Back in the day a lot fewer people were getting college degrees. Supreme Court cases like Griggs v. Duke Power Co. made it more difficult for employers to use testing in hiring, which has (probably) led to college degrees being used as a sort of proxy for the testing that would have been done in the past. Hence, jobs that used to require only a high school diploma now require a bachelor's degree, and everybody feels they need to get a college diploma, leading to the higher education bubble.

Are the hunters cross-dressing, or the pigeons?

They gladly accept what charity is offered them, then take by force the rest. Excellent quote, although some may not enjoy the rather obscene nature of the reason comments section.

"We need more; you have more," one protester, Amin Husain, 36, told a Trinity official on Thursday, during an impromptu sidewalk exchange between clergy members and demonstrators.

The real problem was the police trying to clear out the parks. Instead, they should have Occupied the Exits, and either not let anybody pass by them, or let people move in only one direction (in which case I suppose it would be Occupy the Entrances). By definition this would be no more violent than the original Occupation.

How might we live without a rigidly binary gender system? We'd be extinct, since there wouldn't be any males to mate with any females.

to privatise and marginalise populations Hells bells, I'd rather have my identity privatised. The alternative is having these nasty collectivists trying to define my identity for me. Anybody who wishes to deny me the right to define my identity is evil.

I don't know why I read the comments to that article, Anna. I'd like those five minutes of my life back. :-) My "elsewhere" moment came over the weekend. With the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States on Thursday, that made Friday "Black Friday", the day on which there's stereotypically a big rush of shoppers starting their Christmas shopping. This year, thanks to the OWS people, there were calls to "Occupy Black Friday" and punish the "big" retailers and "shop local". The local TV stations duly reported on this uncritically. My favorite part of this doe-eyed reportage was when they went to the local outlet of the Fa Irt Rade business (because splitting two words up into three is no dumber than joining them up as one Newspeak-style). Apparently, there was a bit of disappointment in the Fa Irt Rade camp because the American branch of Fa Irt Rade is in a dispute with the global brand about what constitutes "fair". Tha fact that you have this large Western business imposing its own arbitrary ideas of fairness upon people in the Third World and calling it "fair" is no different from other Western business practices was lost on both the shoppers and the media propagandists.

The thing is, Moody’s article is only slightly more unhinged than much of what passes for academic critique of popular culture. I know I've argued it before, David, and I think you even agreed with me (with links and all!) the last time I argued it, but the further problem is that these are the sort of people the monopolist media treat as the Serious People Who Should Be Listened To. As are the Occupy People, because even though their ideas are inchoately incoherent at best, they say they want to use the power of Big Government to punish businesses, and that's somehow virtuous enough to trump all the other crap that's going on in the Occupy camps.

"Are Ridley Scott's falling petals… anything more than a way to gussy up the triumph of oligarchy, corporate capital and globalisation?" One wonders what he would think of Zuzu's petals. More seriously, a good decade or so ago I heard a Sunday morning program on the CBC discussing Christmas movies, and one of the women on the panel talked about how she hated It's a Wonderful Life because the whole story line was about stroking George Bailey's ego with Clarence telling him how important he is. Kinda misses the point of the movie, if you ask me, which argues that the world around us would be a much lesser place if we gave in to our selfish wishes. But the woman went on, and complained about how horrible it was that the Lionel Barrymore character isn't seen getting his at the end of the movie. (We all know it's going to happen; it doesn't have to be shown.) I seem to recall her making comments about capitalism too, but this was a good 10 years or more in the past and it's not as though I've got a recording of the show. But it was one of those things that solidified the idea that there are some nasty people who think things can't be art unless those things have the correct political viewpoint. And the corollary that politics trumps beauty when it comes to art, something that's even more frightening.

If you donate more than a grand to the exploding duck boner fund, they'll cook you a roast duck dinner. Not to mention the USB drive filled with all the exploding duck boner porn your donation will fund. The PBS fundraising drones will have to up their game to top that! They should market it as art instead, and charge Damien Hirst prices for it.

I think the starlings of Rome video would go better with this piece of music.

Julia: I'd agree with that comment, but in a different way. I never got what was so romantic about the relationship between Betty Persky and Mr. Mayo Methot.

"Free" degrees also mean, if we follow the logical road down to its conclusion, that we can force people to teach the courses. Of course, every time people here in the States start talking about single-payer medicine, I suggest single-payer legal care, since no lawyer does anything that's worth more than minimum wage.

WTF? They knock two elderly women down concrete stairs and just carry on chanting. They should have giggled sinisterly like Tommy Udo.

I would have suggested this wine: http://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=524918

Ah, I see Anna's link is to the same story as my second link, only from a different source.

From the fine folks at reason, 49% of OWS protesters think the bank bailouts were necessary: http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/18/poll-49-of-occupy-wall-street#comments From the potty-mouthed comments, comes the linked story that thieves are preying on the protestors: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/criminal_occupation_oh3CnKANUqYHrGPCaZaLRK The first person quoted has a Mac stolen, which she claims is worth $5,500. I'd think that's in the top 1% of all home computers out there.

US Representative who marched for civil rights in the 60s first allowed, then disallowed, from speaking at Occupy Atlanta: http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/10/silencing-john-lewis-is-what-d#comments As the article says, if they want a rule preventing any elected official from speaking, that's great. But that's not what happened.

Density Duck: Barry Goldwater owned slaves??

Brett Favre should have suggested he was smashing cultural taboos when he texted those photos of himself to Jenn Sterger.

I think the film could have done with an extra hour, but I fear film-makers are becoming increasingly discouraged from testing their audience's attention span. Funny you should say that; I'm a fan of classic cinema who thinks there's little reason why many movies can't tell their story in under two hours. Indeed, if you go back to the 1930s, there are a lot of all-time classic movies (and Oscar winners) that are even under 90 minutes. Even the multiple intertwined stories of Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight all get resolved in 112 minutes.

Dogs jumping rope: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtwPzyppOyY

I don't know if this belongs here or in the "Elsewhere" thread, but here's a great example of defacing the luvvies' virtual wall in the "wrong" way: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0915/breaking36.html Suddenly when it's done to them it's not funny. And this is only a virtual defacement.

Well, quite. And you can't help but wonder how Mr Bakare would feel about similar "solidarity" and "trenchant resistance" if it were aimed at his property, or that of his family, or were informed by some cause he doesn't find quite so congenial. Well, I would have suggested defacing the Guardian's headquarters. Why go at one of them when you can go at all of them? Could you imagine rioters storming the Guardian or the BBC?