Recently in Demographics Category

If you do nothing else today, read "Doomed by Diversity," about the wonderful promise of the Golden Girl at UNC-Chapel Hill and her tragic end by a pair of young career criminals--and the utterly dysfunctional criminal justice system in North Carolina. This piece by Nicholas Stix is one of the best things I've read, very much like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.

Chan should pay especial note how criminals are now targeting colleges and off-campus venues. There are easy pickings there, and the universities often fudge about the true state of affairs.

I read an op-ed about the dangers of climbing Mt. Everest in the New York Times. It turns out the author, Freddie Wilkinson, is from Madison, NH.

By way of Facebook comes this advice for potential college freshman from Cal Techgirl.

Dear Prospective Freshmen, You are trying to get into a major 4-year university. You do yourself no favors by 1) acting like you're my friend (e.g. "Hey" is not an appropriate subject line for a 1st email) or 2) using text speak. We use grammar and spacing here in the big kids' sandbox.

A number of comments from some of her friends expanded a bit on this, most of with which I agreed. Names have been modified to protect the innocent from egregious retaliation.

BJW- Good luck with that one. Having taught a few high schoolers in the finer arts of English Literature, Grammar and Composition, I can tell you I fought the tough fight, but I fear I lost most days.

I once tried to convince my students to not use any "be" verbs in a particular assignment. They ignored me. I rewrote each of their papers, and I used 2 "be" verbs in two of them, and none in the others. They could not believe that I did it. One student claimed that I changed the meaning of what she had written. I sat down with her and went line by line. Then, she said, "but it doesn't sound like me." (Imagine the whine in her voice.) She did not amuse me. (I now teach only my children - homeschool. They don't like my "no be verbs" rules, either.)

Cal Techgirl- That's hard. But important for what we teach in terms of professional scientific writing. Most of them just don't get it.

--snip--

I think the other problem is that these kids just don't read as much as we did. You learn language by seeing it and hearing it.

CS- We just hired a girl with a bachelor's degree. Every e-mail she writes starts with "Hey", even to the Assistant Vice President of our department. ACK!

BJW- Our society has devolved to such a casual state! Can we blame Mark Zuckerberg?

I have seen this problem at work, where the writing skills of the engineers, technicians, and software coders leave much to be desired, particularly among the younger employees. It's one reason why I spend an inordinate amount of time rewriting procedures, design specifications, and product proposals. It's also the main reason I read anything BeezleBub writes for school as he has a tendency to use texting shorthand - mostly leaving out "unnecessary" words - which makes reading his writing assignments painful at times. At least he hasn't been using texting abbreviations...or at least not yet.

Can Mayor Dave Bing turn Detroit around? (This isn't the first time I've asked this question.)

Maybe. He has a long way to go before anyone can say Detroit has been saved.

He is doing one thing long overdue for his blighted and ever shrinking city: tearing down abandoned homes that have become nothing more than shelter for the homeless or hideouts for drug dealers, rapists, and other criminals preying upon the rest of Detroit's citizens. Some of those dilapidated homes are too dangerous to be occupied even by the criminals or the homeless.

I think I can safely say many of us have seen video or photos of what's left of Detroit's once vibrant neighborhoods, with many of them looking like something out of a zombie-apocalypse movie thriller. Most of the homes and buildings in those areas aren't worth rehabilitating or renovating, leaving block after block after block of decaying homes and businesses empty and soulless.

One of the more interesting parts in the article linked above are the thoughts of those actually performing the demolitions. You wouldn't think that tearing down abandoned homes would be an emotional trial for the wreckers, but for many of them it is.

Wreckers hide it, but when you spend weeks with them, riding in their trucks, sitting in their machines, trailing them all over their job sites right out to the dump where they'll deposit the remains of a house, it becomes clear that they're a reflective and empathetic group. They're raconteurs and historians. They want you to know what they've seen in this city. They want to take you there. They believe it'll help.

