Student Loans

In 2010, Obama signed a law federalizing the student loan program, claiming that the banks were needless middlemen and that the government could just lend the money directly and save truckloads of money. Critics said that the Education Department is ill-equipped to identify risks when making loans. Easy terms and high default rates forced the Congressional Budget Office recently to increase the program's cost by 7 billion — a 30% jump. The New York Fed reports that 11.5% of student loan debt was more than three months past due in Q2 of this year, which was up from Q1. By comparison, the 90-day delinquency rate on credit card debt is just 8.4%. The Department of Education that 6.9 million people haven't made a student loan payment in more than 360 days, which is up 6% from the year before.
Enrollment in income-based loan programs — which base monthly payments on current income and forgive any remaining debt after 20 years — exploded 56% in just the past year. The amount of direct federal student loan debt has climbed more than 600%. The Department of Education now manages a loan portfolio bigger than the entire loan business of JPMorgan Chase.

Sunday 12/13/15

Today's gospel is one of those rare events where Christ does not appear. Instead there are interchanges between the people and John the Baptist:

The crowds asked John the Baptist,
“What should we do?”
He said to them in reply,
“Whoever has two cloaks
should share with the person who has none.
And whoever has food should do likewise.”
Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him,
“Teacher, what should we do?”
He answered them,
“Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.”
Soldiers also asked him,
“And what is it that we should do?”
He told them,
“Do not practice extortion,
do not falsely accuse anyone,
and be satisfied with your wages.”




These simple admonitions were so revolutionary for the times the people thought that John might be God. 

Cab Thoughts 12/12/15

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."- George Orwell, 1984




The Island of Funen, which has fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, is dense with Renaissance castles and pastel-washed villages, briny little fishing ports and ripe meadows that roll out in long, green flanks to meet the northern sky. But a big part of Funen’s fairy-tale cred is the fact that the island was the boyhood home of Hans Christian Andersen, his first muse and enduring inspiration. Andersen’s mother was an alcoholic washerwoman; his father was a poor cobbler who died when Andersen was 11; his aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen. Andersen himself, despite his fame, was isolated by his early traumas. The loneliness is captured in his fairy tales, which are considered adult fiction in Denmark. All of Andersen’s lost boys and girls—the abandoned Little Match girl; the Little Mermaid who sacrifices her tongue in the original version—stay fixed in the memory because they are the emblems of our own early sorrows. (This is from a travel article on Funen)

The Church of England began in schism when Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to approve his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. This new pope is discussing serious changes in Catholic thought. So, if the Church decides to accept divorce now, was the Church wrong then?

Just because many successful people failed in early efforts, that does not necessarily mean that failure leads to success. And it certainly doesn't mean it is a prerequisite.

Cruelty grows anywhere and is open-minded about its targets. Bloemfontein is popularly and poetically known as "the city of roses", owing to the abundance of these flowers and the annual rose festival held there. (The city's Sesotho name is Mangaung, meaning "place of cheetahs," perhaps a better name.) During the Boer War, British forces captured the city and built a concentration camp nearby to house Boer women and children. The National Women's Monument, on the outskirts of the city, pays homage to the 26,370 women and children as well as 1,421 old men^. (Also 14,154 black people, though some sources feel that the records are unsatisfactory, and that this number could be as high as 20,000) who died in these camps in various parts of the country.

I have been reading Furst's WWII spy stories. They are wonderful in their atmosphere, their reflection of that time of fear and hope before the war. And one strange element: There is little depth. It is unapologetic, too. This was a time--and a people--of circumstance. That terrible vulnerability gives each story its power.

"None" is a pronoun most of the time. It means nothing, zero, no one, or not any part. Some believe it can only be singular in construction, but that is not true. Most seem to think that because none can mean ‘not one’ that it is always singular, but none can also mean ‘not any’. See the examples for uses in plural or singular. E.G.:

"Perhaps none is more vulnerable than James, a soft-spoken 19-year-old who is quick to flash a smile that would melt ice."

"Based on the forecasts that we have gotten so far this year, none of them were very close to what the game conditions were."

