Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” hit number one and stayed there for 14 weeks:
Today in 1973, George Harrison got a visit from the taxman, who told him he owed £1 million in taxes on his 1973 Bangladesh album and concert:
The Economist compares the dueling governmental models:
In Texas an unexpected enemy gets a lot of attention. In a television ad for lieutenant-governor that aired last year, Dan Patrick, the winning Republican candidate, looked sternly at the camera and warned of a grave danger. “Truth is, Democrats want to turn Texas into California,” he said. “Well, I’m not about to let that happen. What about you?” United in concern is Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor. He predicts that excessive regulation could turn “the Texas dream into a California nightmare”. “Don’t California my Texas” has become a rallying cry for Republicans in the Lone Star State. You can even buy the bumper-sticker.
Some competitive jousting between the two is inevitable. California, with 40m inhabitants, and Texas, with 29m, are the states with the largest populations, with more than one-fifth of Americans claiming them as home. They also have the biggest economies. If they were countries, they would be the fifth- and tenth-largest in the world (see chart), with around $3trn and $1.8trn in gdp, respectively.
Texas is the country’s largest exporter, and California claims the number-two spot. In the past 20 years nearly a third of American jobs were generated in just these two states. Combined, they account for around a quarter of American gdp. They educate nearly a quarter of American children, so their investments in, and approach to, public education directly affects national competitiveness. Both states are booming, too. Between 2010 and 2018 two of the three fastest-growing metro areas in America were in Texas: greater Dallas and Houston each gained more than 1m people. The state has a robust oil and gas industry and has succeeded in diversifying its economy. California enjoys the many fruits of the technology boom, a rising stockmarket and some of America’s best universities.
A nation divided
But the two states matter just as much because of the opposing visions and models of government for which they stand. Indeed their rivalry is often an expression of these differences. California is the standard-bearer for progressive experimentation nationally, spearheading policies to deal with climate change, gay rights, the decriminalisation of drugs, paid family leave, inclusive immigration and more. Since Donald Trump assumed office, California has become a state of resistance, suing the federal government around 50 times. It is the country’s largest blue state, where the share of registered Republicans is at a historic low and Democrats control all three branches of government. Its model can be summed up as high taxes, high services and high regulation. California sees a strong role for government and leans heavily on its affluent residents to fund a social-safety net.
Texas, by contrast, has been socially conservative for decades. Although Democrats made gains in the state legislature in 2018, no Democrat has been elected to statewide office for more than 25 years. Its model is low taxes, low services and low regulation. “Govern wisely and as little as possible,” is how Sam Houston, who served as the first president of the Republic of Texas in 1836, described the state’s light-touch philosophy. Serious about avoiding government overreach, the legislature meets only every other year. In 2017 Texas ranked 49th out of 50 in spending per person, shelling out around $3,925 per citizen, 52% less than the national average and 68% less than California.
Demographically, both states are already living America’s future. Their non-white populations started to outnumber their white ones long ago; California became a “majority-minority” state in 2000, Texas in 2005. Today they are both around 40% Hispanic, more than double the national share. With fast-growing, young and ethnically diverse populations, what California and Texas look like today is what the country will look like in 2050. According to Stephen Klineberg, a professor at Rice University in Houston, “states like California and Texas are where the American future is going to be worked out.”
Both states have vulnerabilities. “The key question for California is how much a state can take on, and with Texas it is about how little a government can continue to take on,” says Ken Miller of Claremont McKenna College. Their differences can be seen in dramatic and subtle ways. To fund its operations, California levies one of the highest income taxes in America. By contrast, Texas’s constitution forbids a state income tax. Unions are a mighty force in Californian politics and workplaces, but Texas is what is known as a “right-to-work” state, meaning that employees do not need to belong to a union, so such infrastructure is weak.
Big-state big state
California probably has the strongest environmental regulations in the country, whereas Texas nurtures its oil and gas industry and regards nature as something to be subdued. It puts minimal restrictions on keeping exotic animals as pets, which is why there are believed to be more tigers in captivity in Texas than in the wild in India.
Their leaders embody the two states’ divergent philosophies. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who took office in January, is a former mayor of San Francisco, best known for legalising gay marriage in 2004 and sparking a national social movement. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, is a staunch social conservative who formerly served as the state’s attorney-general and is proud to have sued Barack Obama’s administration 31 times over policies including health care and environmental regulations.
