Pun Salad

You and I have the unfortunate honor of facing down a crisis the likes of which our species has never before seen. Rapid climate change of our own making is transforming every bit of ocean and land, imperiling organisms clear across the tree of life. It’s killing people by way of stronger storms and hotter heat waves and unchecked pollution.

We all can and should do our part—fly less if possible, buy local foods that haven’t been shipped thousands of miles, get solar panels and an electric car. But let’s not lose sight of the root cause of this crisis: rampant capitalism. Capitalism has steamrolled this planet and its organisms, gouging out mountains, overexploiting fish stocks, and burning fossil fuels to power the maniacal pursuit of growth and enrich a fraction of humanity. Since 1988, 100 corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Sweden’s government has actually been trending away from the centrally planned economic approach favored by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. The country reined in public spending with a system of budget caps in the 1990s, scrapped its wealth tax in 2007, and has generally followed a path of privatization and deregulation over the past two decades.

But there’s also a neglected dark side to the Swedish welfare model that its “democratic socialist” admirers seldom mention. That same welfare system developed in explicit conjunction with a violent and coercive eugenics policy, intended to ensure its fiscal solvency and prevent abuses of its programs by persons who were deemed genetically “unfit” by the state.

For the ideologue, “take government out” is a self-recommending policy. The conservative might take a different view, as I do. There is a lot that is silly, meretricious, distasteful, and genuinely destructive going on in American universities, especially at the second-rate institutions and in second-rate programs. (The thing about second-rate schools is, they’re second-rate.) But there also is much that is splendid, productive, admirable — and, indeed, the envy of the world.

And if you do not believe that American universities are the envy of the world, ask the world. The number of students from abroad who travel to the United States to study dwarfs that of any other country: The United Kingdom, whose top universities have for centuries attracted the best and brightest, doesn’t have half the foreign students the United States does. France has about a third the number; Germany, a quarter.

And top academics from around the world flock to American campuses, too — for good reason. If you are among the world’s best in any significant intellectual field, chances are excellent that an American university is the place you want to be. For a rough indicator, consider which universities have the most Nobel laureates associated with them. What do you imagine that list looks like? The top ten includes the two British universities you’d guess (Oxford and Cambridge) and eight U.S. universities: Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, and Princeton. You won’t find a continental European university on the list until No. 13 (Humboldt) and only four more in the top 20 (University of Paris, Göttingen, Munich, Copenhagen). You won’t find a single Asian, African, South American, or Middle Eastern university on the list.

Envy of the world? No question.

What's got your goat right now? Maybe it's all those climate-change strikes that are giving schoolkids cover for playing hooky on a beautful early Autumn day. Or maybe it's that we're not doing enough to combat climate change. Blackface is back in the news, thanks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's compulsion to impersonate other races. What else is going on? Unending modifications by Democratic presidential candidates to the theme of "Medicare for All." An intriguing and emerging possible scandal involving Donald Trump, the Ukraine, and interference in the 2016 presidential election. Or maybe it's actually an intriguing and emerging scandal involving the deep state trying to hamstring a president.

There isn't a day—an hour, really—that goes by where you can't lose yourself in breaking news or developments in all sorts of stories. Which is exactly how the people running the federal government probably want it. While we're outraged or flummoxed by the latest outrage du jour, the feds manage to keep spending more and more money that we don't have. The practice is so routine that only oddballs such as Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) even bother pointing it out anymore:

Live Free or Die. Some of us meant those words when we say them.

Americans may mouth the words, but when push comes to shove, too many either really don't care or they are cowards deep down, who will allow the status quo to carry on, no matter how sorry a state of affairs has grown around it; or, their own ignorance is so deep that the God Given nature of our individual rights is beyond their grasp and understanding, and those words in the mouths of the timid, the weak and unsure become mere noises like the squeaking of a mouse eking out an advertising catch-phrase. Their words are empty and void of any sense of duty and obligation to themselves, their families and their country and what one must do to actually maintain a free society.