Howard Hughes was a successful Hollywood movie producer when he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He personally tested cutting-edge aircraft of his own design and in 1937 broke the transcontinental flight-time record. In 1938, he flew around the world in a record three days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.

Recapitulation, also known as the biogenetic law, states that the stages in an organism's embryonic development and differentiation (ontogeny) correspond to the stages of evolutionary development characteristic to its species (phylogeny). Ernst Haeckel, who proposed the theory in 1866, produced a number of controversial embryo drawings to support this premise. So the embryo stages are a reflection of the species historic phases. No one believes this anymore but it was very popular for a while.

China's "population policy" was not the first effort by a state to manipulate population numbers. In the late 19th century the French saw a shift in the balance of power in Europe away from them and toward Germany. German population was growing with its industry. The French government wanted to do something to encourage more French babies so it came up with a series of modest financial bonuses for families who had children, along with a public relations campaign "talking up" the importance of the French family. As a policy it wasn't terribly effective but the broader ramifications were considerable as it marked the introduction of modern population policy.
After WWII the emphasis shifted the other way--not to imply a faddish or superficial element in government thinking. In 1968, Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich published the best-selling book The Population Bomb in which he warned that overpopulation would soon lead to mass starvation. Birth control became a cornerstone of U.S. foreign aid policy.
In the late 1970s, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, introduced a program that involved the involuntary sterilization of many men and women.

Terrorism is an old game.

'My object was to terrorize so as to force society to look attentively at those who suffer.' Thus spake  Ravachol, a Frenchman born François Koeningstein (he took his mother's name, Ravachol, although it sounds like a corrosive) who so typified the crazed bomb-throwing anarchist that his name became a verb.

In the late 1800s, the harsh oppression of factory workers and the new specter of unemployment and homelessness spawned in backlash, "anarchism." The Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil, eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another, and human nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men. The vision was of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him. Six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914. They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the United States in 1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912. Not one could qualify as a tyrant.

But random destruction is meaningful if one assumes an underlying nascent order of things.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch will release the first wave of 46,000-plus federal inmates, whose sentences were slashed, in the largest mass prison release ever. The mass release, which represents half the federal prison population of drug offenders, is part of President Obama's "criminal justice reform." Under new administration guidelines, criminal sentences were retroactively cut by an average 25 months as a way to make punishment for drug crimes "fair" to minorities, whom Obama says are disproportionately affected by mandatory-minimum sentences. Three-fourths of the parolees are minorities. So the judicial system is trumped by the executive?

Who is....Henry the Navigator?

Photography was a 'wet' art when George Eastman carried the large, heavy equipment necessary for photography on his vacation to Santo Domingo in1878. But Eastman  read about gelatin emulsions capable of remaining light-sensitive after drying. Working at night, in his mother's kitchen, he began to experiment with his own varieties. A natural-born tinkerer, Eastman took less than two years to invent both a dry plate formula and a machine that fabricated dry plates. The Eastman Dry Plate Company was born.  In 1884, Eastman invented roll film; four years later he came up with a camera capable of taking advantage of that roll. In 1888, that camera became commercially available.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/in-academic-political-dmz.html

Tribes in the central Sahara, lacking in gold, salt and other precious commodities, made the slave trade their principle source of wealth, trading over four million slaves from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries AD, sometimes in caravans of over 10,000 camels. In 1444, Europeans entered the business, beginning a lucrative practice that eventually sent millions of slaves to Europe and the Americas. Under Prince Henry the Navigator, Portugal pioneered major advances in shipbuilding and navigation. The Portuguese fleet was equipped with newly designed caravels, which were highly maneuverable and ideally suited for reconnaissance along unknown coasts. In 1434, a Portuguese crew sailed around Cape Bojador and returned safely against the wind. By 1445, Portuguese mariners reached the mouth of the Senegal River which traditionally marked the boundary between the Berber and Arab tribes of the Sahara and 'the Land of the Blacks'. In 1444, a Portuguese official, Lancarote de Freitas, backed by a consortium of merchant-adventurers from the Algarve port of Lagos, mounted an expedition of six caravels to islands on the Arguin Bank with the express purpose of capturing slaves. Their arrival onshore on 8 August 1444 became a public spectacle, watched by crowds of Lagos residents. Prince Henry himself was on hand to supervise the proceedings, mounted on a horse. The captives were marched to an open space outside one of the town gates and divided into five groups. One group of forty-six of the best slaves was set aside for Henry for his share of the booty. The remainder were either retained by their new owners or put up for auction.

