DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

ZMan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

There is a famous line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which one of the characters asserts that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. This has been resaid many ways and attributed to many people, but the original is from Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist. For most of human history, the answer to the question, “Who says?” has been God, maybe the gods or perhaps a holy man who everyone agrees has some connection to the gods.

When someone said you should not do something, that question, “Who says?” was baked into the statement, along with its answer. You should not speak ill of the gids because the gods will exact revenge on you or maybe the authorities, fearing the wrath of the gods, will punish you. The answer to the question of who says you should or should not do something was always the same. it was some concept of the supernatural or its manifestation in the natural world.

In modern times, we do not appeal to the gods. You should not drive your car recklessly in a school zone because the government says you should not do that, and they have men with guns to arrest you if you do it. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is the government. Every prohibition in our lives comes with an assumed answer to the question, “Who says?” That answer is almost always the government or its agents.

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Maddison Bergmann, a 24-year-old Wisconsin elementary school teacher, was arrested recently after allegedly making out with one of her 5th grade students. Screenshots from numerous text message conversations between the victim and Bergmann suggest that the sexual abuse took place during lunch or after school, CBS News reported.

Apparently, the victim’s mother overheard a phone call between Bergmann and her son which prompted the mother to go through her 11-year-old’s cellphone. The victim then told investigators that he spoke with Bergmann “almost daily.”

When the child’s father found out about the alleged relationship, he marched to River Crest Elementary with the printed conversations from his son’s phone, leading to police being called “regarding inappropriate conduct between a current teacher and a 5th grade student.”

More female grade school teachers engage in inappropriate relationships with their students than there are school shooters. Yet nobody is talking about it.

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A Republican-led House panel is set to vote on a contempt charge next week for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland over his refusal to turn over the audio tapes of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden, it was reported Monday.

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Le Monde reports Belgium’s ports drowning under glut of Chinese electric cars: ‘Some are parked here for a year, sometimes more’.

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New details have emerged in a congressional investigation into the Biden administration censorship enterprise that has curtailed free speech on a level unprecedented in American history.

A new House Judiciary Committee report uncovered more of the Biden administration’s collusion with Facebook, YouTube and Amazon to silence constitutionally protected speech. The administration in some cases threatened these companies, pushing them to censor content or change their moderation guidelines, specifically with regards to fighting “vaccine hesitancy” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“By the end of 2021, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon changed their content moderation policies in ways that were directly responsive to criticism from the Biden Administration,” wrote the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Weaponization Committee in a May 1 press release. “While the Biden White House’s pressure campaign largely succeeded, its effects were devastating. By suppressing free speech and intentionally distorting public debate in the modern town square, ideas and policies were no longer fairly tested and debated on their merits.”

The Muslim invasion of Europe, after a brief hiatus from 1683, has resumed.

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The depths of the river Thames in London hold many unexpected stories, gleaned from the recovery of prehistoric tools, Roman pottery, medieval jewelry, and much more besides. Yet the tale of the lost (and since recovered) Doves typeface is surely one of the most peculiar.

A little over a century ago, the printer T.J. Cobden-Sanderson took it upon himself to surreptitiously dump every piece of this carefully honed metal letterpress type into the river. It was an act of retribution against his business partner, Emery Walker, whom he believed was attempting to swindle him.

The pair had conceived this idiosyncratic Arts and Crafts typeface when they founded the Doves Press in the London’s Hammersmith neighborhood, in 1900. They worked with draftsman Percy Tiffin and master punch-cutter Edward Prince to faithfully recall the Renaissance clarity of 15th-century Venetian fonts, designed by the revolutionary master typographer Nicolas Jensen.

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The Islamo-realism that dare not speak its name.

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Continued fighting in Ukraine and Middle East, plus the worldwide persistence of Islamic terrorism and urban violence, has revived interest in William Fairbairn, the developer of close combat methods used by police and the military, especially special operations or commando type troops.