Earlier this year Mr Newsom ordered a moratorium on the death penalty, around the same time that politicians in the Texas legislature were debating whether to start providing air-conditioning in prisons during the sweltering summer—an expensive creature comfort, in the eyes of some. Since 1976 Texas has executed more prisoners than any other American state and around five times more than second-placed Virginia.
Their independent natures can be partly explained by history. Tellingly, Texans celebrate 1836 as their founding year, when the state became independent from Mexico after an armed insurrection, not 1845, when Texas officially became an American state. At the time slaveholding Texas received an ambivalent welcome into the nation, which was worried about the balance between states that permitted slavery and those that did not. California, which had also been a part of Mexico before it joined America in 1850, never allowed slavery, which meant it was more warmly welcomed. This experience shaped its political attitudes. Its distance from Washington, dc, fuelled its ability to experiment.
Both states used to be supportive of the other political party. Republicans won California in nearly every presidential election between 1952 and 1988, and Ronald Reagan served as governor there before he became president. The state’s politics swerved in response to its growing population of immigrants, who were troubled by Republicans’ intolerant rhetoric and policies. Texas used to be strongly Democratic and produced Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Mr Johnson’s legacy includes launching many of the programmes that Texan politicians today scorn, including the war on poverty and federally funded health care for the poor and elderly. His commitment to social services and civil rights helped hand his state and the south to Republicans.
Americans and immigrants have for decades travelled to both states to build their future unencumbered by tradition. The “Texas Triangle”, formed by the four large cities of Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, accounts for three-quarters of the state’s population, has been responsible for three-quarters of its population growth since 2010, and produces 82% of its gdp.
Small-state big state
The threat of Texas becoming California, as the Lone Star State’s leadership fears, is exaggerated. However, it raises the question of which pole America will turn towards—the progressive left represented by California or the right represented by Texas. “The fact that America can contain two such assertive, contrary forces as Texas and California is a testament to our political dynamism, but more and more I feel that America is being compelled to make a choice between the models these states embody,” writes Lawrence Wright in his book “God Save Texas”. “Under the Trump administration, Texas is clearly the winning archetype.”
That may not hold for ever. Texas is already changing. “Outsiders think Austin is a blue bubble and the rest of Texas is tumbleweeds,” says Ann Beeson of the Centre for Public Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think-tank. “People have a huge misunderstanding of how giant, progressive and diverse our cities are.”
Nor should California, which frequently creates political winds that then sweep across the country, be discounted. It experienced an anti-tax backlash in the 1970s and an anti-immigrant push in the 1990s, both of which spread nationally. It legalised abortion six years before Roe v Wade, the historic Supreme Court decision, in a bill signed by Reagan, then governor. “So much of what we aspire to as a country resides in California,” says Austin Beutner, a former businessman who is superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District. “Laws go east to west. Values go west to east.”
Much of America’s future rides on California’s and Texas’s success. This special report will look in detail at how the states are approaching business, taxation, public education, social welfare, the environment, and policies toward immigrants. It will ask which state’s model is likely to prove more fruitful in the long term. “There are 50 labs in the United States, and you can watch the California and Texas experiment,” says Ross Perot junior, a successful Texan businessman. “That’s the American way.”
Wisconsin’s Democrats favor California, if not some fictional socialist country.
Today in 1964, a member of the audience at a Rolling Stones concert in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, England, spat upon guitarist Brian Jones, sparking a riot that injured 30 fans and two police officers.
The Stones were banned from performing in Blackpool until 2008.
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” which is not like said Rolling Stones:
Today in 1967, the Beatles and other celebrities took out a full-page ad in the London Times calling for the legalization of …
… marijuana.
With scant public input, Gov. Tony Evers’ administration has just crafted some of the most draconian environmental standards in the world.
And Wisconsin business leaders are “completely terrified” about the high costs the stringent regulations will bring — for what science suggests are negligible public health outcomes.
On July 8, the state Department of Health Services published its groundwater quality standards recommendations for 27 chemical substances. On the list are two synthetic compounds in the polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) with hefty chemical names — perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid(PFOA).
The synthetics are found in a variety of products, from non-stick cookware and stain-resistant sprays to firefighting foam. There are some 3,500 different compounds under the umbrella of PFAS.