Root beer is a dark brown sweet beverage traditionally made using the root or bark of the tree Sassafras albidum (sassafras) or the vine Smilax ornata (sarsaparilla) as the primary flavor. Root beer may be alcoholic or non-alcoholic, and may be carbonated or non-carbonated. Most root beer has a thick foamy head when poured. Modern, commercially produced *root beer* is generally sweet, foamy, carbonated, and non-alcoholic, and is flavored using artificial sassafras.

In the newer culture of America few such signs [...of monopoly...] had been erected; from the sheer lack of organized monopolists, old monopolies could not be perpetuated. America broke down distinctions: where life was full of surprises, of unexplored wilderness, and of unpredictable problems, its tasks could not be neatly divided for legal distribution.  Any man who preferred the even tenor of his way, who wished to pursue his licensed without the competition of amateurs, intruders, or vagrants, or who was unwilling to do jobs for which he had not been legally certified was better off in England.--Daniel Boorstin

By 1971, more than six hundred death courses were being offered across the United States, and five years later that number had nearly doubled. Now thousands of such classes can be found across disciplines from psychology to philosophy to medical science to sociology. Some colleges offer degree and certificate programs with death, dying, and bereavement concentrations, and increasingly, as at Kean University, undergraduates can take such classes as general electives. In 1985, two researchers from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette embarked on what would become a twenty-year study to solve this question: what kind of students take death education courses in college, and why? Sarah Brabant and Deann Kalich surveyed more than nine hundred students enrolled in Brabant's Sociology of Death and Dying course and found that nearly 24 percent wanted to deal with their own grief issues; but, most startlingly, close to half of the students surveyed had 'seriously contemplated committing suicide at some time in their lives.' Even more distressing, 10 percent of the students said they had actually tried to kill themselves at one point.

The first country to grant women the right to vote in the modern era was New Zealand in 1893.

According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "social expenditures" are expenditures that occur with the purpose of redistributing resources from one group to another, in order to benefit a lower-income or presumably disadvantaged population. These can be direct transfers or indirect. The U.S. has lower than most direct transfers but the indirect, through incentives, credits and private structures are high. Redistributive social spending in the US is indeed different from many other countries. But the overall magnitude is actually greater (both proportionally and in absolute terms) in the US than in almost all other countries measured. One can argue that the way that the wealth is redistributed through public policy in the US is "wrong" or "suboptimal." But, to argue that there is less redistribution as a result of public policy in the US than elsewhere is simply wrong.

In Washington, D.C., there has been an increase in homicides of more than 20% in neighborhoods across the city. Baltimore, a city of 600,000, is averaging more than one homicide a day—a rate higher than that of New York City, which has 13 times the people. Milwaukee’s murder rate has nearly doubled over the past year.

AAAAAnnnnnddddddd.....a portion of a report by a court Portuguese chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, in the Chronicle if Guinea on the arrival at the dock of Lagos of Lancarote de Freitas' first slaving voyage and the subsequent division of the slaves:  

These people, assembled together on that open place, were an astonishing sight to behold ... Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards the heavens fixedly and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe to help them; others struck their faces with their hands and threw themselves full length on the ground; yet others lamented in the form of a chant, according to the custom of their native land, and though the words of the language in which they sang could not be understood by our people, the chant revealed clearly enough the degree of their grief. To increase their anguish still more, those who had charge of the division then arrived and began to separate them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their husbands and brother from brother. No account was taken of friendship or relationship, but each one ending up where chance placed him ... 

"Dividing them up proved difficult:

For as soon as the children who had been assigned to one group saw the parents in another they jumped up and ran towards them; mothers clasped their other children in their arms and lay face down on the ground, accepting wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let their children be torn from them ...

