Those who are beyond college or who don’t have children who may one day like to attend may breathe a little sigh of relief and feel very sympathetic – but tend not to worry about the issue too much.

Whomever you are, listen up: it’s time to start worrying.

1. The United States cannot compete globally without a college-educated population. Period.
2. The money going to debt payments by graduates is money they are not spending on housing, retail shopping or whatever it is your business sells.
3. Student debt forces graduates to work for others and discourages entrepreneurship and innovation.
4. Along with not buying homes, debt-laden graduates are also putting off having children – goodbye future workforce and taxpayers!
5. The student loan market is extremely complex, and default levels are astoundingly high – endangering the economy as a whole.
6. It’s not just students, but also their parents and grandparents whose money is being pulled from the larger economy to payoff college debt.
7. And what’s the one kind of debt that can never be discharged, no matter what? We’re back to indentured servitude.
8. Both private and government loans lack “the most fundamental protections we take for granted with every other type of loan” – but at least it keeps the collection agencies in business, since they can “hound you for life.”

It’s sad: the two areas that are doing the greatest long-term harm to the American economy — the costs of higher education and of  health care — are also two areas which most benefit us as a society. Yet, we leave it all at the mercy of “the market” — in both cases allowing maximized profit off of what should be the public good. It’s no way to run a country of the people and for the people.

I flew United from ND to South Padre, TX. On the way down I got through the check-in process without any trouble. I paid the checked-bag fee of twenty-five dollars as the policy states and went on my way. This was how I expected the transaction to go down.

Returning home things went differently. I had the same bag and the same contents inside. But this time I was assessed an oversize bag fee of $100. When I stepped up to the check-in area the woman asked if the bag contained kite gear. I answered with a yes. She then said it would be a hundred dollars. I told her the policy stated kite gear was to be treated as a simple checked bag according to her airline’s policy unless it didn’t meet the criteria as set out in the policy. She was unaware of the policy and asked another woman to look it up. Sure enough she came back with the policy in hand and stated my bag was to big to qualify. She hadn’t measured it yet. As you can see United had already decided I wasn’t getting through without the added fee.

Knowing my bag was sixty inches long I asked that she measure it. She measured the bag from end to end and then the height on both ends and told me the result was seventy-two inches. I then told her she measured incorrectly. What reason would there be to measure the height twice and add that into the total? She never even measured the width. So she didn’t measure correctly but it wouldn’t have mattered. The policy states length plus width plus height. After further review of the policy and checking with some kiteboard pros I have determined no kiteboard would be allowed to fly at the regular fee. This is because no kiteboard would fit within their restricted dimensions. In order to do so under the policy as written a kite board would need to be 1″ x 48″ x 13″. Or at least some dimensions similar to that adding up to less than 62″.  Maybe someone has a board like that but it is too small to fit the norm. Isn’t that what the policy is written for?

Wakeboards, snowboards and downhill skis are not limited by this strange set of dimensions and therefore allowed to fly at the regular rate. As far as the airline is concerned, what is the difference between a wakeboard and a kiteboard? Sure there are some kiteboards which would be closer to the surfboard category and probably should be charged as such but many are not. When I travel with my ski equipment I am probably traveling with more surface area and weight than with my kite gear but I have never had any trouble with it all. Well, United did temporarily lose my skis once.

Anyway, I couldn’t leave the bag at the airport and go home without it. Since I couldn’t reason with her I told her to charge it and I would dispute it later. So I will be having a conversation with United about the difference I found between their check-in process at the two different airports as well as the discriminatory way their policy is written towards kiteboard equipment. I will keep you posted on how this turns out.

No, it’s a Double edged sword with equal responsibility coming from us all.  Loopholes in tax laws mean that not only are the best parts of our country being bought up by foreign investors, which means our county is no longer ours, but the high prices being set by the millionaire and billionaires with money to burn mean that ordinary working people can’t even afford a decent room in London. The super rich use their power and influence to join the wealthy brits in keeping the majority of their funds abroad, thus increasing the ordinary working persons tax responsibility two-fold!

One would have thought that a well-educated successful 30something would be entitled to enjoy their own home, be it rented or mortgaged. But no, the property market is so insane that people are unable to find a flat without entering into a bidding war, desperately pledging the best part of their wages to triumphantly land themselves a badly lit box room with 4 others! Offer to Redecorate the room to improve your chances quips a “helpful” estate agent. You have got to be kidding me! What with 1 month upfront, 2 months deposit, the removal van and council tax I will be lucky to pay for the bloody bus into work!