While the compounds are no longer manufactured in the United States, PFOS And PFOA remain in the soil, groundwater and other substances. The problem, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, is that both chemicals are very persistent in the environment and in the human body — meaning they don’t break down and can accumulate over time.
Certain studies indicate PFOA and PFOS can cause reproductive and developmental, liver and kidney, and immunological effects in laboratory animals, according to the EPA.
“Due to their widespread use and persistence in the environment, most people in the United States have been exposed to PFAS,” an EPA online backgrounder notes. “There is evidence that continued exposure above specific levels to certain PFAS may lead to adverse health effects.”
But what is considered a safe amount? What’s a toxic level? The science is anything but settled on those questions.
That fact hasn’t stopped the environmental extremists in the Evers administration from creating what industry experts and business advocates contend are impossibly rigid standards that will ultimately cost the Badger State economy big.
‘Detrimental Impact’
“Wisconsin’s DHS has recommended one of the most restrictive proposed standards in the nation at 20 parts per trillion combined,” the Water Quality Coalition stated last week in a press release. The coalition is composed of industry associations, scientists, and legal scholars, including the American Chemistry Council, the National Waste & Recycling Association, the Wisconsin Paper Council, and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.
The standards recommended by the Department of Health Services mean enforcement could be triggered by as little as 10 parts per trillion of PFOS and 10 parts per trillion PFOA combined. But DHS takes the stringent standard further, setting out a combined preventive action limit for PFOS and PFOA at 2 parts per trillion, the lowest enforceable limit in the world, according to the Water Quality Coalition.
“The DHS standard would have a detrimental impact on Wisconsin’s economy. It will significantly impact tax payers, utility rate payers, job creators, and local governments not only with the cost of installing expensive and underdeveloped control equipment, but also the cost of fines and forfeitures when the regulated community cannot meet a nearly impossible standard,” the coalition wrote in its Comments on DHS’ recommended groundwater standards for PFOA and PFOS.
New York is going down the road with similar aggressive environmental standards, and the costs are adding up.
Last year, the state set recommended levels for PFOA and PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonate) at 10 parts per trillion for each compound individually, not quite as stringent as Wisconsin’s recommended standards but thought to be the toughest in the nation at the time.
The New York agency that oversees community water systems estimates the cost of compliance by the local entities alone will top $850 million in capital expenditures and $45 million in operation and maintenance costs.Those estimates don’t take into account the expensive technology the private sector would have to deploy to ensure compliance.
More so, DHS groundwater quality standards would apply to businesses that are not even manufacturing PFAS-based products.
“They’re all completely terrified (of what the stringent new standards could mean),” Lane Ruhland, director of Environmental and Energy Policy for Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce said of Wisconsin business owners. “The technology on that scale, to get to that 2 parts per trillion, if it does exist, is extremely expensive. It means shutting down.”
Wisconsin’s critical paper industry would definitely feel the pinch, Ruhland said. The Badger State’s paper makers employ 30,000 people and provides about $2.5 billion in payroll.
“We are deeply concerned that such a standard could devastate Wisconsin’s economy and significantly raise the cost of residential water. It would require municipal utilities, industrial facilities, and energy producers, to reach near-zero discharge levels of compounds that are pre-existing in groundwater,” the Water Quality Coalition stated in its press release.
Unsettled Science
Evers has billed 2019 the Year of Clean Drinking Water. Critics of his administration’s stringent water quality standards assert the year marks the return of environmental extremists running public policy in the Evers administration.
A DHS official did not return MacIver News Service’s requests for comment this week, but an agency official did comment in a press statement.
“Using a rigorous, evidence-based process will help us assure that our water is safe, no matter where we live in the state,” said DHS Deputy Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk in the press release.
But what did the agency’s “evidence-based process” consist of? DHS drew from the Department of Natural Resources’ latest watch list of contaminants and “extensively reviewed scientific literature about each substance,” according to the administration. DHS used federal quality standards as a starting point “when available,” and created a document describing the “rationale” for each enforcement standard, according to the agency.
