Borrowing into Oblivion

One of the best columns that I recently read was penned by Jay Jefferson Cooke.  His screed appeared on the front page of the Courier News.  It discusses the decades-long love affair of Americans with instant gratification, and of how it plunged us into the deep waters of unsustainable debt.  Cooke discusses ways to avoid that.

If you read his column, you will get a sense for the vigor and passion – not to mention the accuracy – with which he gets his points across about overspending and its consequences. 

 

I can relate to his essay very well:  When I grew up in post-WWII Lowell, Massachusetts, textile and shoe manufacturing industries were its economic backbone – at least 50 million square feet of productive capacity.

The war effort kept everything booming, but post-war peace brought a sharp decline in demand, and mills shifted south in chase of cheaper labor and proximity to its raw material, cotton.  Later, everything would move to Asia.

Yale students sign petition to abolish the First Amendment

Seeking to determine just how many, if any, Yale University students were willing to sign a petition in favor of repealing the First Amendment, film maker Ami Horowitz went on campus in New Haven on a balmy day, and stood outside asking students passing by if they were interested in lending their signatures to it.

What these students did not know is that satirist Horowitz’s petition, though clearly worded and plain as all get-out, was not for real.  It was an experiment to see just how many students would fall for his ruse and sign the document declaring their position – and it worked.

Within one hour, Horowitz had the signatures of over 50 gullible Yale students willing to destroy some of the basic tenets of universal human rights.

AAA Pushes for a Boycott of all Israeli Academic Institutions

Last month at its annual conference in Denver, the American Anthropological Association (no relation to the AAA auto club) overwhelmingly passed a resolution of censure [1040 to 36] that calls for the boycott of all Israeli Academic Institutions.

In April, 2016, it will be presented for final approval to the group’s full membership numbering about 12,000.  The proposal calls on members “to officially adopt a boycott to refrain from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions, though not of individual academics.”

The resolution fails to explain the paradoxical distinction which it strikes between “Israeli academic institutions” and its members, seeming not to take into account that one cannot exist without the other.

This move is largely the result of efforts by Palestinian groups including the “Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors” and other Palestinian organizations that “have called for an international boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Unexpected Beauty, Small yet Substantial

Cradled among the pines. 

While Pris and I were outdoors during the last week of October in the backyard, cleaning up before the arrival of cold weather (where did it go?), I came across a solitary leaf that had drifted from a nearby maple tree and gently settled within the blue needles of a dwarf spruce growing at the base of our rain garden.

Whenever I’m outdoors, everything about nature compels my eyes to observe and to ponder – however momentarily – the smallest of things such as, in this case, a leaf.  This one though, as also happens within the human family, stood out from all the others.

Had it been just one of those dried-up, crinkled foliage remnants of early fall, I might have simply brushed it off from the spruce and gone about my chores.