Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

What employers look for in graduates

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From The Campus Review. This is an exact reprint.

Survey results highlight philosophical debate about universities’ purpose

Have you noticed that students aren’t that resilient? Eleven thousand global employers have. In the QS Global Skills Gap in the 21st Century Report, they reported a lack of resilience as the largest student skill gap, among many others.

The report, by QS and student recruitment agency the Institute of Student Employers, found that employers thought students deficient in 12 of the 15 skills surveyed.

Having also gleaned insights from 16,000 students, the report authors noted that students and employers held different views on which skills were most valuable. While students believed creativity and data analysis were key, employers preferred problem-solving, teamwork and communication skills.

The results also varied by business size, as well as location. For example, large companies prized leadership over technical skills, and North American employers were relatively satisfied with their graduate employees – especially compared with Latin American ones.

Global Overview of Core Skills: Importance v Satisfaction

Photo: QS/Institute of Student Employers

Dasha Karzunina, Market Insights Manager at QS, said the report verifies widely-held beliefs about students’ skills gaps. This implies that a purpose of university education is to prepare students for employment. Undoubtedly many – if not all universities would affirm this. Yet some people argue that preparing students for employment is the job of vocational providers, not universities.

These, however, are lone voices. Students want graduate jobs, so universities, swayed by market forces, attempt to ready students for them. Examples include the growing emphasis universities place on inculcating soft, transferable skills in students to suit the rapidly shifting employment landscape, and the increasing prominence of experiential learning and industry placements across degrees.

To further prepare students for careers, universities could introduce measures that enhance their resilience – their largest skill ‘gap’. For instance, universities could consider improving resilience as part of the student experience, even as an educational outcome.

The first fair and deliberate exchange in world history

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From The Wealth of Nations:

“Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that….But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.”

On the other hand, it could be the resurrection of an economy recovering from the grip of a socialist experiment, Venezuela say, in about a year or two from now.

Cartoon via Powerline – The Week in Pictures

Music and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

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One of the most interesting and insightful articles I have ever come across. Odd title perhaps – O Magnum Mysterium – but this tells you what you need to know.

From the time of the troubadours and the trouveres of the Crusades, the advances in Western thought have not only been mirrored in our music, but occasioned by it, from Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin des Prez and Pierre de la Rue, to Obrecht and Ockegham, to Palestrina to Johann Sebastian Bach. A popular song such as “L’homme armé” could become the subject of numerous medieval masses, not because of its secular origin (although that certainly helped, as the worshippers would respond to its familiarity), but because its implicit polyphonic structure could be successfully and inventively exploited by composers across Europe, leading to ever more complex and inventive ways of using the material.

Yes, masses. Because the development of European polyphony was, like religious dogma itself, inspired by Aristotelian ideas of free inquiry and the teleological impulses of both Judaism and Christianity. Music, like faith, has to be headed somewhere. Our lives may be temporally constricted, but freedom of inquiry is not.

And the writer is someone to contend with, a true scholar:

Michael Walsh was for sixteen years the music critic and foreign correspondent for Time, for which he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His works include the non-fiction best-seller The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (2017); this article is an extract from its sequel, The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West, which was published by Encounter Books in May.

How to become a war criminal in the modern world

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Learn how and more from this: The sparkling waters of the West Bank.

SodaStream, as you probably know, is a device for making sparkling water at home — no plastic bottles to schlep and then throw away or send for recycling.

Its CEO, Daniel Birnbaum, an Israeli entrepreneur, a visionary who came up with a wild idea: Open a factory on the West Bank and hire Palestinians. Give them “Israeli wages” which are about four times higher than the average in the territories. Provide them and their extended families with medical insurance, a benefit few employers in the West Bank provide.

Also hire Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews and let them all work together, learn about each other, maybe develop mutual respect and even friendships. What an achievement it would be if the experiment succeeded!

And succeed it did. By 2014, with more than 500 workers, SodaStream was among the largest private employers on the West Bank.

Unsurprisingly, champions of the Palestinian cause denounced Mr. Birnbaum as anti-Palestinian. In particular, advocates for BDS (the campaign to de-legitimize and demonize Israel through boycotts, divestments and sanctions) accused him of stealing Palestinian land, profiting from the “occupation” and exploiting Palestinian workers.

“Suddenly,” Mr. Birnbaum recounted to me over dinner in Tel Aviv three years ago, “I’m a walking war criminal!”

And now read it all. It should be filled with lessons about possibilities that are now afoot, but no chance of that in the world as it is.

