The proleness of military service

This is a topic that’s not talked about openly. Even I worry about violating this taboo, because we need people to volunteer for the military. If not, they could start drafting people again, and certainly no one from the upper classes wants there to be a draft that could impact their own families. However, I’m too old for the draft, and I don’t have any children, so I guess I don’t have much personal investment.

Military service wasn’t always prole. In fact, just the opposite. In the distant past, military service was a value transference occupation. Soldiers, when they are not at war, just sit around the barracks doing nothing and living off the largess of people doing the real work that provides them with food, uniforms, and weaponry. So as a value transference occupation, soldiery had higher prestige than value creation occupations. As originally explained by Thorstein Veblen in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, the people who do real work always have the lowest level of prestige.

So why did things change?

For starters, merely being in a value transference occupation has less significance because today most of the labor force does value transference work. Soldiers still have higher prestige than people who pick crops or do other types of manual labor, and their prestige is surely no worse than blue collar occupations such as driving a truck or working in a factory. However, soldiery is a lower level of value transference, competing with millions of other government jobs. As a job that doesn’t require a college degree, military service is inherently prole. Because officers have a real college degree, officers are middle class, but no higher than middle class. Being a military officer is a career like teaching or nursing which also require college education but they are not careers that the upper class aspires to. This is a huge change from the 19th century when people from the upper classes did become military officers.

Today, the upper classes are obsessed with being safe and healthy. Is it surprising that military service, an occupation in which you can be shot and killed by the enemy, is looked down upon in a time when it’s illegal to drive your car without being strapped in by seat belts and having an air bag in case the seat belt doesn’t work? When children can’t ride bicycles without wearing a helmet?

So in conclusion, enlisted service is prole because it does not require a college degree and because you can be killed in combat.

Service as an officer is equivalent to the prestige of a police officer with a college degree, at the bottom level of middle class, because you can be killed while doing your job.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus

I walked into the Apple store on the Upper West Side yesterday and looked at the new phones.

The iPhone 6 looked very nice, and thinner than the chunky iPhone 5, it looks more like an iPod Touch. It’s bigger, but still not so big that I would think it becomes unpocketable. There has been talk online about the new phones bending, but the floor sample didn’t look bent.

The iPhone 6 Plus, on the other hand, is HUGE. That thing is definitely not phone sized and definitely not suitable for pants pockets. I would feel stupid talking on that thing, it’s so big. I give the iPhone 6 Plus a big thumbs down.

De Blasio administration wants more dangerous schools

Bloomberg made the schools safer. Now, as reported by the NY Times, De Blasio wants to make the schools less safe because liberals believe that strong discipline is discriminatory against blacks.

Surprisngly anti-De-Blasio for a NY Times article, they quote a Bronx high school principal:

One principal in the Bronx, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized by the Education Department to speak publicly, said the needs of her school ran counter to the political tone of the day. She said she wanted more school safety agents, not fewer; she said that in some schools, there were high rates of suspensions because they had challenging students who required a strict hand; and she said she would have no interest in parting with her metal detectors.

“I’d love to think we don’t need it,” she said of the screening process, called scanning. “But when you see what they catch in it, they need it.”

How to game financial aid: must read

Do you have children who will be going to college one day? (And if you have kids who are not going to go to college one day, get off this blog, you prole!)

Then you must read this Wall Street Journal article about how to game the financial aid system.

Look who the De Blasios hang out with

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife’s chief of staff, Rachel Noerdlinger, has a boyfriend who has served time in prison for manslaughter, among his other serious crimes.

Brush with Obama?

I think I walked in between the car’s of Obama’s motorcade while it was stuck in traffic in front of the Sheraton. From my perspective he was just causing a lot of traffic and getting in my way.

Good thing I wasn’t tackled by aggressive Secret Service agents.

* * *

I take that back. Obama was supposed to speak there earlier. Maybe the motorcade belonged to a Clinton, or Mayor DeBlasio, or Governor Cuomo? In any case, if they’re attending a Climate Change summit, maybe they should have bicycled there instead of traveling in a motorcade of black gas-guzzling SUVs.

Ultra-liberal ultra-rich

The heirs to the Rockefeller fortune are divesting their philanthropic fund of fossil fuels.

This demonstrates a point I’ve made many times before, which is that even when the ultra-rich are conservative, their children are almost always liberals, and if not their children then their grandchildren. Thus the billions of dollars made by the richest Americans almost always winds up being used to fund liberal causes in the long run.

This is why conservatives, if they had any common sense, would support high estate taxes and would also eliminate tax deductions for charitable contributions.

Mike Huckabee in the National Review Corner

At the National Review Corner, Henry Olsen says that Ted Cruz has no chance against Mike Huckabee, because a conservative dark horse candidate needs to win Iowa to rise to prominence, and Huckabee has a lock on Iowa which he won previously in 2008 when he had less name recognition and less money. And Huckabee has a commanding lead over other candidates in the latest Iowa poll.

I was the first person to predict that Mike Huckabee would win the 2016 Republican nomination. The National Review pundits are catching up to me.

* * *

There’s one person who might beat Huckabee in Iowa if he decides to run: Mitt Romney.

Nixon lost the presidential election in 1960, but tried again a few years later and won, so it’s not crazy at all. Only in the most recent decades have people suddenly decided that once you win your party nomination and then lose, this means you can never run again.

United Kingdom still united

I’m disappointed. I was hoping that the Scots would vote to secede because it would have been a very interesting social, political and economic experiment.

I think the lesson here is that people fear change. And the British MSM was opposed to independence, and you should never doubt the propaganda power of the MSM.

Bocca Cucina Italiana vs Chef Boyardee

I bought some cheese ravioli for $9.50 plus tax at Bocca Cucina Italiana, one of many takeout lunch places in midtown with many different food stations, including a pasta station. It may not be a real Italian restaurant (despite the pretentious name), but it’s still pretty good. I will miss places like this if I ever leave Manhattan.

Unlike the wimpy tomato broth in which the Chef Boyardee ravioli floated, this ravioli was covered with a marinara sauce that had real tomato chunks, as well as chunks of onions. The ravioli was al dente, and not soft and mushy like the Chef Boyardee ravioli. And so far, there is no funky aftertaste.