Shadwell and Dryden

British poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell died in 1692. Shadwell wrote eighteen plays and became poet laureate but, as the Columbia History of English Literature puts it, "he enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable in ours," as literary skill "was not among the gifts of his mind."
This description is a kindness compared to the attacks suffered by Shadwell from contemporary John Dryden. For it is as loser in their satire war that Shadwell is now remembered, his three written about Dryden being no match for Dryden's three about him. In Mac Flecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S., Dryden has Flecknoe, the King of Dullness, give his crown to Shadwell, the son with the most suitable genes and talent:


...And pond'ring which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit;
Cry'd, 'tis resolv'd; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me:
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense....


Much of this was sniping along Whig vs. Tory and Protestant vs. Catholic lines. Judging by talent rather than partisanship, modern literary historians label the second half of the 17th century the 'Age of Dryden' and barely give Shadwell an anthology page.


When James II abdicated in 1688, and it was once again open season on Catholics. Dryden had his poet laureateship -- he was Britain's first -- taken from him, and given to Thomas Shadwell. Thus the butt of Dryden's enthronement joke in Mac Flecknoe now got from the real King the poetic crown, the pension, and a "butt of Canary wine." Shadwell was a heavy drinker, and opium taker; most accounts of his death in 1692 attribute it to an opium overdose.

The State of the State of Delaware

On the 150th anniversary of the December 6, 1865, ratification of the 13th Amendment—which abolished slavery in the United States—the State of Delaware announced plans to apologize formally for the role it played in the slave trade. There is no word from those Delaware Civil War veterans who were killed in ending slavery. 

What it is about responsibility these politicians seem to be missing?

One is responsible for what he can influence, something over which he has some element of control. But there seems to be a lot of Old Religion going around. Inherited guilt is a leftover from the Old Testament, a notion we, until recently, have been liberated from. Guilt is hard to assign and impossible to inherit.
Guilt is a profound emotion resulting from significant self-assessment and measurement of oneself against some accepted ideal. Guilt is not something to be careless with. And its inappropriate assignation is invariably met with resentment.
And the trivializing of guilt does more than allow for superior criticism, it trivializes responsibility itself. One might wonder if that is not the aim.

 

Cab Thoughts 12/9/15

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)


Factory hours at Thomas Edison were 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.; in the winter, it was dark when workers went in and dark when they came out. Twenty-two saloons and bars lined the street that faced the main plant, and they opened at 5:00 A.M. for workers who had difficulty facing the grimness of the workday. When Thomas Edison departed for Washington to aid the war effort in 1917, Charles Edison, Thomas' son recently raised to the position of CEO,  got the chance to make changes at Thomas A. Edison, Inc., that made life for factory workers less harsh and dangerous. Charles shortened the workday to ten hours; put in a dispensary staffed with a nurse or doctor on duty; and subscribed to the state's workmen's compensation plan, even though other managers were convinced it would bankrupt the company. When Tomas returned he reversed or cancelled all of his son's new policies.


In the President's speech he said that Tashfeen Malik, one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino, California, attack, arrived in the US as part of the US's visa waver program. The entire world--except for him--knows she came on a fiancé visa. That is at least strange.


China will allow two children for every couple, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. China, now a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, instituted a policy of one child per couple to control population growth in the 1970s. The policy eased over the years: In late 2013, the country announced couples could have two children if one of the parents was an only child.

Satellite temperature readings have shown no warming trend for the last 18 years, 8 months and counting. None.
Satellite temperature readings are supposed to be the most comprehensive and thus the most accurate. And, of course, the pause in warming since 1998 undercuts the entire global warming argument of the environmental movement and its allies. Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists took part in a study that found  that the "pause" in global warming from 1998 to 2013 didn't exist. Instead of a pause, they found a surge. Huh? The House Science Committee subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to the study. NOAA refused to hand them over. Huh?

Rectitude: n: 1. Moral uprightness. 2. Correctness. 3. Straightness. ety: From Latin rectus (right, straight). Ultimately from the Indo-European root reg- (to move in a straight line, to lead or rule) that also gave us regime, direct, rectangle, erect, alert, source, surge

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish philosopher whose famous work was On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.  He argues that the key role in history lies in the actions of the "Great Man", claiming that "History is nothing but the biography of the Great Man". Is this a worse position than history's invisible materialistic hand?