Fairbairn died in 1960, having developed close combat fighting methods and taught them to soldiers and police personnel starting in the 1920s, continuing through World War II and for over a decade after the war. Fairbairn specialized in what he called gutter fighting, a ruthless, no holds barred form of combat referred to as The Fairbairn Method, which were developed in Shanghai, China, during the 1930’s when Fairbairn was an officer of its Chinese police force.

Fairbairn also developed various forms of hand-to-hand combat as well as innovations like the Kill House and bullet-proof transparent shields for police, the commando knife, and pop-up targets. Fairbairn trained allied commandos during World War II and these special operations were so feared by the Germans that Hitler ordered that any who were captured were to be immediately executed. The Germans believed, with some justification, that these commandos could be dangerous even when handcuffed or otherwise restrained. Authors of espionage and special operations publications found, and still find Fairbairn’s books excellent sources of material and details of close combat.

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This year’s recipients were the usual mixed bag, but I want to focus specifically on Gore. This is what Gore’s citation says:

Al Gore is a former Vice President, United States Senator, and member of the House of Representatives. After winning the popular vote, he accepted the outcome of a disputed presidential election for the sake of our unity. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his bold action on climate change.

Let’s dissect that: “After winning the popular vote…” This is completely irrelevant. The “popular vote” does not elect the president. The point is to emphasize what follows: “…he accepted the outcome of a disputed presidential election for the sake of our unity.” That is what Richard Nixon did, but not Al Gore. Gore went to court to challenge George W. Bush’s victory in Florida. After Gore lost in the trial court–correctly–four partisan Florida Supreme Court justices tried to steal the election for their man by purporting to award him Florida’s electoral votes. That triggered a further appeal. Gore fought for the presidency until the last dog was hung in the U.S. Supreme Court. And even thereafter, he claimed that he was the rightful winner, as have many Democrats ever since 2000.

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Degrees from Ivy League schools are losing their luster as a growing number of companies are publicly expressing doubt about recent graduates from the top-tiered universities where anti-Israel takeovers have rocked campuses.

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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris Monday announced more than $100 million in funding and resources to support American auto workers and small auto suppliers.Historic contracts secured by the United Auto Workers with the Big Three Detroit automakers and recent organizing…

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

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Chicago police abruptly canceled the city’s annual Cinco de Mayo parade due to gang violence.

While busy concentrating on the REAL problem, white supremacists. Yeah. Right.

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The politicization of COVID in America during the 2020 presidential election cycle ultimately led to worldwide skepticism that the intelligence was “radioactive American political issue,” according to a report.

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Clinical trials of the world’s first “tooth regrowth medicine” are set to commence in September at Kyoto University Hospital, researchers announced here on May 2.

Once the medicine’s safety is confirmed, it will be given to patients congenitally lacking a full set of teeth to confirm its effectiveness. The researchers hope to commence sale of the medicine in 2030.

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It’s very puzzling that the purple-haired communist revolutionaries sitting in tents across woke colleges and universities nationwide would advocate for Palestinians to break free from the support of freedom-loving Israel only to adopt the authoritarian control of Sharia law by Hamas. But perhaps, as we’ve explained before, the uprisings at colleges have very little to do with helping poor Palestinians and everything to do with abolishing capitalism and the socialist reconstruction of America.

…

To answer that question, the Wall Street Journal, published a new report that reveals the social unrest at colleges and universities was the result of a multi-month “training and planning” campaign by “activists and left-wing groups.”

At Columbia University, student organizers consulted heavily with radical leftwing groups, such as National Students for Justice in Palestine, veterans of campus protests, and former Black Panthers, many months before the protests.

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The clear message from the people and the Court is that admission should be based upon merit. But those running the University of California (UC) maintain their obsession with race and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). They are undeterred in their mission to enforce equity via affirmative action. Rather than complying with the law and the will of the people, they search for loopholes to achieve the racial balancing they deem ideal for the shaping of society.

The most recent example comes from its San Diego campus (UCSD) which implemented a rule that discriminates against students whose parents make more than a certain amount of money or who went to college. It just so happens that this rule greatly advantages black and Latino students. In a nice side benefit for the administrators, it hurts Asians, who are already overrepresented at the UCs (as well as most universities, as addressed in the Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which specifically addressed discrimination against Asian students.)

