Archives for April 2013

When I was a student at the University of Alabama, I never seriously asked myself why I was in school. It was just understood that I was there to get a degree that would prepare me for a career. My parents both had degrees and it was just an assumption in our family that everyone gets a university degree.

If you had asked me why I was in school, I might have struggled to answer. I might have wanted to say that the purpose was to be an intellectually well-rounded and thoughtful person, but if I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted I was there to get a piece of paper that marked me as acceptable as socially acceptable for employment. (The photo above from a UA graduation two years ago suggests to me that students still mostly see graduation as a ticket to employment.)

As much as I love learning, I’ve come to have serious doubts about the way the university system works in the United States today. (For readers in other countries, “college” and “university” are used interchangeably for practical purposes here in most usages.) I’ve come to see college as a long series of expensive hoops to jump through — which mostly just show that someone has the tenacity and willingness to stick to a plan and follow orders.

On Monday, a friend posted a link on Facebook to an article questioning the value of getting master’s degrees in library science and suggesting that some sort of apprentice program would be more useful. My friend is a librarian and a very bright woman. She’s decided to get a master’s in “library science” — which in itself as an odd name — but it’s not because it will help her do her job better. It’s because she’ll be paid more.

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In the 1970s, we were regularly being told to worry about a coming ice age. I can remember reading about it in Weekly Reader. Time magazine ran this story, right, in 1979. Here’s the introduction to a 1978 documentary warning us about it. And here’s a whole boatload of other predictions from the ’70s assuring us that we were facing serious cooling.

Then everything switched. The popular theory was suddenly that we faced global warming. We were told over and over again that the science was settled and decided. The Earth was warming up — and it was the burning of fossil fuels that was responsible. We must change our standard of living and quit using so much energy.

Those who dared to question the “scientific consensus” were labeled “deniers” in order to shame them by lumping them in with Holocaust deniers.

The only problem is that reality hasn’t matched the predictions. Climate scientists — still wedded to their dear theory — are struggling now to explain why warming isn’t happening as their models predicted.

And now Russian scientists are claiming that we could face a cooling period for the next 200 to 250 years.

I don’t have a clue what the climate is going to do. I really don’t. But I do know that the people loudly telling us what’s going to happen have no credibility, as far as I’m concerned. When predictions change this much over a 40-year period, it’s impossible to have confidence in the people making the predictions. It’s not necessarily that they’re bad people or that they have poor intentions.

But it does mean that they’re making predictions with a level of certainty that just isn’t possible.

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Only 10 days after the bombing of the Boston Marathon, ugly partisan politics is taking the story over. Some in Congress are starting to openly blame the Obama administration for not keeping the country safe. The head of the CIA quickly fired back, essentially saying, “Hey, don’t blame us.” And there’s NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying we’ll have to give up more individual rights (and add more surveillance cameras) to make everyone safe.

The truth is that perfect security is impossible. Even in a totalitarian society, attacks can happen every now and then. But in a free society, we have to tolerate even more risk. It’s just part of the trade-off of remaining mostly free.

You are going to die one of these days, and I am, too. Every one of us will. I might live to be 120 years old or I might be killed in a car accident later today. We just don’t know. We can take reasonable steps to minimize the dangers we face, but we can’t eliminate risks. It’s literally impossible.

So if perfect security is impossible, why are politicians arguing about it? And why is the media filled with so much news of terror that it scares so many people?

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