Six Paragraphs of Sheer Brilliance . . .

.  .  .  from my favorite leftist, Camille Paglia.  She calls for the "sweeping revalorization of the trades."  I'm not sure what trades will prepare practitioners for the balance of this century, or what the century requires.  But she's got the right idea on the deepening uselessness of a college education over the past few decades, arising largely from meaningless "post-structuralist" rubbish in the liberal arts and the neglected cultivation of habits of thought in those costly four-year nurseries.  Only take you a minute to read.

Did you Hear POTUS Supporting The Cool Hot Center? Peggy Noonan Did

Faithful visitors to The Cool Hot Center will recall my two-parter of a couple of weeks ago where I expressed my view that the President is in love with the academy, that it is in love with him, and that this explains a lot about his Presidency.

If you heard his here-and-gone Oval Office speech on the BP Oil Spill a couple of evenings ago, you heard some striking evidence of that. Peggy Noonan caught it in her editorial this morning in the Wall Street Journal

“[G]rowing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others 'experts in academia' on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the 'small people' in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.”

President Obama in the Oval Office

Exactly.