Mark Sherman insists on driving me down a street called Robinwood, a few blocks from Adamo's home base. "This one," he says, "breaks me up every time I'm on it." The stretch is so blighted it seems haunted. Somehow it's totally devoid of color. All the Craftsman-style homes, with their tapered support columns and stonework porches, are empty. "You can see," says Mark, tugging on the brim of his black John Deere cap, "these were really beautiful. Unique." And he's right. They're exactly the kinds of homes young families in Portland and Los Angeles line up to live in. "This is the perfect example," he continues, "of what can happen in two years. Two years ago, this street was mostly full. This is what happens when nobody cares."

They try not to think of the people who used to live in those homes. Those who worked hard, raised families, took pride in their homes, now long gone, leaving echoes of what used to be behind them.

I'm not sure I could do their job and not feel what they do. But they know it's a necessary job, so-called creative destruction, where the only way to rebuild Detroit is to remove those homes and other buildings that are now a blight infesting their city.

Will it work?

Only time will tell.

One of the strange things I've noticed about America as compared to many other countries is this: our perception of poverty is quite different than anyone else's. It's not that our definition of 'poor' is any different, but how we look at it.

When Americans think of poverty, for the most part they think of the starving multitudes in places far away. Of American poor many Americans will think about those living in the run down sections of our metropolitan areas or the more rural areas of the country (Appalachia comes to mind). Even then the perception is skewed.

While our 'poor' are poor in relation to the average American, they are still far wealthier than the so-called middle class in a lot of other countries.

Let's look at a few examples.

Probably one of the things that used to differentiate our poor from the rest of us was our material wealth, things like homes, cars, TVs, air conditioners, other appliances, and phones (of all things).

But looking at the poor here in the US, we find that a vast majority of them have all these things. While they aren't the fanciest or most expensive, a large majority of those we call poor have them.

Among "the persons whom the Census Bureau identifies as 'poor,' " 38% were homeowners. Among "poor" households, 62% owned a car, 14% two or more cars, nearly half had air-conditioning, and 31% had microwave ovens. "Nationwide, some 22,000 'poor' households have heated swimming pools or Jacuzzis."

While I find it hard to believe the last item, it does illustrate that our definition of what it is to be poor in America is seriously skewed. In John Barron's Mig Pilot, Lt. Viktor Belenko relates his impression of America he gained while watching a propaganda film showing how poor and oppressed the American people were. But what the film showed him was that even the 'poor and oppressed peoples' in America had their own apartments, automobiles, TVs, refrigerators, and stoves, something the average Soviet citizen could only dream about. The poor in America were wealthy compared to average Soviet citizen.

One thing that has come full circle (or should I saw has flipped upside down) is phones. Yes, phones.

Starting some time in the early 20^th Century and lasting through the early 1960's, it was quite common to find people with telephones quite often had them in their front hallway, where it sat on a small table. It wasn't uncommon for there to be a chair next to the table. These furnishings accomplished two things: it established that the homeowner had enough money to afford a telephone and it gave them a place to sit while they used it. It wasn't common that the average homeowner had more than one phone, and the one they had was in plain sight of any visitor entering the home.

Then when mobile telephones became available, it was primarily the wealthy who had them. At the same time the average American family, even the poorer ones, all had telephones in their homes.

Today, that trend has reversed, with the average American carrying a cell phone, even the poorer Americans, while wired telephones are fading away. (We here at The Manse have just canceled our landline service. It made no sense to be paying for a landline and our cell phones when we rarely use the landline any more.)

One thing only rich people had back in 1990, though, was portable telephones. That's changed, hasn't it? If you're reading this column, you very likely have a cellular phone. You may even be reading this column on your cellular phone.

But cellphones aren't just ubiquitous. In what the New York Times calls "a strange twist," they've become symbols of poverty. Arkansas and Mississippi, those perennial economic laggards, "find themselves at the top of a new state ranking: They have the highest concentrations of people in the nation who have abandoned landlines in favor of cellular phones."