The only alternative to this insane scrabble for a shoe box is the relocation to the surrounding counties or for the very brave further afield thus being instantly and permanently enslaved to mercy of the Railway Networks aka “the great British tax on going to work” it’s literally a sick joke that these immensely profitable private companies are not only government subsidised but are allowed to brazenly rip us off, on a daily basis. The fact that there is no viable alternative for the thousands of commuters descending on London each day should surely mean that this essential service be efficient, affordable and accessible to all. Oh and don’t get me started on the 1st car insurance premiums. Because every 17-year-old college kid had £3000 gathering dust in his Natwest piggy bank just waiting to be spent on a 15-year-old ford fiesta worth less than a PS3! And we wonder why the biggest killer of young men is suicide. Even if they want to get up, earn a living, get an education and generally hold their heads high they get smacked back down. Oh yeah, and they need to live with their mum till they are 35!

 The thing is that the more we sit back and accept the lot that we have been given the more the powers that be will be able to do whatever they want. We all have the ability as individuals and as a group to make a difference. Our complacency, our unwillingness to take any responsibility for making our lives as good as they can be is what is making “Broken Britain”. Lets not be taken in by the constant distractions of bickering politicians (yes you Boris and Ken) and actually look at the real issues.

 This is England, but we all needs to contribute to make it GREAT Britain.

The U.S. government funded the work but last month urged the teams not to publicly reveal the exact formula so that would-be bioterrorists couldn’t copy it. Critics also worried a lab accident might allow the strains to escape. The researchers reluctantly agreed not to publish all the details as long as the government set up a system to provide them to legitimate scientists who really need to know. The National Institutes of Health is creating such a system.

(Please note: This is totally sub-thesis, here,
And does not–repeat, not–represent
An actual boss/staff dynamic. We clear?)
Whining time would be time not well spent.

A place where the policy doesn’t preclude
Bad behavior by those at the top,
And that policy gap leads to eye-poking…Dude,
Change the policy and the pokes stop!

Make the policy say Don’t poke eyes? That’s one way,
And it makes sense, but these are the guys
Who defended the boss’s eye-poking. They’ll say,
“Don’t do things that make bosses poke eyes!”

The charge against the kid, as you can probably surmise, is racism. You know, that “all of them look the same to me” attitude that sophisticated people like Marc Winger ascribe to the Archie Bunker types that Berkeley professors believe populate the land outside Sproul Plaza. Now, take a look at this picture of Chris Schaubel and rank, on a scale of 1 to 10, how closely he resembles Barack Obama. I’d give it a 6 myself, but then I’m the Kligrapp in my local Klavern. Certainly it’s a close enough resemblance to merit a 5th-grade prank from a reasonable distance.

Really, what’s a more racist attitude: saying that Schaubel looks like Obama or saying that whitey can never say that any two black people resemble each other?

Furthermore, who exactly got hurt by this alleged hate speech? Name names, Herr Doktor Winger, or STFU. And some little snitch bitch with an axe to grind against the kid doesn’t count. (Oops; I said “axe.” Is that racist? Is it racist to ask if it’s racist?)

Not one single person (aside from the kid who’s been banished from the Paradise that is Stevenson Ranch Elementary School) has demonstrated a shred of good judgment or common decency. The school district Nazis choose to cower behind their interpretation of privacy laws, which apparently enable them to defame and punish the kids under their command without explanation, let alone justification.

But I think the worst person–the sorriest excuse for a human being–is Chris Schaubel. One brief statement from him saying that he took no offense at being compared to Barack Obama would have quashed this whole stupid business. But–as far as I can tell from googling–he’s (quite uncharacteristically) kept his mouth shut about it.

Fuck you, Schaubel.

Fuck you, Winger.

Fuck you, principal Candy Fleece (yes!) who treated this seriously.

Fuck you, school-board president Susan Solomon (I am not making these names up!), for your mealy-mouthed sliming of the kid  (“there’s more to the story, but I can’t say what it is”).

And fuck you, you little Hitler Youth brat who bitched about this kid to a teacher and then celebrated his expulsion from Paradise Elementary after the wheels of injustice had finished crushing the kid.

You’re all cowards and bullies. But you do a wonderful job showing people why school vouchers are such an excellent idea.

What Does The Flag Say?

The Greeley Reporter