Young people in America are bombarded with the message that they won't find meaningful employment without a degree (and sometimes a graduate degree).

Meanwhile, universities have increased their fees to astronomical levels, far ahead of inflation, and lenders offer easy credit to students as a means of paying these sums.

The loans are backed by the government, and constitute a special form of debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and that can be doubled, tripled, or increased tenfold through usury penalties for missed payments.

The economic distortion field around higher education needs more study.

Essays on the trap of US student debt – Boing Boing

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Confronting the Malefactors - NYTimes.com

On Saturday, visitors to the Rock Poster Society’s 13th annual Festival of Rock Posters in San Francisco will need to take a number to get any face time with a soft-spoken artist named Emek, whose psychedelic-steampunk screenprints are some of the hottest pieces of paper in the rock poster world.

Moments when I wish I still lived in San Francisco usually involve art shows.

Where Hard Rock Meets Pop Art - NYTimes.com

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes - Digits - WSJ

Holy shit - an intelligent, actionable idea:

The effort by the Fed to drop long-term interest rates won’t do much for housing if too many people can’t refinance because the value of their home has declined.

That has to change. By regulatory fiat, where possible, more people who are current on their mortgage payments have to be able to refinance their mortgages to take advantage of rates near 4%.

That savings for many would go into additional spending, a stimulative measure, and would boost their economic psychology, which is important. Even if they used the savings to pay down their own debt it would do long-term good.

We Can’t Ignore Housing Anymore - Real Time Economics - WSJ

Matthew Yglesias on Lessig's new book.

The disappointing experience of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance effort should remind us that it’s extraordinarily difficult to get money out of politics in a manner consistent with freedom of association and expression.

I sure wish I found Lessig's proposal compelling, but I don't. People voting with dollars are going to be just as subject to manipulation as people voting with votes.

I DO like Yglesias's comments about the need for more and higher paid Congressional staff. Part of the problem is that the legislature is approving bills written by lobbyists rather than doing their own research and their own bill writing.

Cleaning Up the Capitol

Brennan: Well, as you know, covert actions are designed to be covert, and therefore. . .

Wizner: And therefore you only read about them in the newspaper.

Lawfare › More on Releasing the Legal Rationale for the Al-Aulaqi Strike

At the height of the Cold War, a hill in West Berlin known as Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain) served as the perfect spot for U.S. and British intelligence agents to turn an ear on East Berlin and Soviet communications. In its glory days, state-of-the-art listening towers and rotating antennas at the Teufelsberg spy station exposed the Communist Bloc's secrets to analysts and linguists from the U.S. Army and the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Teufelsberg was abandoned to decay, graffiti artists and weekend partiers.

Devil’s Mountain: NSA’s Abandoned Cold-War Listening Post | Threat Level | Wired.com

The phytoplankton in this red tide off a California beach are bioluminescent. Their cells produce a chemical reaction that creates a soft, blue-green glow. It's basically the same thing that makes lightning bugs light. In this video by Loghan Call and Man's Best Media, you can see plankton light up in the beach (and a few surfers).

Surfing the red tide – Boing Boing

This article includes a JavaScript utility to help you identify the moons of Jupiter in your telescope's eyepiece. You'll find instructions for its use below.

I've been visiting this page regularly of late.

Jupiter's Moons Javascript Utility - Interactive Observing Tools - SkyandTelescope.com