Who is....Arthur Rimbaud?

Crowdsourcing: In December 2009, DARPA offered $40,000 to anyone who could locate ten balloons that they had placed in plain sight around the continental United States. On a predesignated day, DARPA hid ten large, red weather balloons, eight feet in diameter, in various places around the country. The $40,000 prize would be awarded to the first person or team anywhere in the world who could correctly identify the precise location of all ten balloons. When the contest was first announced, experts pointed out that the problem would be impossible to solve using traditional intelligence-gathering techniques. The contest was entered by 53 teams totaling 4,300 volunteers. The winning team, a group of researchers from MIT, solved the problem in just under nine hours. How did they do it? Not via the kinds of high-tech satellite imaging or reconnaissance that many imagined, but -- as you may have guessed -- by constructing a massive, ad hoc social network of collaborators and spotters -- in short, by crowdsourcing. The MIT team allocated $4,000 to finding each balloon. If you happened to spot the balloon in your neighborhood and provided them with the correct location, you'd get $2,000. If a friend of yours whom you recruited found it, your friend would get the $2,000 and you'd get $1,000 simply for encouraging your friend to join the effort. If a friend of your friend found the balloon, you'd get $500 for this third-level referral, and so on. The likelihood of anyone person spotting a balloon is infinitesimally small. But if everyone you know recruits everyone they know, and each of them recruits everyone they know, you build a network of eyes on the ground that theoretically can cover the entire country.

One third of the people identified in police lineups by eyewitnesses to crimes are fillers for the lineup picked randomly out of people at the police station.

During the 1880s Chicago's total population increased by 118 percent -- a rate of growth five times faster than that of New York City. The city's foreign-born population doubled, reaching 450,000, a total that made immigrant Chicago larger than the total population of St. Louis or any other city in the Midwest, a total swollen by thousands of impoverished Polish Catholic peasants and Jewish refugees from the ghettos of Russia.

Gravity Payment's CEO Dan Price announced on April 13 that he would raise the minimum wage of his staff to $70,000 a year; the story went beyond viral: it took the media, especially the part of it which has been obsessing with income and wealth inequality which in the aftermath of Piketty would be most of it, by meteoric storm. Not only that, but the soon to be lionized young chief executive doubled down on this story of "purest of corporate nobility" by announcing he would cut his own compensation of $1.1 million to offset the cost. Well, it looks as if this altruism was a lot more complicated. http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gravity-ceo-dan-price/

In the early 1930s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin extracted as much grain as possible from the farmers of the Soviet Union, especially those in the Ukraine, resulting in a forced famine with an estimated 7,000,000 deaths. The main purpose was to fund his country's rapid industrialization projects, but he also wanted to force the "kulaks" (formerly wealthy farmers that had owned 24 or more acres) into submission and bring about the "collectivization" of privately held lands. In the Ukraine, he also wanted to stave off the stirrings of an independence movement.

The Depression of the 30s was filled with recriminations towards various groups. One specific problem was said to be "profit." Yet 18 of 19 businesses went bankrupt during the period.

In Georgia Catholics were expressly banned, along with rum, lawyers, and blacks, under the original Georgia Trust in 1733. While that law had long ago been overwritten, and waves of Irish immigrants arrived during the potato famines of the 1840s, an anti-Catholic law was still on the books when Flannery O'Connor's was born: the Convent Inspection Bill became Georgia law in 1916. Under this weird legislation, grand juries were charged with inspecting Catholic convents, monasteries, and orphanages, to search for evidence of sexual immorality and to question all the 'inmates,' ensuring that they were not held involuntarily. Tom Watson, elected U.S. senator from Georgia in 1920, went so far as to accuse the bishop of Savannah of keeping 'white slave pens' of missing girls.