Beginning next year, certain “selective” majors (such as biology and most engineering degrees, including computer science) will have a special selection criteria at UCSD. “The selection?criteria for entry to the major will?consider academic achievement in the specified screening courses and will also be aligned with UC San Diego’s priorities of serving California residents, first-generation college students, and students from low-income families.” Thus, UCSD, without any direction from its constituents, has decided that it should prioritize students based on the status of their parents.

Time to leave.

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Dora Moutot is a committed feminist. She was deputy editor-in-chief of Konbini, a website aimed at young people. She has a degree in arts and fashion.

“The hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing.” — James Sexton

Watch his interview with Chris Williamson

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DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” your history of DEI activities, and how you will implement DEI initiatives if you get the admission/job/grant. I have posted quite a bit about them (see collection here), and object to them because they are not only compelled speech and are often completely irrelevant to what you’re applying for, but also ignore the fact that there are many ways to make contributions to society beyond enacting DEI. (For example, what about a college applicant who has taught illiterate adults to read?) And I think many institutions are eliminating them. For one thing, some of them may violate the recent Supreme Court decision on race-based admission. Now MIT has joined the statement-eliminators.

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The surge of pro-Hamas “protesters” on American campuses has some pundits puzzled. On the other hand, past events help explain the dynamics in play. On August 3, 1981, some 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), walked off their jobs. “They are in violation of the law,” said President Ronald Reagan, “and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.” Two days later, President Reagan fired and replaced the strikers. As one wag put it, the PATCO strikers must have thought Reagan was a college president and would cave to their demands. That’s what’s going on now.

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Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, has provided a forensic analysis of the videos and evidence emerging from Iran’s 13th April swarm drone and missile ‘demonstration’ attack into Israel: A ‘message’, rather than an ‘assault’.

The leading Israeli daily, Yediot Ahoronot, has estimated the cost of attempting to down this Iranian flotilla at between $2-3 billion dollars. The implications of this single number are substantial.

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California lawmakers are considering a bill that would give preference to African American applicants seeking occupational licenses, for such professions as teaching, nursing, counseling, electrical work and others, especially those who are descendants of slaves.

California never had slavery, but that’s where the Democrats are, so that’s where racial preferences and ‘reparations’ are being pushed.

Time to leave.

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A Texas high school yearbook has sparked outrage among the community, particularly its Jewish members, for including a “Times of Palestine” page that notably glosses over the ramifications of a Hamas terror assault on Israel, which claimed the lives of over 1,200 individuals, the N.Y. Post reports.

Houston’s Bellaire High School, which has a large population of Jewish students, features a section labeled “Times of Palestine” in its 2024 yearbook that omits crucial details regarding the Oct. 7 attack. The account provides a perspective of the Israel-Gaza conflict by an Arab student.

The page emerges amid tensions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and includes the page ostensibly as an Arab student’s narrative “of the Israel-Gaza conflict.”

Major urban areas are dominated by Democrats, even in red states like Texas. Austin is the poster child for this situation, but Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio are just as bad.

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State Farm, California’s largest insurance provider, announced it would not renew insurance policies for approximately 72,000 homes and apartments in the state beginning this summer.

In March, State Farm stated that it would discontinue coverage for around 30,000 homes and 42,000 apartments, citing surging costs, increasing risks of disasters such as wildfires, and outdated insurance rules as reasons for terminating the policies, per the Associated Press.

Play Democrat games, win Democrat prizes.

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What was the “intent to commit another crime or aid and conceal the commission thereof” that prosecutors used to raise falsification of business records from a misdemeanor to a felony? In nearly every case of alleged falsification of records that has been charged as a felony in New York, the defendant was charged with another crime — that is, prosecutors made it clear what the other crime was. In Trump’s case, the indictment did not specify any other crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the law did not require him to specify the other crime.

