10/25/11 MORE COLOR NUANCES, AND PUTTING THE LID ON T HE COOKIE JAR

HIGHBUSH CRANBERRY

GINNALA MAPLE AND BURNING BUSH

WILD-GROWING ASPARAGUS

ASPARAGUS BERRY

WILD CLIMATIS

CLEMATIS SEED HEADS

Tuesday, 8:00 AM.  Wind NNE, calm to light. The sky is overcast but the barometer is trending up.
    The garden asparagus is often escaped along roadsides, and is very obvious now because of the vivid yellow-green fall color of its feathery leaves.  It also has characteristic bright red berries, which the birds usually get as soon as they ripen.
    The native highbush cranberry, Viburnum americanum, is obvious now in yards and along woods edges, with its maroon maple-like leaves and drooping panicles of bright red “cranberries.”
    Look closely along roadsides and woods edges and you may see the autumn clematis, or virgin’s bower,  Clematis virginiana, a member of the Ranununculaceae or crowfoot family.  I don’t remember ever seeing it in flower, but its fluffy, recurved seed heads, which look almost exactly like those of the Pasque flower are very obvious and beautiful, attached along the climbing stems,  which drape themselves over shrubs and clamber into trees.  From a distance it might be confused with wild cucumber.
    Political commentary: Texas senator and perennial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has proposed eliminating federal Student Loans for higher education.  Sen. Paul is a Libertarian at heart and I often disagree with him, but totally agree with this proposal.  In my opinion, and I have watched this program since its inception, it is bears primary responsibility for the outrageous tuition and other costs of colleges and universities.  I paid for every penny of my BS and MS degrees with money I earned myself, because the costs were low enough I could.  It took six ears to earn a BS and as many the MS, working all the time.  But I incurred no debt. Joan and I paid, with no help at all, for her BS degree and my doctorate, again with no student loans.  It was a stretch for us but we also paid in full, with the exception of a small scholarship or two, for the Bachelors degrees of three children.  By the time the kids were in college the tuitions were going through the roof but we managed without debt although it caused us great pain financially. 
    Institutions of higher learning have been able to raise tuitions, room and board and all other fees at will because they can tell students (mostly those from middle class families who are not favored minorities of one kind or another) they can get a federal loan, and the loans have been given with little or no thought to how they would, or even ever could, be paid back.  It is fiscal irresponsibility of even greater magnitude than that of the housing loan bubble.  It is not uncommon for graduates of the professions to owe hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even bachelors graduates to owe forty or fifty thousand. The education debt of doctors, lawyers, engineers and even teachers has caused inflation to surge throughout the economy as they must demand higher wages to pay off the debt they so easily were ensnared in.
    And, by and large, the colleges and universities (at least Ivy league and other private institutions) have taken the profits they make through the student loan programs and squirreled them away in trust funds which may reach hundreds of millions of dollars, of which they often only use the interest.  So, we now have colleges and universities sitting on unconscionable hoards of money while they aggressively raise their fees to students and parents, are miserly with scholarships to average Americans, throw money at foreign students in the name of creating diversity, and pay favored professors and administrators hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or sometimes much more.  Higher education has become, by and large, corrupt and corrupting, while the product they produce, an education, has deteriorated noticeably and often serves unAmerican causes and attitudes.   Ron Paul is right.  Put the lid on the cookie jar.