“In order to make these recommendations, DHS toxicologists reviewed over 5,000 scientific findings,” states a joint release from DHS, DNR, and the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
That’s a stretch, according to the Water Quality Coalition. In its comments to DHS, the coalition noted that, according to recent testimony, “the evaluation was completed by one, single toxicologist at DHS who relied on a total of three studies to set a standard that could shut down a significant portion of industry in our state.”
WMC’s Ruhland said DHS relied on a 2018 study from the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry. The study examined Minimal Risk Levels, but it cautions that “MRLs are not intended to define clean up or action levels” for any agency. The study was clearly meant to be an especially conservative review of hazardous substances, and its thresholds were not designed to set regulations.
Ruhland said DHS also reviewed EPA studies. But the state agency failed to stop at the EPA’s 70 parts per trillion recommendation, instead insisting on more stringent standards. That’s fine, as long as the standards are based on significant science emerging since the EPA issued its recommendations, testimony notes. Water Quality Coalition members and other critics of DHS’ standards argue the Minimal Risk Levels study doesn’t fit the definition of significant emerging science because of its qualifying caveat. Absent more settled science, the EPA number should be applied, according to EPA guidelines.
While there is growing fear about the dangers of PFAS, just how they affect human health remains unclear. Several studies suggest minimal, if any health impact from the compounds — even at levels of exposure several magnitudes higher than what DHS has proposed, according to the the Water Quality Coalition.
“EPA does not anticipate a person to experience negative health effects if they drink water at or below this level every day over their entire lifetime,” an EPA spokesperson told MacIver News Service in an email response.
The agencies health advisories, however, are non-enforceable and non-regulatory and provide technical information to states agencies and other public health officials on health effects, analytical methodologies, and treatment technologies associated with drinking water contamination, the spokesperson added.
The Agency is moving forward with the drinking water standard setting process outlined in the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) for PFOA and PFOS. EPA expects to publish a proposed regulatory determination for PFOA and PFOS by the end of this year. The Agency is also gathering and evaluating information to determine if regulation is appropriate for other chemicals in the PFAS family.
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states may develop regulations that are no less stringent than EPA’s National Primary Drinking Water Regulations, the spokesperson said.
“(T)he body of science necessary to fully understand and regulate these chemicals is not yet as robust as it needs to be,” David Ross, EPA assistant administrator for Water, testified during a March 28 congressional hearing on PFAS.
“Studies in humans and animals are inconsistent and inconclusive but suggest that certain PFAS may affect a variety of possible endpoints. Confirmatory research is needed,” notes the National Center for Environmental Health on its website.
Environmental Extremism Returns?
If confirmatory research is needed, why is the Evers administration bolting ahead on the rigid PFOA and PFOS standards? More so, why did the governor limit to one day the comment period on DHS’ recommendations? The process provides for 21 days, unless the governor decides to reduce the comment period.
Administration officials declined to answer those questions.
But Sen. Tom Tiffany worries Evers is making good on his promise earlier this year to “unleash” the DNR, just as then-Gov. Jim Doyle, also a Democrat, did during his tenure in office.
Tiffany points to Todd Ambs, who directed the DNR’s water division from 2003 to 2010 and led the agency’s costly and failed phosphorus-fighting initiate. In 2014, then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, signed a measure easing up the rigid Doyle-era standards. The bill was backed by 100-plus municipal treatment plant operators concerned the previous regulations could cost billions of dollars to meet. Municipal permit-holders, under the law, may delay the more stringent limits if they can show financial hardship. Many could and can.
“This is my concern, and it goes back to what I have talked about since Gov. Evers announced his appointments to various positions. Particularly, does this have Todd Ambs’ fingerprints on it,” Tiffany said. “He gave us phosphorus regulations without legislative approval, and it did very little to reduce emissions.”
Ambs is back. Earlier this year the environmental activist was named DNR assistant deputy secretary.
As the Water Quality Coalition notes, DHS’ standards recommendations aren’t really recommendations; they must be applied as DNR puts together its enforcement plan.
Tiffany says he’s hopeful the Evers administration will reconsider what the senator asserts has been a rush job on the governor’s way to a “photo-op.”
While Republican-led reforms in recent years could ultimately stop the DHS standards dead in their tracks, that could take a while. Wisconsin’s first-in-the-nation REINS Act demands economic impact reviews on government rules and regulations suspected of having a price tag of $10 million or more over two years. Critics say DHS’ standards will certainly do that.
