has been to re-read a book entitled Krav Maga: How to Defend Yourself Against Armed Assault and to think about returning to the Kra Maga lessons I was taking about two years ago that I described here.

I think feeling that you have some control over your own life despite all that goes on in the world is important. How do you manage to make your own life better, freer or more fun, despite the problems going on in the world? Do you have hobbies, interests or pursuits that lead you to a more positive place? If so, share them with me (us) and maybe we can learn something.

Does political correctness teach lack of empathy?

Stuart Schneiderman has additional thoughts on why college student's lack empathy:

Here political correctness makes a contribution, especially by teaching young people to be intolerant of differing political and cultural viewpoints. If you tell people that they should only listen to people whose ideas echo their own, you are in the business of producing narcissists. ....

Clearly, something paradoxical is afoot in the land. Dr. Helen Smith identifies the problem clearly. In her view, students are gaining their good feelings on the cheap. They support government programs that are supposed to care for people because they want to feel good about having the right feelings. They have not advanced to the level of wondering about whether these programs are helping real people.

The students are so involved with their own good feelings that they have no sense of the realities of the programs they support. If you really care about other people you care about whether they have jobs. If you support quasi-socialistic experiments that end up costing jobs and then vote for politicians who want to set up more and more programs to take care of the unemployed... does that show how much you care for other people or how little you are interested in their lives?

Jeff Dunetz at Big Government: “How can a Jew not be politically conservative?”

Right Wing News compares the Liberal reaction to the Conservative reaction to the Israel/Flotilla story.

Neo-Neocon: Voting again for Carter II.

Is college a "sucker's game?"

Vox Day has an interesting post on whether or not college is a "sucker's game:"

Going 100k into debt in order to obtain a job that pays $22 as a photographer's assistant is not an intelligent action. The correct answer to the question about attending college is "it depends". What college, what degree, and what job prospects? ....

Basically, if you have to borrow money or if you are at all prone to not finishing what you start, you shouldn't even think about going to college. And if you do go, get a degree in something meaningful, not outdated liberal arts degrees in English, Art History, or Business. You'll learn more about business running a fast food franchise for a summer than you will in six years of college. Throw in a little reading of Peter Drucker,Sun Tzu, Malcolm Gladwell, Dilbert, and whoever the business author du jour happens to be and you'll know more management-speak too.

Study finds college students less empathetic

A study in Science Daily found that today's college students have less empathy than they used to (via Newsalert):

Today's college students are not as empathetic as college students of the 1980s and '90s, a University of Michigan study shows.

The study, presented in Boston at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, analyzes data on empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.

"We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000," said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait."

Some experts in the article felt the drop in empathy was because of exposure to media causing desensitization to other's pain or because of a hyper-competitive atmosphere where everyone has to worry about themselves in order to compete.

Perhaps this is part of the equation but, in my opinion, the huge emphasis in the schools and culture on "high self-esteem" (from the 1970's on) regardless of accomplishments probably plays a part in the increase in narcissism, and increased lack of empathy. In addition, the cheap emphasis on being a do-gooder through government means as a tool for feeling good about oneself, rather than helping others due to the intrinsic reward and what it means to the other person has probably not helped.

It's kind of ironic that as the liberal government emphasizes their "wonderful" socialist programs to the masses (heath care, global warming, peace studies, etc.), the masses are becoming less able to feel for their fellow human beings. As more people see the government as being responsible for taking care of others, their tendency to help others will lessen, not increase.