When certification becomes a status marker rather than a reliable indication that a person can perform a particular task, society is in trouble.
Yep
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
History is a blind, deaf, and dumb idol. It is not the thing that Christians should be worried about being on the right side of.
More and more we look like an undignified parody of Bourbon France. This will not end well.
More and more we look like an undignified parody of Bourbon France. This will not end well.
There are few bright spots with what happened with covid, but two come to mind. It exposed how duplicitous “experts” can be and it also exposed how quickly the government that hires those experts can become dictatorial even when their experts are wrong. I commented to my wife that I could finally understand the French revolution. When you remove any ability of the public to have a peaceful redress of grievances or even a discussion of differences, it almost always degenerates into violence.
I learned early in my career that I could always find an expert to say whatever I wanted them to say. All it took was money. From that point on, I became a skeptic of “experts” , credentialed or not.
Let’s remember not to use the enemy’s language. “Buy back programs” is a dangerous lie. The government didn’t give people their guns, and it’s foolish to speak as though it had.
I commented to my wife that I could finally understand the French revolution. When you remove any ability of the public to have a peaceful redress of grievances or even a discussion of differences, it almost always degenerates into violence
I don’t think ‘always’ or that that was the issue in France. In France there was an acute problem (the government was nearly bankrupt) and several chronic problems (the disconnect between household resources and tax burdens, the disconnect between effort and entrepreneurship on the one hand and household living standards on the other, the stew of incompetence and crookery in the civil service (at the heart of continual revenue shortfalls), the gross self-indulgence of the court, an episcopate which was the issue of political games in and among the nobility, &c. None of it was novel. For reasons poorly explained by sociologists and social psychologists, France suffered a volcanic eruption in response to this situation. IIRC, the historian Jerome Blum said that the feudal order in Europe never seemed so immovable than in the last century of its existence. Then, over a period of about 80 years, it was swept away completely.
Saira Rao omits her employment history from her LinkedIn. By some accounts, she’s a doctor’s kid from Richmond, Va., cadged a degree from UVa, worked in television news for a few years, cadged a law degree from NYU, landed a clerkship with one of the federal circuit courts, then spent several years as an associate with a BigLaw firm. Most people wash out of BigLaw and find a niche in some other component of the profession or find a new line of work. Her response to that has been to embark on a career as a freelance professional complainer / defamation artist. She managed to land a husband who appears to have a lucrative position in the financial sector. This is the person who pretends to be our moral tutor.
Art- I agree that France had an acute problem. However most of the woes listed for France are increasingly applicable to the US. We even have a Bastille full of people who were at Jan 6.
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/08/03/nobel-prize-winner-cancelled-by-the-imf-after-questioning-climate-change-data/#more-207995
Anthony Annett / TonyA / Morning’s Minion was once employed in the PR apparat of the IMF. If he’s still there, I wonder if he had a hand in this.
David Brooks, once upon a time sane and respectable, tipped the bean jar last Thursday in the NYT, while not quite spilling the whole shebang:
Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
The Bourbonesque hubris of this bunch is beyond description. Someone should undrertake to remind them that history is up to its eyeballs with mostly violent ends to such arrogance, and that they are no more immune than anyone else.
He’s talking about two newspapers which might actually still have a net profit.
The distinction between mean cash compensation and the median among journalists is quite a bit larger than is usually the case. The mean – about $86,000 per annum – is north of the 75th percentile of the population of journalists. The median is about $56,000 per year. The median for elementary schoolteachers (special education excepted) is now $61,700 a year, and teachers receive an abnormally large portion of their compensation in the form of fringes. There are 1.394 elementary schoolteachers; there are 44,600 journalists. Another category, ‘writers and authors’ is more numerous (54,000) with median annual cash compensation of $73,000. Technical writers: 48,600, median annual $80,000. Editors: 101,400; median annual, $73,000. IIRC, fringes for the average employee amount to a value of $13,000 a year, some correlated with your cash compensation, some not.
The median annual cash compensation for registered nurses is currently $81,000. There are 3,000,000 registered nurses in the U.S. A nursing school is bog standard at state colleges. I don’t know what the salary scale is at the two papers Brooks names, but I’m going to bet they’d be earning better if they’d bizbagged Georgetown and enrolled in the nursing school at Towson state college in Baltimore County.
[…] then. Like so many, he's beyond being a cautionary tale. He has become a symbol for that malady we suffer under today in which an entire class of self-appointed experts with diplomas of the college decide they must be […]