If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, you might want to go back and catch up before reading this one. Trashing education A few weeks ago I posted a link to the article that forms the backbone of part one of this series — which, again, is “A Straight-Talk Survival Guide for Colleges” by Peter…
Category: Economy
America’s Colleges at a Crossroads – Part 1
This is the first of a three-part series. (Also see parts 2 and 3.)In this post I’ll simply point to the problem and refer to a couple of recently published pieces that lay it out in bleak detail. In the next two, to be published over the course of this week, I’ll lay out some…
Thomas Friedman: The game is up, the ‘Great Disruption’ is at hand
Who would have believed it? Two days ago in Saturday’s (March 7) edition of The New York Times, Mr. Economic Globalization himself — Thomas Friedman, author of the monumentally influential tome The World Is Flat, which argues that individuals and nations must recognize and adapt to the reality of a level global economic “playing field”…
Troubles in Eastern Europe add to drumbeat of economic Armageddon
My roving eye-for-apocalypse scans the immediate environment and detects — imminent meltdown in Eastern Europe! In a word (or actually two), holy hell. The financial situation in Eastern Europe has gotten absolutely insane over the past few days. Here’s a small sampling of the mass-mediated intel that’s available to us mere mortals — as distinguished…
Economic doom indeed: Fantasy, SF, and horror publishers and publications scaling back and shutting down
Okay, so this developing trend doesn’t rank up there in severity with things like peak oil, spiking unemployment, riots around the globe, and dead bees. But it’s still quite interesting, at least to somebody like me, who has written horror for years, spoken on panels at several genre conventions, and made a lot of personal…
Apocalypse-check, January 2009: Yep, the sky’s falling
It’s the end of the first month of 2009. The apocalypse, or at least the human race’s version based on hubris and greed, began in earnest last year. So how’s it looking now, 31 days into the new year? A sampling of prominent headlines will sketch the picture: America’s economy is worse than it looks,…
Citizens stage mass strike and demonstration across France (with riot in Paris) over government bail outs of banks while U.S. citizens remain asleep in their La-Z Boys
Check out this BBC video from yesterday (Thursday, January 29): Crowds riot in striking France [Whoever posted the video to YouTube requested to have external embedding disabled, so you’ll have to click on the link and actually visit YouTube to watch it.] The summary and upshot: All across France yesterday, citizens staged a HUGE strike…
U.S. Toyota bigwig refers to “the inevitability of peak oil”
I don’t plan these hiatuses, but they do happen anyway. Welcome back to The Teeming Brain after a two-month pause during which I felt no internal compulsion to post, and during which time I was extremely busy with other stuff anyway. I hope 2008 ended and 2009 began on a good note for everybody reading…
After G20, Bush openly refers to “the Greater Depression”
Color me shocked. Seriously. Today, George W. Bush openly mentioned the possibility that the U.S. may be staring down the barrel of what various parties have been referring to for months and even years as “the Greater Depression.” And it’s all on video. The big moment came in the wake of today’s G20 summit in…
The Frankenstein Economy, part 2: It’s alive!
It’s everywhere now. The Frankenstein metaphor is being used far and wide and fast and furiously to describe the monster of a financial/economic crisis that has taken on a life of its own and is rampaging through the little Bavarian village called America (or perhaps, more accurately, Planet Earth). Two days ago I uploaded a…