The Calico Cat

I have already received an Email regarding my essay on the marketing economy. That Email, along with a lengthy response, has been appended to the original essay.

Click here to read my essay on the marketing economy.

I've been thinking about writing this for over a month, and now I've finally put my thoughts down in a readable from. It's my new theory that the United States is moving from an information economy to a marketing economy.

This is the most important thing I've ever published in my blog, because it describes a transformation underway in our economy that I seem to be the first person to spot.

Click here to read my essay on the marketing economy.

They say that Howard Dean is no longer the front runner in New Hampshire. His turn of bad fortune has certainly been swift and unexpected. Is it because people are making such a big deal about his speech after he lost in Iowa? I don't see what the big deal is if he came off as a real person for a few minutes instead of a super smooth political phony. People complain tht all of our politicians are a bunch of phonies, but then whenever someone reveals the human being behind the political face, he gets pilloried. We get what we vote for. Or we get who the media tells us to vote for. If the media didn't make such a big deal about the speech, probably no one would have noticed.

I'm not even sure what Dean stands for, probably because the media is too busy reporting that he didn't look presidential enough during his speech. Dean is supposed to be more liberal than the other candidates. But considering that we have a liberal in the White House right now, who favors federalizing education, increasing government spending, opening our borders to massive immigration, what's the difference who wins the election?

A Dean victory could be the best thing for conservatives. I imagine he'll have a Jimmy Carter type of foreign policy, and the economy is going to do bad no matter who wins the election, so I'd rather Dean get blamed for it than a liberal pretending to be a conservative like Bush.

Being that my essay on Frank McCourt appeared in this week's Carnival of the Vanities, I figure that it's fair for me to comment on an interesting post from another blog that was also featured in the Carnival.

I choose a post from the blog King of Fools entitled Gender Gap.

Upon hearing about a gender gap, one immediately presumes it's a complaint about females getting shafted compared to males. But in the educational system, it's actually the boys who are getting the shaft. From the very beginning, girls do better in school than boys, and more girls go on to college than boys. This is actually not as new as one might think. I remember reading an article by educational psychologist Arthur Jensen that he wrote in the sixties where he mentioned that fact that teachers evaluated girls more favorably than boys. What's different is that back then, girls weren't especially encouraged to pursue additional education (or so my mother tells me). So girls did well in school but weren't as likely to seek higher education or careers.

I should also bring up a point that I'm sure I've brought up before; college education is probably overvalued in this country. A co-worker used to tell me at least once a week (maybe I exaggerate the frequency a little) how his son didn't go to college and he made $120,000 a year. The son had some sort of computer networking job. If women go to college to study economically worthless subjects, while men forgo the college education to pursue more lucrative opportunities in the computer field (where you rarely see a woman working), then which sex is benefitting more from this gender gap?

It is even been suggested by some (sorry, no links) that the feminization of college could devalue higher education. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, because we worship college education too much.

In the course of maintaining this blog, people have occasionally given me positive comments on the quality of my writing. Maybe they are just saying this to be nice, or maybe they are sincere. Probably the former explanation is correct, but if there is any truth to the latter, then one may ask how I came to be such a good writer.

The answer is that I had a really great Creative Writing teacher when I was at Stuyvesant High School. His name was Frank McCourt, and yes, that’s the same Frank McCourt who’s the author of the best selling book Angela's Ashes.

Click here to read the rest of my Frank McCourt essay