The devil’s not just in the detail

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A very interesting post: Night of the Demon. Here’s the premise:

Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles Robert Barron has a theory.  He suggests that the Church — and perhaps the world at large — is struggling not just against a few disorganized human beings but something more powerful: an evolving, self-programming, viral “demonic element” that is almost impossible to destroy.  When Barron says the devil he means just that:

When I was going through school, the devil was presented to us as a myth, a literary device, a symbolic manner of signaling the presence of evil in the world. I will admit to internalizing this view and largely losing my sense of the devil as a real spiritual person. What shook my agnosticism in regard to the evil one was the clerical sex abuse scandal of the nineties and the early aughts. I say this because that awful crisis just seemed too thought-through, too well-coordinated, to be simply the result of chance or wicked human choice.

I’ve always thought that the Zoroastrians were onto something about the physical presence of evil in the world. But the truly difficult part is to know just which side one is on oneself.

I encourage you to read the entire article and then to continue with the comments as well.

Freedom of speech in Airstrip One

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There was a time before the first of the socialist states came into existence when there might have been some lame excuse not to know how fanatically repressive such regimes are. There are no excuses today. In such regimes, it is as certain as certain can be that you have no freedoms and they impoverish you as well. Here is a story that remains accessible to anyone interested, but which for all too many, have no interest in learning from the past: Soviet censorship: How did the USSR control the public?

Yet it’s not as if they are not learning from history. They are. What they learn is that even the shallowest losers in a free society can get to the top and have untold wealth and power if they can fool just enough of the population for just long enough to get their hands on the levers of state. Meanwhile, there are fools aplenty willing to give them the power to set up their tyrannical regimes, from which there is no force within the regime that can bring deliverance.

Chattel in a chain of imposed and remotely determined obligations

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Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Branch – Academic Staff

National Councillor (Academic Staff)
Candidates First Preference Votes

NORMA Caroline   205      76.8%
KATES Steven         62       23.2%

I ran for the RMIT academic staff representative on the NTEU National Council and ended up with a quarter of the vote. So in this small way I have shown that the tertiary system is not yet totally beyond redemption. This was my campaign platform.

The heart and soul of a university are its academics.

Universities are now large, bureaucratic organisations who in many ways think of themselves as a business while still retaining the sentiments of our ancient academic traditions. My aim in joining the Council will be to act as a perpetual reminder to the university on why universities exist and the crucial role that the academics in our tertiary institutions play.

The top-down structure that now affects what we do and how we do it is taking much of the vitality out of our universities and is shaping our roles to suit the purposes of an efficient, profit-maximising organisation. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a university in trying to remain solvent. Paying its bills is what it must do.

But paying its bills is not what a university is for. A university is to carry the values of our common humanity forward by building on the hard-won knowledge of the past while contributing what we can ourselves in our hope to shape the future.

My own specialty area is in the History of Economic Thought, a very unfashionable part of the academic world. Yet it is in the overlap between history and economics that the ancient meets the modern, and indeed reaches out into the future.

Although my early career was as an academic, I have only been a senior academic for the past thirteen years, having spent most of my career in the private sector, and interestingly working in industrial relations. I know the IR system well and understand its crucial importance in maintaining the dignity of work in the face of employers who often do not.

Since returning to the academic world, I have published ten books, including a children’s book, Economics for Infants, and many papers.

With me elected to the Council as your academic representative, you will have someone in place who truly cares about your place in the scheme of things, and will not allow our position as mere chattel in a chain of imposed and remotely determined obligations to continue.

Dangerous roads

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The first in an article on The 20 Most Dangerous Roads In The World (20 Photos)

Karakoram Highway

Suburban Men

Connecting China to Pakistan, the “Friendship Highway” is actually not friendly at all. It’s 16,000 feet in the air, meaning altitude sickness is a serious issue for anyone braving its sharp turns. It also has the usual landslides, avalanches, rock slides and unpaved lanes common to mountain highways. You’re basically driving a narrow lane with flat rock on one side and an unguarded death drop on the other – plus it’s full of buses taking people to K2.

It’s a wild world out there. I’ve driven the Barton Highway between Yass and Canberra many times over without a scratch, but it is a complete pussy compared with the rest. No idea why it’s included [Number 8 on the list so these are definitely not ordered according to their intrinsic danger]. I have, however, driven the Canadian Rockies in the bad old days before the guardrails were put in, but in summer, and when young and with total awareness that one false move and its over. The roadways pictured are madness, and in the places where many of them are, the drivers are probably paid not much more than a few dollars an hour.

“A Sociopathic Philosophy Conceived in Gross Error and Ignorance”

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A note to me from the author.

If you want to stop and reverse the resurgence of socialist ideas on campus and elsewhere, here’s an excellent vehicle for doing it:

This thirty-three thousand word essay is now available in Kindle format at Amazon.com for just 99¢. Go here to order it.

Royalty free licenses are available for anyone who wants to assign the essay to a class or distribute it to any special group, such as the members of an organization or its contributors, or to one’s personal list of friends and associates. Write to me at g.reisman@capitalism.net to request such a license along with a copy from which duplicates can be made either for distribution online or in hardcopy format.

You gotta try, but the hill to climb does keep getting steeper and more difficult. Might just mention Scott Johnson discusses just this today: Socialism as a Hate Crime. What is there not to understand about one of the most intense political failures in the history of the human race? But whatever there is, no actual real world experience ever seems to get vast numbers to see the disastrous futures they plan for themselves should they actually achieve their political ends.

They don’t care if you know because you cannot do a thing

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One of the best things about living in an open society is that you find out about many things you might otherwise not have found out, even criminal conspiracies, but nothing ever happens since in many cases the criminals are at the very top. This is from Stacy McCain in a post he titles, Who Is Lisa H. Barsoomian? It is a direct reprint from this post at Reddit. Every fact is verifiable, but they don’t care if you know because you cannot do a thing about it.

I am passing this on from someone who’s connecting some dots with input from sources he cannot reveal.

Here’s what it looks like when all the pieces are sewn together

It smells like conspiracy and treason. Everyone needs to read this. Slowly, and patiently, because it’s very important……

From 2001 to 2005 there was an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

A Grand Jury had been impanelled.

Governments from around the world had donated to the “Charity”.

Yet, from 2001 to 2003 none of those “Donations” to the Clinton Foundation were declared. Now you would think that an honest investigator would be able to figure this out.

Look who took over this investigation in 2005: None other than James Comey; Coincidence? Guess who was transferred into the Internal Revenue Service to run the Tax Exemption Branch of the IRS? None other than, Lois “Be on The Look Out” (BOLO) Lerner. Isn’t that interesting?

But this is all just a series of strange coincidences, right?

Guess who ran the Tax Division inside the Department of Injustice from 2001 to 2005?

No other than the Assistant Attorney General of the United States,

Rod Rosenstein.

Guess who was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during this time frame?

Another coincidence (just an anomaly in statistics and chances), but it was Robert Mueller.

What do all four casting characters have in common?

They all were briefed and/or were front-line investigators into the Clinton Foundation Investigation.

Another coincidence, right?

Fast forward to 2009….

James Comey leaves the Justice Department to go and cash-in at Lockheed Martin.

Hillary Clinton is running the State Department, official government business, on her own personal email server.

The Uranium One “issue” comes to the attention of the Hillary.

Like all good public servants do, supposedly looking out for America’s best interest, she decides to support the decision and approve the sale of 20% of US Uranium to no other than, the Russians.

Now you would think that this is a fairly straight up deal, except it wasn’t, America got absolutely nothing out of it.

However, prior to the sales approval, no other than Bill Clinton goes to Moscow, gets paid 500K for a one hour speech; then meets with Vladimir Putin at his home for a few hours.

Ok, no big deal right? Well, not so fast, the FBI had a mole inside the money laundering and bribery scheme.

Robert Mueller was the FBI Director during this time frame? Yep, He even delivered a Uranium Sample to Moscow in 2009.

Who was handling that case within the Justice Department out of the US Attorney’s Office in Maryland?

None other than, Rod Rosenstein. And what happened to the informant?

The Department of Justice placed a GAG order on him and threatened to lock him up if he spoke out about it.

How does 20% of the most strategic asset of the United States of America end up in Russian hands when the FBI has an informant, a mole providing inside information to the FBI on the criminal enterprise?

Very soon after; the sale was approved!~145 million dollars in “donations” made their way into the Clinton Foundation from entities directly connected to the Uranium One deal.

Guess who was still at the Internal Revenue Service working the Charitable Division? None other than, – Lois Lerner.

Ok, that’s all just another series of coincidences, nothing to see here, right?

Let’s fast forward to 2015.