So Trump faced felony charges without knowing what he was accused of doing. And the really amazing thing is that the trial is now underway and Bragg has still not specified what the other crime is. It is a key element of the case. Without it, the charges against Trump could never have been brought because they were misdemeanors long past the statute of limitations. It is the other crime that makes this whole prosecution possible. But the prosecutor has not specified what it is.

If that sounds vaguely unconstitutional to you, you’re right. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, the Fifth Amendment “requires a felony charge to be spelled out in an indictment whose criminal elements have been established by probable cause to the satisfaction of a grand jury.” The problem, McCarthy continues, is that the election-stealing conspiracy Bragg’s prosecutors are accusing Trump of engaging in is “not charged in the indictment” and, further, “there is no such conspiracy crime in New York penal law.” McCarthy also argues that the charges violate the New York Constitution.

It’s a political witch-hunt, pure and simple.

House of Eratosthenes.

Internet phenomena are rather like campfire fuel: Some are like wet logs, you can sit there until your butt gets tired trying magnifying glasses, matches, Bic lighters, whatever have you, putting unlimited effort into it — and some people do! Nothing happens. They end up embarrassing themselves and tiring out their butts. Other things are like gasoline, the white variety, burning so fast that there’s no time for the flame to take to the wood and the accelerant can’t do anything but forcefully explode.

Most are in between the two extremes. This dumb bear thing is more like the latter. Match, toss, kaboom. I think it can be truthfully said, in all my Internet years, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I wish that every female who would rather meet a bear than a man in the woods would to ahead and do that. Think of it as evolution in action.

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Despite the fact that the world is teetering on the edge of global conflict, US college campuses being trashed by radical occupiers, and criminal illegals are still overwhelming the border, Joe Biden spent Friday afternoon awarding other Democrats medals.

Biden, who was incapable of saying ‘Presidential Medal of Freedom,’ awarded one each to Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, and Rep. Jim Clyburn.

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A health crisis has emerged for Democrat officials in Long Beach, California, following a tuberculosis outbreak linked to a hotel housing ‘homeless’ people, according to Fox News.

On Thursday, health officials declared a public health emergency after an alarming tuberculosis outbreak was reported at an unnamed hotel housing.

The city has so far confirmed 14 cases of tuberculosis in people “associated with a single room occupancy hotel.” Nine of them were hospitalized with one fatal case. Another 170 people were “likely exposed” to the deadly bacteria.

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A member of the House Democrats’ progressive “Squad” is under fire for hosting fundraiser with extremist Muslim leader who praised Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team admitted on Friday that key evidence in Trump’s classified documents case was altered or manipulated – leaving two different chronologies; one that was digitally scanned vs. what’s in the actual boxes.

Smith also misled the court, after originally telling U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained “in their original, intact form as seized,” when in a footnote they conceded that they removed classified documents and left placeholder sheets, which prosecutors acknowledged has created an “inconsistent” record – in which some of the documents are no longer in the same order as they appear in digital scans made in the fall of 2022.

“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote reads, according to Just the News.

NPR.

Play terrorist games, get terrorist prizes.

“MOOMMMMEEEEE! David hit me BACK!”

Gabe Bult.

Austin Williams.

The military has a technical term for people who call attention to themselves.

They’re called ‘targets’.

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An Italian-flagged vessel funded by a German NGO has joined the fleet of so-called ‘rescue boats’ that operate on the Mediterranean Sea, and stands accused by the Italian government of colluding with people smugglers to bring as many migrants as possible to Italy.

Maldusa, an Italian pro-migration cultural association, supported by German NGOs ProAsyl and United4Rescue, has announced that its speedboat, which is smaller than regular coast guard patrol boats, has set sail on the Mediterranean. Its aim, they declared, is not to rescue, but to “monitor the waters around Lampedusa, to prevent shipwrecks and other forms of border violence, and facilitate the freedom of movement of all those trying to reach Europe.”

StrategyPage.