The Water Quality Coalition contends that until the standards are put into administrative code, the stringent water quality regulations aren’t enforceable. But the Evers administration has been known to push constitutional limits in its first seven months.
Coalition members are not ruling out litigation.
For now, the coalition requests DHS reconsider its recommendation for PFOA and PFOS groundwater standards.
“The Wisconsin Water Quality Coalition is concerned with the lack of transparency in the crafting of this recommended number as well as the potential detrimental impact on industry and the taxpayers alike,” the organization stated. “We will continue to advocate for regulation based on science that properly balances our health impacts with protecting the future of Wisconsin’s economy.”
Today in 1963, high school student Neil Young and his band, the Squires, recorded in a Winnipeg studio a surf instrumental:
Today in 1965, the Beatles asked for …
The number one single — really — today in 1966:
Today in 1979, Iran’s new ruler, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, banned rock and roll, an event that inspired a British band:
Liberals are saying so many idiotic things that that might demand an entire blog on just that subject.
If you thought it was stupid for a liberal to claim that conservatives like dogs because dogs are like slaves to them, enjoy what Eric Worrall reports:
h/t Dr. Willie Soon – According to British MP Michael Gove, cheap food damages the environment and encourages poor people to overeat.
True cost of cheap food is health and climate crises, says commission
Damian Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Tue 16 Jul 2019 06.00 BSTRadical change needed to make UK food and farming system sustainable within 10 years
The true cost of cheap, unhealthy food is a spiralling public health crisis and environmental destruction, according to a high-level commission. It said the UK’s food and farming system must be radically transformed and become sustainable within 10 years.
The commission’s report, which was welcomed by the environment secretary, Michael Gove, concluded that farmers must be enabled to shift from intensive farming to more organic and wildlife friendly production, raising livestock on grass and growing more nuts and pulses. It also said a National Nature Service should be created to give opportunities for young people to work in the countryside and, for example, tackle the climate crisis by planting trees or restoring peatlands.
“Our own health and the health of the land are inextricably intertwined [but] in the last 70 years, this relationship has been broken,” said the report, which was produced by leaders from farming, supermarket and food supply businesses, as well as health and environment groups, and involved conversations with thousands of rural inhabitants.
…
“Farmers are extraordinarily adaptable,” said Sue Pritchard, director of the RSA commission and an organic farmer in Wales. “We have to live with change every single day of our lives.
…
Gove said: “This report raises issues that are hugely important. We know that it is in the interests of farmers and landowners to move to a more sustainable model.” He added that the government’s agriculture bill would reward farmers with public money for public goods and a new “farm to fork” food review would look to ensure everyone had access to healthy British food.
The report was backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Green MP Caroline Lucas said: “This monumental report is a powerful and profound account of the ecological transformation of our food and farming system that we urgently need – and where we can start.”
…
I’m less than reassured by Gove’s promise that everyone will have enough to eat after he abolishes affordable food.
Green energy Britain has an atrocious record of helping people suffering fuel poverty. Occasionally even young people in Britain die because they missed a meal once too oftento ensure their children are warm and have enough to eat.
On Wednesday, Rasmussen released a very disturbing poll that found “one-in-three Democrats think it’s racism any time a white politician criticizes a politician of color.”
While 80% of Democrats believe the president is a racist, 85% of Republicans think the racism charges by his opponents are politically motivated. Voters not affiliated with either major party are evenly divided on the question.
Thirty-two percent (32%) of Democrats, however, say it’s racist for any white politician to criticize the political views of a politician of color. That’s a view shared by just 16% of both GOP and unaffiliated voters.
Among all voters, 22% think it’s racist if a white politician criticizes the political views of a politician of color. Sixty-eight percent (68%) disagree, while 10% are undecided.
But only 11% believe the term “racism” refers only to discrimination by white people against minorities. Eighty-four percent (84%) say racism refers to any discrimination by people of one race against another. These findings have changed little in surveys for the last six years.
Let’s put this another way: A third of Democrats believe that minority politicians should be immune from criticism by white politicians. Their policies can’t be challenged without there being an inherent racist motive. This is what a third of Democrats actually believe. If you’re a white politician and oppose raising taxes, you can debate higher taxes with another white politician, but if you have the same debate with a minority politician, you’re racist.
