I can’t help it. The outrage at BP over this oil spill is getting out of hand. People are complaining about things that are not at all helpful to complain about. One bright light was complaining because BP is paying for Ad Words on the major search engines so that when people type in a search phrase having to do with the oil spill, BP’s website is showing up in the paid ad section. Duh!

Read the rest of this entry

My father insisted that if I didn’t get a college education I would suffer in life. I got the message. Dad also was quick to shake his head and mutter, “More college, more dumb,” when I did something he felt demonstrated a lack of common sense. He seemed to hold this duality of admiration for people with higher education (he was not able to attend college himself), and at the same time a bit of disdain for those same folks because they often had no “practical experience” or “common sense.”

Read the rest of this entry

Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist, commentator and book author. Some dozen years ago he wrote in one of his commentaries that, “The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origin of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.” He recently noted that things “seem to have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words.”

Read the rest of this entry

I was listening to a podcast discussing higher education around the world. The statistic I heard quoted from the experts on this topic was that 60% of the 26,000 PhD’s awarded to students in a given year from US Institutions are foreign nationals.

Read the rest of this entry