Worldwide military spending reached a record $2.443 trillion in 2023. This was an increase of 6.8 per cent since 2022. This was the largest year-to-year increase since 2009. Global defense spending passed two trillion dollars a year in 2021. The nations with the largest defense budgets remain the same. In 2023 the top ten spenders were the United States, China, India, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea. As usual the United States accounted for the largest amount of global spending, 38 percent of it. China came in at 14 percent while India has 3.6 percent. The number ten nation, South Korea, had 2.4 percent. Russia, long the number two spender has not fallen to number five with 3.2 percent of world spending. The rest of the world, which has about 170 nations, account for 25.3 percent of global defense spending. The current global superpowers are the United States and China, with China a distant second to the Americans.

The American Mind.

Mercenaries are, of course, nothing new. Wars tend to beguile adventurers and some of them are going to be foreigners attracted to the possibility of financial reward, if not ideology. Iraq and Afghanistan had plenty of guns for hire, providing technical services or working as protective security details. In my time in Iraq, I recall seeing Americans, South Africans, Chileans, and Nepalese (Gurkhas) serving in such capacities. According to the Russians, there are over three thousand foreign mercenaries serving with the Ukrainians, with particularly large contingents from the United States, France, and Canada. On the Russian side in the Ukraine War, we’ve seen evidence of African, Syrian, and Cuban mercenaries.

And while the white mercenaries of Africa are legendary, or notorious, the case should be made that they were outnumbered by African and other mercenaries. Rwandan soldiers on missions in the Congo and Central African Republic essentially behaved as rapacious mercenaries, looking to benefit financially from the conflict. And there were few supporters of African and Arab mercenaries, of men with guns for hire, as assiduous as the late Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. The consequences of Qaddafi-funded mercenary forces such as the Islamic Legion and the Volcano Army would reverberate for decades, helping to stoke the genocidal war in Sudan’s Darfur region.

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Attorneys general representing half of the country on May 1 sued President Joe Biden’s administration over a new rule requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales, including private sales.

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The parole program allowed over 200,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua to enter the United States between January and August 2023. The program did not cover the cost of flights, but allowed them to enter and travel independently.

In a recent development, a House Committee subpoena has forced the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reveal details of its parole program designed to allow entry for thousands of individuals from several nations.

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Iowa will face legal consequences if it enforces a recently passed immigration law that prohibits people from being in the state if they were previously denied entry into the United States, the Des Moines Register reported.

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On January 6, 2021, tens of thousands of Americans descended on Washington to protest the counts and Covid-related conditions of the 2020 election. A riot took place at the US Capitol. Over 1,200 people were arrested and more than 460 were incarcerated. The coverage of that day in the mainstream media is typified by headlines like this from the New York Times, Forbes and Washington Post.

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A self-described “rebel alliance” operates a website that reacts in real time to the protests roiling college campuses across the country with analysis and instruction on the benefits of digging in and escalating violence, especially as it pertains to law enforcement.

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The school psychologist for Indianapolis Public Schools was among those held when police arrested 14 masked adults who blocked traffic last month. They were charged with obstructing traffic April 25 at 10:30 a.m. on Meridian Street.

A psychologist for Indianapolis Public Schools was among those held when police arrested 14 masked adults who officers said were blocking traffic late last month just outside the Governor’s Residence in the state capital.

The school psychologist, Karisa Cole, and the other arrested protesters were charged with obstructing traffic April 25 at 10:30 a.m. on Meridian Street in Indianapolis.

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The Austin City Council voted to become a sanctuary city for transgender minors seeking “gender-affirming care” on Thursday. In a vote of 10-1, the council passed a measure that will help it undermine state law by directing police to push any enforcement of the state’s transgender child restrictions to their lowest priority.

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Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas activist-scholar at Columbia University. Abdou teaches virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual twaddle concocted by modern man. Nearly every student loan taken in the U.S. is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers.

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas “anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization” at Columbia University. Now, I don’t mean to pick on Abdou. It’s just that he happens to teach virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual identitarian twaddle concocted by modern man.

Ultimately, we make Abdou’s job possible. Nearly every student loan taken in the U.S. is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, since it allows every student a chance at higher education. The reality, however, is that we have incentivized universities to create hordes of debt-ridden, credentialed nitwits.