Is it starting to make sense yet? This is why Democrats nominated Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and why you can bet anything there will be a minority on the Democratic ticket in 2020. Minority and women are human shields to the Democratic Party.
Jon Del Arroz, a conservative science-fiction author who is Hispanic, summed up this attitude perfectly:
There is absolutely nothing American about the idea that certain people are above having their policies and opinions questions. Democrats are desperately hoping they can silence the opposition by automatically dubbing anyone who dares to speak out against someone who happens to be a minority as racist. Conservatives put up with it for eight years under Obama, and sadly it worked to a degree. Obama’s repeated violations of the U.S. Constitution would have had any other president impeached. Obama’s status as a minority protected him from criticism from the media as well, and enabled Democrats to promote the narrative that Obama was a scandal-free president with little to no pushback. Enough is enough already.
I bet the percentage is higher than 32 percent, except that some Democrats have the sense to not publicly admit their own biases.
Democratic candidates for president, in their impressive expansiveness, are promising free college. Some limit their proposals to community colleges, others to state-run schools, and a few, going for broke, want also to forgive student debt for private-college tuition. Since no realm of American life has undergone greater inflation in recent decades than higher education, this is no piddling promise. The cost to taxpayers could be in the trillions, though the prospect would please a nephew of mine who this autumn is sending a son to Dartmouth at the annual price of $76,000.
If government is going to pay for college, at least it ought to try to bring down the cost. I taught at a university for 30 years and have a few suggestions. Start at the top: I would reduce the salaries of university presidents by, say, 90%. (At the institution where I taught, the president made more than $2 million when last I checked.) I would also evict them from their rent-free mansions and remove their cadres of servants. The contemporary university president, after all, has little or nothing to do with education, but is chiefly occupied with fundraising and public relations. If universities were restaurants, the president would be a maître d’. To encourage their fundraising skills, perhaps they could be paid a small commission on the money they bring into their schools—cash, so to speak, and carry—excepting that on money used to erect more otiose buildings filled with treadmills, computers and condom machines.
The next big cut in the cost of higher education would be in superfluous administrative jobs, for the contemporary university is nothing if not vastly overstaffed. All those assistant provosts for diversity, those associate deans presiding over sensitivity programs, those directors for student experience—out, out with them. I would also suggest dispensing with courses that specialize exclusively in victimology, the history of victim groups told from the point of view of the victims. Young men and women do not need reinforcement in their already mistaken belief that they are victims because of their skin color, ethnicity or sexuality.
Another place serious money could be saved is college athletics. I’ve read that the highest-paid public employee in most states is the state-university football coach. The school at which I taught is not a state school, but its reasonably successful football coach earned $3.3 million in 2017, ranking him only 32nd among all college football coaches.
Nick Saban, the football coach at the University of Alabama, earns $8.3 million a year. Mike Krzyzewski, the basketball coach at Duke, earns $7 million. The argument for these astonishing figures is that football at Alabama and basketball at Duke more than pay for themselves. The Alabama football “program,” as they like to refer to this most brutal of sports, with its postseason games and television fees, brings in nearly $100 million a year. Duke’s perpetually winning basketball teams doubtless result in more student applications and alumni donations.
Under pure capitalism, Messrs. Saban and Krzyzewski might be said to earn their pay. But if higher education is to be free, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would have it, we are no longer talking about capitalism. Coaches’ salaries could be greatly reduced and the money earned by college sports—which means chiefly football and basketball—would need to be turned over to the federal government to help pay the cost of education itself.
Which brings us to the faculty. Faculty jobs in American universities have risen well in excess of any visible improvement in the quality of university teachers: $200,000-a-year-or-more professorships are now not uncommon. When I began teaching in my mid-30s, an older friend, long resident at the same university, said to me, “Welcome to the racket.” What he meant is that I would be getting a full-time salary for what was essentially a six-month job, and without ever having to put in an eight-hour day. At the tonier universities, professors in the humanities and social sciences might teach as few as three or four courses a year, the remainder of their time supposedly devoted to research. Like the man said, a sweet racket.
Under free higher education, perhaps it would make sense to pay university teachers by the hour, with raises in the wage awarded by seniority. Surely they could not complain. After all, the two most common comments (some would say the two biggest lies) about university teaching are, “I learn so much from my students” and “It’s so inspiring, I’d do it for nothing.” A strict hourly wage for teachers, as free university education may require, would nicely test the validity of that second proposition.