Due to a series of tragic events in Benghazi and after the 9 “investigations” the House, Senate and at State Department, Trey Gowdy who was running the 10th investigation as Chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi discovers that the Hillary ran the State Department on an unclassified, unauthorized, outlaw personal email server.He also discovered that none of those emails had been turned over when she departed her “Public Service” as Secretary of State which was required by law. He also discovered that there was Top Secret information contained within her personally archived email.

Sparing you the State Departments cover up, the nostrums they floated, the delay tactics that were employed and the outright lies that were spewed forth from the necks of the Kerry State Department, we shall leave it with this…… they did everything humanly possible to cover for Hillary. .

Now this is amazing, guess who became FBI Director in 2013? None other than James Comey; who secured 17 no bid contracts for his employer (Lockheed Martin) with the State Department and was rewarded with a six million dollar thank you present when he departed his employer? Amazing how all those no-bids just went right through at State, huh?

Now he is the FBI Director in charge of the “Clinton Email Investigation” after of course his FBI Investigates the Lois Lerner “Matter” at the Internal Revenue Service and he exonerates her. Nope…. couldn’t find any crimes there.

In April 2016, James Comey drafts an exoneration letter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile the DOJ is handing out immunity deals like candy.They didn’t even convene a Grand Jury!

Like a lightning bolt of statistical impossibility, like a miracle from God himself, like the true “Gangsta” Comey is, James steps out into the cameras of an awaiting press conference on July the 8th of 2016, and exonerates the Hillary from any wrongdoing.

Do you see the pattern?

It goes on and on, Rosenstein becomes Asst. Attorney General,Comey gets fired based upon a letter by Rosenstein, Comey leaks government information to the press, Mueller is assigned to the Russian Investigation sham by Rosenstein to provide cover for decades of malfeasance within the FBI and DOJ and the story continues.

FISA Abuse, political espionage….. pick a crime, any crime, chances are…… this group and a few others did it:

All the same players.

All compromised and conflicted.

All working fervently to NOT go to jail themselves

All connected in one way or another to the Clinton’s.

They are like battery acid; they corrode and corrupt everything they touch.How many lives have these two destroyed?

As of this writing, the Clinton Foundation, in its 20+ years of operation of being the largest International Charity Fraud in the history of mankind, has never been audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

Let us not forget that Comey’s brother works for DLA Piper, the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.

The person that is the common denominator to all the crimes above and still doing her evil escape legal maneuvers at the top of the 3 Letter USA Agencies?

Yep, that would be Hillary R. Clinton.

Now who is LISA BARSOOMIAN? Let’s learn a little about Mrs. Lisa H. Barsoomian’s background.

Lisa H. Barsoomian, an Attorney that graduated from Georgetown Law, is a protégé of James Comey and Robert Mueller.

Barsoomian, with her boss R. Craig Lawrence, represented Bill Clinton in 1998.

Lawrence also represented:

Robert Mueller three times;

James Comey five times;

Barack Obama 45 times;

Kathleen Sebelius 56 times;

Bill Clinton 40 times; and

Hillary Clinton 17 times.

Between 1998 and 2017, Barsoomian herself represented the FBI at least five times.

You may be saying to yourself, OK, who cares? Who cares about the work history of this Barsoomian woman?

Apparently, someone does, because someone out there cares so much that they’ve “purged” all Barsoomian court documents for her Clinton representation in Hamburg vs. Clinton in 1998 and its appeal in 1999 from the DC District and Appeals Court dockets (?). Someone out there cares so much that even the internet has been “purged” of all information pertaining to Barsoomian.

Historically, this indicates that the individual is a protected CIA operative. Additionally, Lisa Barsoomian has specialized in opposing Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the intelligence community. Although Barsoomian has been involved in hundreds of cases representing the DC Office of the US Attorney, her email address is Lisa Barsoomian at NIH.gov. The NIH stands for National Institutes of Health. This is a tactic routinely used by the CIA to protect an operative by using another government organization to shield their activities.

It’s a cover, so big deal right? What does one more attorney with ties to the US intelligence community really matter?

It deals with Trump and his recent tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports, the border wall, DACA, everything coming out of California, the Uni-party unrelenting opposition to President Trump, the Clapper leaks, the Comey leaks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusal and subsequent 14 month nap with occasional forays into the marijuana legalization mix …. and last but not least Mueller’s never-ending investigation into collusion between the Trump team and-the Russians.

Why does Barsoomian, CIA operative, merit any mention?

BECAUSE….

She is Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s WIFE!