Cell phones are cheaper than wired phones, and with the many pre-paid plans out there, is it any wonder the poor have taken to them?

Soon, only businesses and the 'wealthy' will still have them.

I could go on and on, making one comparison after another. The fact is that poverty, while it still exists in the US, is not anywhere near the same as it was back in the 60's, 70's, or 80's. Most of today's poor in America are better off than many of the middle class in the 70's.

Are there still pockets of abject poverty in the US? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean we need to spend billions trying to remove those last bastions of true poverty. It won't work. Better that we let the economy recover and do its best to eliminate the problem.

At least according to a recent study that Randall Parker links to, joking that he hopes the egalitarian PC won't drag him away in the middle of the night.

There's even a book written on the subject, peer-reviewed and all that, by Richard Lynn and a Finnish scholar, _IQ and the Wealth of Nations_.  Why is wasn't given a larger hearing among the chattering classes is solely because of a childish disregard for group differences.

For those of us who have been paying attention the past decade or so, none of this comes as a surprise to us: Factories are having trouble finding skilled workers to fill open positions.

Some of this can probably be blamed on the higher education bubble, where for years kids were told the only way to get ahead was to get a college degree. Some can be attributed to us Baby Boomers making our kids lives far too easy and making them think that actually working for a living doing manual labor (even highly specialized and lucrative manual labor) is something other people do. And some blame can be laid upon laid off workers, looking to get training or work in areas other than the ones from which they were laid off.

You might think that it would be easier for manufacturers to find new employees. After all, the number of workers employed in factories is still more than 2 million lower than pre-recession levels due to layoffs or plant closings.

"The perception out there is that we're losing manufacturing jobs to China and India. So if they've already been displaced and they're going to go back to school, they're going for something not manufacturing-related," said Rob Clark, vice president of operations at Clark Metal Products, a company outside of Pittsburgh started by his grandfather and now run by his uncle.

The trades are also suffering, as evidenced in the first comment made to this post at Lucianne about the subject:

I know the guy in charge of the local VoTech school here. He says they are probably gonna close the Heating/AC class because nobody is interested in becoming a heating/ac technician, even though he says local companies have standing offers to hire graduates direct from school for $18-20 an hour.

To many young adults think life is an episode of MTV Cribs, where money just falls outta the sky for them...

That kind of money is darned good for starting right out of school with no experience. And of those who go to college, far too many are coming out with degrees with little practical application in the real world. (I don't know of too many companies looking for people with BA degrees in Native American Transgender Studies. And those with Philosophy degrees are purely out of luck because the big Philosophy companies just aren't hiring these days.)

Is it any wonder more companies have to move operations overseas? If they can't find employees here, they have to look elsewhere in order to stay in business.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

Bill Whittle addresses American Exceptionalism, something we know our present President doesn't like and has been working hard to destroy. But I think Obama will find that while he may dent it a bit, he doesn't have the wherewithal to overcome the sheer inertia of American Exceptionalism. American know-how and those providing it will always find a way around those in this country working hard to bring about its downfall.

One thing I found interesting: With only 5% of the world's population, American produces 24% of the world's GDP, which is 3 times more than China produces even though it has over 4 times as many people.

Austerity sets in a couple of generations after below-replacement birth rates have set in. That's 2.1 births per female. But the welfare state discourages the old-time virtues that gave impetus to larger family sizes in the first place. Akin to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell, the middle class civilization is self-defeating for its inability to do what seemingly comes more natural to more primitive and less advanced ones--although the whole world is experiencing a fall in birth rates--have babies.

Or, as Mark Steyn is able to say it so well, even if he is johnny-come-lately to the issue:

This Corner entry by NH's Mark Steyn is a keeper, "The Suicide Bomb," including a discussion of the Anglican Church in Australia counseling its practitioners to have fewer children lest they despoil the environment.