Free higher education—what a splendid ring it has, sufficient tintinnabulation to cause one to forget the old axiom that you get what you pay for.
Birthdays start with the indescribable George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic:
Rick Davies played keyboards for Supertramp:
Estelle Bennett was the older sister of Ronnie Spector, and both were part of the Ronettes:
Don Henley of the Eagles:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kslHr7_9Zac
Today in 1970, after Joe Cocker dropped out due to illness and unable to get Jimi Hendrix, promoter Bill Graham (possibly at Hendrix’s suggestion) presented Chicago in concert at Tanglewood, a classical music venue in Lenox, Mass.:
I would have loved to go to this concert, but I was 5 years old at the time.
The number one song today in 1973:
The number one R&B song today in 1979:
Today in 1980, AC/DC released “Back in Black,” their first album with new singer Brian Johnson, who replaced the deceased Bon Scott:
Thirty months after setting the goal of sending a mission 239,000 miles to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a story the Irish author Frank O’Connor told about his boyhood. Facing the challenge of a high wall, O’Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it. Said Kennedy, “They had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space.” Kennedy said this on Nov. 21, 1963, in San Antonio. The next day: Dallas.
To understand America’s euphoria about the moon landing 50 years ago, remember 51 years ago: 1968 was one of America’s worst years — the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinated, urban riots. President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, vow to reach the moon before 1970 came 43 days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to enter outer space and orbit the Earth, and 38 days after the Bay of Pigs debacle. When Kennedy audaciously pointed to the moon, America had only sent a single astronaut on a 15-minute suborbital flight.
Kennedy’s goal was reckless, and exhilarating leadership. Given existing knowledge and technologies, it was impossible. But Kennedy said the space program would “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” It did. The thrilling story of collaborative science and individual daring is told well in HBO’s twelve-part From the Earth to the Moon, and PBS’s three-part Chasing the Moon, and in the companion volume with that title, by Robert Stone and Alan Andres, who write:
The American effort to get to the moon was the largest peacetime government initiative in the nation’s history. At its peak in the mid-1960s, nearly 2% of the American workforce was engaged in the effort to some degree. It employed more than 400,000 individuals, most of them working for 20,000 different private companies and 200 universities.
The “space race” began as a Cold War competition, military and political. Even before Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite, jolted Americans’ complacency in 1957 (ten days after President Dwight Eisenhower sent paratroopers to Little Rock’s Central High School), national security was at stake in the race for rockets with ever-greater thrusts to deliver thermonuclear warheads with ever-greater accuracy.
By 1969, however, the Soviet Union was out of the race to the moon, a capitulation that anticipated the Soviets’ expiring gasp, two decades later, when confronted by the technological challenge of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. By mid-1967, a majority of Americans no longer thought a moon landing was worth the expense.
But it triggered a final flaring of post-war confidence and pride. “The Eagle has landed” came as defiant last words of affirmation, at the end of a decade that, Stone and Andres note, had begun with harbingers of a coming culture of dark irony and satire: Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961) and Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964). …
Stone and Andres say Apollo 11 was hurled upward by engines burning “15 tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene per second, producing energy equal to the combined power of 85 Hoover Dams.” People spoke jauntily of “the conquest of space.” Well.
The universe, 99.9 (and about 58 other nines) percent of which is already outside Earth’s atmosphere, is expanding (into we know not what) at 46 miles per second per megaparsec. (One megaparsec is approximately 3.26 million light years.) Astronomers are studying light that has taken perhaps twelve billion years to reach their instruments. This cooling cinder called Earth, spinning in the darkness at the back of beyond, is a minor speck of residue from the Big Bang, which lasted less than a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second 13.8 billion years ago. The estimated number of stars — they come and go — is 100 followed by 22 zeros. The visible universe (which is hardly all of it) contains more than 150 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars. But if there were only three bees in America, the air would be more crowded with bees than space is with stars. The distances, and the violently unheavenly conditions in “the heavens,” tell us that our devices will roam our immediate cosmic neighborhood, but in spite of Apollo 11’s still-dazzling achievement, we are not really going anywhere.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 