London boasts the world’s oldest underground train network (opened in 1863) and Boston built the first subway in the United States in 1897, the New York City subway became the largest American system. Every day, some 4.5 million passengers take the subway in New York. With the exception of the PATH train connecting New York with New Jersey and some parts of Chicago’s elevated train system, New York’s subway is the only rapid transit system in the world that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In 1885, the poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother that he had decided to become a gun-runner in Ethiopia. This was the last phase of his wild, infamous and short life. By the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud had renounced his lover Paul Verlaine and poetry for a vagabond tour of Europe -- tutor, beggar, docker, factory worker, soldier, thief, and more. By the age of twenty-five, he had renounced Europe for Africa, becoming at first a coffee trader and then turning to gun-running (and possibly slave-trading) as a get-rich scheme. Thus he proved that poets could not just have crazy tendencies, crazy people could have poetic tendencies.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/income-disparity-among-people-and.html

The largest number of fatalities ever in a production of a film occurred during the shooting of the 1931 film Viking. Twenty-seven people died, including the director and cinematographer, when a ship they were shooting from exploded in the ice off the coast of Newfoundland.

If scientific principles can be applied to spiritual questions, should other principles apply? Should logistical concepts apply to the spiritual? Or economic ideas? And can scientific--or logistical or economic--concepts be applied to other areas like reproduction or marriage?

"I was working for Ross Perot during the 1992 presidential campaign. I had three videos to test: a) a Perot biography; b) testimonials of various people praising Perot; and c) Perot himself delivering a speech. Without giving it much thought, I'd been showing the videos to various focus groups of independent voters in that order-until, at the beginning of one session, I realized to my horror that I'd failed to rewind the first two videotapes. So, I was forced to begin the focus group with the tape of Perot himself talking.

The results were stunning.

 In every previous focus group, the participants had fallen in love with Perot by the time they'd seen all three tapes in their particular order. No matter what the negative information I threw at them, they could not be moved off their support. But now, when people were seeing the tapes in the opposite order, they were immediately skeptical of Perot's capabilities and claims, and abandoned him at the first negative information they heard. ... I repeated this experiment several times, reversing the order, and watched as the same phenomenon took place. Demographically identical focus groups in the same cities had radically different reactions -- all based on whether or not they saw Perot's biographical video first  and the third-party testimonials second (and were therefore predisposed and conditioned to like him) before or after the candidate spoke for himself.

The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction."-- Frank Luntz

AAAAAAaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnddddddd.........a graph on foreign vs. native American workers:

Altruism in America‏

This Zuckenberg thing is telling. People are outraged over how the guy is going to give his own money away. Political correctness has become more than an shallow attitude, it is a movement. Teach for America is a common option for college graduates, nonprofits have gone from make-work projects for the wealthy to aspirations for all, comics avoid campuses for fear of drifting outside the tight circle of approval. People can get their college loans forgiven if they work for non-profits. (And government.)

And righteousness has birthed a militant arm, the  cultural vigilantes. Some might argue it is too selective to be either spontaneous or genuine: The Mozilla CEO is hounded out of office for mainstream and legal opinions, Romney vilified for completely fabricated bullying charges decades ago in high school, a young woman is offended by the lyrics of the nation's best selling song being played in a bar and initiates a petition that gets the DJ fired for playing it. But results matter.

De Tocqueville described America as a country that had coalesced around the notion of individual liberty. It, liberty, was the social bond that cut across and united all groups. But liberty has a serious downside: Inequity. De Tocqueville said that equality was achievable only through tyranny and that the American knowingly rejected it. Liberty solved a lot of problems in the democracy. It unified the most disparate groups, withheld judgment from all, respected failure and was self justifying; it could exist with religion but did not require it. But we may be changing. And liberty, as a unifying principle, might be very hard to replace with a satisfactory substitute because liberty is, it can not be granted or imposed.

Inequality might become a problem the young are unwilling to live with. And, as the country becomes more diverse, fewer things are held in common. If the concept of liberty is insufficient as a bond, we may need to seek something else. Historically those unifying elements have not been good as all cultures seek themselves and mark The Other. Perhaps we will fall back on some poorly defined good will. But that likely will eventually be shown as too weak and in need of some stronger and more aggressive administration. Some unifying principle will have to be imposed, as de Tocqueville predicted.