C-SPAN's annual Presidential Leadership Ranking is out.

George W. Bush is of course ranked with the losers--seventh from the bottom--what else would you expect from fascist sympathizers who rank Woodrow Wilson number nine.

Jimmy Carter is a full eleven spots ahead of Bush. Clinton is twenty-five.

The funny thing is that in 2005, George W. Bush was ranked 18 in a Wallstreet Journal ranking. Amazing historical perspective going on here where you can drop 20 spots in three years.

Reading this bollocks on Bloomberg put me in mind of John Junor's catch phrase above:

Obama, a 1991 Harvard Law School graduate, is surrounding himself with intellectuals who, like the president, have pursued careers in public service. They bring policy and political expertise, without the ideology that marked the George W. Bush administration, said Jeffrey Frankel, a professor of capital formation and growth at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“All of them are completely open to new information,” said Frankel, who was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers for three years during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “They are trying to find out what really works. People don’t value competence, but you do need it.”

Methinks Larry Summers tried to impart some new information at Harvard. They were so open to that, he resigned.

= MBA. Quite unfair; we all know MBA's and they're perfectly pleasant. That none of them is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Lakshmi Mittal, Richard Branson or the guy who runs whelk stall down the road is co-incidence. Make your own list. I pinched mine from a mea culpa by a Harvard MBA.

I dunno. My beef with graduates in general, especially men, is that the years spent on someone's curriculum in protected surroundings are the years most people aged 17-23 complete the foundation of their spiritual and worldly souls, but that takes risk, failure, self-invention, recovery from error and courage. You don't get an adult soul by living an adolescent life and college, for all its stresses, is prolonged adolescence.

Mexican little tykes won't find the answer at school:

A new sixth-grade world history textbook is causing a stir in Mexico because it leaves out any mention of the Spanish Conquest.

Few events have shaped Mexico's culture, ethnicity and history more than the 1521 conquest.

But it doesn't appear in the government-published world history text, which ends in the age of exploration with a reference to the rising world powers of Spain and Portugal.

Assistant Education Secretary Fernando Gonzalez told the Mexican newspaper El Universal on Monday there was no intention of covering up the Spain's brutal conquest of indigenous societies.

File this with the Japanese kids wondering why the United States declared war on their country.

University of Illinois study determines that Cook country is a "Dark pool of political corruption..."

Today Obama nominates the morally repulsive Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. She is his "moderate" choice. This post is simply to record extracts from Powerline's terrific blog entry "A Note On Elena Kagan" :

As Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan had to deal with the issue of compliance with the Solomon Amendment. Under the Solomon Amendment, universities receiving federal funding are required to allow the armed services to recruit on campus like other employers. It is a law that shouldn't be necessary.

Harvard Law School was one of many prominent law schools that chose to violate the Solomon Amendment, citing the military's don't ask/don't tell policy. The don't ask/don't tell policy is not just a whim of the armed forces. It is also the law of the land, but don't tell law school deans about it. They have to worry about matters closer to home, like their own schools' so-called nondiscrimination policies against hosting recruiters for employers that don't toe the line on homosexual rights.

When the Department of Defense sent Harvard a notice that it intended to enforce the Solomon Amendment, Kagan announced that she would adhere to what I call the Yale Doctrine, in honor of the statement made by then-Yale Law Dean Anthony Kronman at the time:

We would never put at risk the overwhelmingly large financial interests of the University in federal funding. We have a point of principle to defend, but we will not defend this--at the expense of programs vital to the University and the world at large.

Dean Kronman paid a backhanded tribute to the "money talks" impetus behind the Solomon Amendment. Thus the Yale Doctrine: We take your money for the good of the world.

And:

Kagan's side decisively lost the FAIR case in the Supreme Court [9-0]. I wrote while the case was pending in the Supreme Court that some lawsuits deserve a fate worse than failure. While decent military recruiters suffered the rudeness of their purported betters at Yale Law School and elsewhere in silence, the armed services of the United States were (and are) actively defending the freedom of those schools from peril. The rank ingratitude of those who should know better is a disgrace that deserves to be widely recognized as such.

To paraphrase Powerline: Some nominees deserve a fate worse than failure and so do some Presidents. Has any President ever nominated such a gang of intellectual cowards, tax evaders, hacks, placemen, student revolutionaries and enemies of The West? Nope. The Manchurian President indeed.

It's a joy for it's own sake to to rehearse Jacques' "seven ages of man" speech from As You Like It, but do you notice an "age" which is missing?

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

The age "missing" to a modern reader is the college years in which most literate and many illiterate young men and women loiter sheltered from adulthood; those years when Shakespeare migrated from Stratford to London, learnt to act, absorbed history useful to his craft such as Plutarch and Holinshed, was earning a living to support his baby and his elder wife, evolved his sensational soul .... those years are often spent in the second hand life of an immature full-time student with little life experience to bring to his study. The damage to a young man of deferred adulthood may never be repaired. Hom. sap. has evolved to assume life's risks and burdens in the years 12-25. Absent those trials, a young man may never grow up. He may become a community organizer or corporate drone or charity worker or Ed Miliband or ... It's a little different for girls, but I'll not dilute the theme by dealing with that here.

Apart from the spiritual atrophy of deferred adulthood, that lifestyle is increasingly bad business as laid out in this article in Forbes magazine:

The overwhelming cultural consensus of the post-WWII generation was that if you are middle-class, then you simply must own your own home and your children must go to college. Out of that cultural consensus emerged a complex system of tax breaks and special lending deals designed to make sure that the number of Americans who bought houses and bachelor's degrees was as high as possible--or maybe more so.

Many people now understand that this system of tax-and-lend has created a multigenerational housing bubble. But only a few have noticed that a very similar tax-and-lend system has also created a multi-generational higher education bubble.

Bubbles arise in nature when some sort of film, bolstered by surface tension, contains a pocket of air under greater pressure than the general atmosphere. Bubbles arise in markets when some factor external to the market (usually tax engineering or a regulatory mandate) creates a pocket of concentrated capital in which asset prices rise well above levels that can be justified by the assets' underlying value.

So, the recipe for an asset bubble is one part social engineering, one part easy money.

Just for the frisson here are images of a recent student protest against an increase in fees. I suppose that this is displacement activity of young men thwarted in their drive to grow up, retards: