This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
A Cynical Look At Tim Cook's Commencement Speech
Why? There a number of reasons.
First, the average amount of debt for graduating seniors has risen every year since at least 1993, hitting $35,000 for this year’s graduating class even as some evidence suggests that these degrees are worth less than they have ever been in terms of helping students find gainful post-graduation employment. One reason for this is that college degrees — indeed, even advanced degrees — are commonplace, meaning that even those with master’s degrees may find themselves joining what we have dubbed the “waiter and bartender” recovery, as ‘qualified’ applicants outnumber high-level positions. There’s also the fact that according to the OECD, $35,000 degrees do not necessarily prepare students for the real world and there are now serious questions as to whether colleges and universities are teaching the right skills.
Meanwhile, the “resilient” jobs market and US economic “recovery” are pure fiction — a myth created by the BLS and BEA who vanish workers and double-adjust the numbers in a shameless goal-seeking exercise designed to perpetuate the idea that the Fed and its post-crisis policies have the country on its way back to prosperity.
In reality, the central bank has done nothing more than “destroy creative destruction” (to use Citi’s words), pushing an inevitable bad asset purge later into the future and embedding untold amounts of risk into the financial system in the mean time while simultaneously exacerbating class segregation by widening the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.



As for the country’s social fabric, well, the events that unfolded in Baltimore in late April underscore the degree to which racial tensions have once again served as the catalyst for violent protests, some five decades after the Civil Rights Movement.
It’s against this backdrop that LA Times columnist Chris Erksine takes aim at a commencement speech given by Apple CEO Tim Cook at George Washington University.
Via LA Times:
In an address at George Washington University, Apple's Tim Cook urged grads to tune out the cynics.
"There will always be cynics and critics on the sidelines tearing people down," he said.
OK, Cookie. And where do I send the thank-you note and a small gift?
Keep in mind, there is nothing as excruciating as a graduation address. Steve Jobs famously nailed a Stanford commencement in 2005, but most graduations mean prolonged suffering in airless arenas. What do they ask grads and trustees to wear? Heavy robes. In May, no less. Right there, you know some sort of punishment is at hand.
Doesn't help that graduation advice always seems to come from someone so successful that he or she will never need to balance a checkbook again, or worry that the car will hold out or learn how to care for an aging mother who keeps setting her stove on fire in the home she swears she'll never leave.
It's understandable that commencement planners pick speakers of means and accomplishment. They'd be better off picking cynics, those wandering minstrels of a vibrant nation.
Thomas Jefferson. Bob Dylan. Jon Stewart. To this day, our nation's greatest global achievement was the 1st Amendment, based in part on French philosophers who spent lazy, liquored afternoons figuring out ways to provoke politicians and afflict the affluent. Such ornery subversives are as necessary as rain. A little fragrant under their robes, perhaps. But that's what democracy smells like sometimes.
Our country doesn't produce philosophers. What we have is late-night talk-show hosts, who do a pretty reasonable job, with a soapbox Voltaire or Diogenes would've envied.
That greatest of cynics, David Letterman, retired recently, a setback for cranky truthfulness in general.
That he will be missed more than most presidents is a tribute to the appeal of his honest rants. Letterman was our Will Rogers, our H.L. Mencken, a witty and real Sultan of Snark. Miss him already.
I miss the late Christopher Hitchens as well. It was Hitchens who once noted, of children: "It's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body."
Or: "I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information."
So see, Mr. Cook, we need our wry and fearless cynics, not corporate types who can't help but plug the product, as you shamelessly did in your commencement address. After all, your hero Jobs was a cynic at heart, a different and artful drummer, a philosopher in the first degree.
I love millennials, have several myself, and recommend them to everyone...
In his address, Cook also told these millennials, "Don't shrink from risk."
That's a musty old standard for commencement addresses: Find your passion, follow your dreams, take some risks, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah
It cannot be lost among the most discerning grads that these commencement tips are coming from a generation that left them with crushing student debt, a wobbly job market, unaffordable real estate and cities increasingly ablaze. In the '70s, we'd have jeered them from the stage.
What I do sense from my encounters with millennials is that they prefer authenticity over everything else...
So please grasp at least this: In a world that over-worships corporate bottom lines, grads should be encouraged to embrace the healthy cynicism we all require to survive.
* * *
Here is the full commencement speech:
- 15138 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -



With the inner cities ablaze, the new grads will be able to save on heating costs in the land of running out of energy forever in 1974.
A lot of young folks I've met over the last several years don't want to have kids.... as it's too fucked up.
The ones that do seem to be having them out of wedlock, lickety split. Just an observation, folks.
Jubilee, bitches. You could hold meetings and brainstorm, and put think tanks to work, for 10 years, and you would not find a simpler, more equitable solution to the world's problems. Let it all burn down. The phoenix will rise from the ashes.
Tim Cook is my Spirit Animal.
That's fucked up.
Yes. Yes it is. ;)
Is he a Garden Fairy, or a Water Fairy?
Fruit fly...
Where's my 30-06? Nevermind, it's a doe. No rack, and he only prefers dick. Unlike Caitlyn.
As if Tim Cook cares if American proles reproduce themselves. On the contrary, western proles are to be discouraged from breeding at all costs, the better to minimize the threat posed to prole children to their masters' rule.
Not that Cook and rich perverts like him have no interest in children. That's why they visit Thailand, after all.
These days, a master is worthless!
The number of kids who have 2 masters in their pocket is just insane!
During the crisis period, kids just kept on studying... and most still don’t have a job and are nearing 30... how sad is that...
So true.
Only had to take one extra class to obtain my masters. Over a 1/3 of the students in the engineering school went on to do the 1 year masters program.
More than 35 years ago, when I got my undergraduate degree in Chem, a Masters in the hard sciences was usually something given as a consolation prize for those who couldn't hack it in the PhD program.
Now its more like:
Oh you seem like a decent student, want to stay in school for another quarter and pay us $35k?
Boom, masters degree.
My PhD was honestly easier than my undergrad, but I heard that's usually the case anyways.
I fondly remember attending a buddy's graduation from UCSB's computer science program, and one of my buddy's classmates was wearing big sunglasses and a gigantic gold rapper-style dollar symbol around his neck. Man he was just jumping and mugging the whole time like he had won the lottery.
Of course this was only a few weeks before the stock market collapsed - proving once again that timing is everything.
Always wondered what happened to that guy.
blah blah blah i'm here because i want to bang a coed blah blah blah ...
I'm pretty sure that's NOT why he's there.
Hes looking to pull a Hassert
do you think he ever had some type of rodent in his ass? he seems that far gone...
So did he introduce any new features to the iCrap 10? If not then go away.
what a goofy fag, who the fuck cares what he says he takes it in the clam hole
haha ... oops, my bad
It's not a clam hole Squid, it's a corn hole.
it's more like that thing that comes out of a clam so i call it a clam hole, ok?...also starfish, balloon knot, etc. etc.
are you the "corn hole" police or something? lol...
actually that thing on the bottom of an apple is perfect re: Tim Cook... what do you call that?
I prefer to call it the old puckered starfish myself.
Always makes me chuckle.
pods
Probably in the pie hole too!
If you ain't cynical, you don't know what's going on. The adult children graduating nowadays have never been exposed to how the real world works. I went to college on an ROTC scholarship, which had its downsides but it beat the hell out of driving a tractor on the family farm.....
I really like driving my tractor . . .
Millennials. These kids are the fags that want warning labels on things that might hurt their feelings. They aren't great. Theyre fucking losers.
Jeezus ! ....here's an old boomer who made it to the cover of Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair in one lifetime ! #CalllMeCaitlyn
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/01/us-people-brucejenner-idUSKBN0OH33820150601
Lipstick on a pig?
<-- Caitlyn for President!
<-- Hitlery for President!
I wonder if Barry will cut eyeholes in it for Reggie....
the 5/3 commercial of a commencement is great. admitting only 50% of grads will get a full time job and the rest going back home to live with mommy again.
Cook by name and Cookie by nature.
Still keeping your nest egg out of the clutches of .Gov can be deemed wise albeit cynical. Cant have it both ways Tiny Tim.
Today the government is paying Q99X2 to study literature written about shit--literal shit.
Fortunately I'm just about done reading and soon will be heading into class to discuss The Suffering Channel (a story about shit) with my colleagues.
This will be a historical event for those on Q99X2 who choose to receive live coverage of this most important human cultural activity.
Turns out the Professor was no dummy. Knew right away it was all about 911 Bush Cheney and why, or how a civilized country would allow the media to repeatedly show the collapse of the WTCs for two weeks straight. That's some real shit there. The Q99X2 were very pleased.
People begin relatively equal. A few ignore the stupidity of public education, but most do not. Over generations, you get what you see, certified stupidity breeding more of the same. The more technology is employed to exchange entertainment, surveillance and war for real estate inflation, the more it distills labor out. Uber isn’t anything new. It reduces the cost of what its originators believe is labor, increasing the efficiency of stupid capital, with growing leverage of the middle class ponzi, which is collapsing, as measured by natural resource depletion and DNA deficiency. The Fed is simply anticipating demographic deceleration, expecting demographic re-excitation, which isn’t occurring. All the ‘new’ currencies are trying to find a labor market, with no success, surprise.
Capitalism depends on expansion - on discovery of new resources and markets. By now the entire planet has been explored. There are no hidden lands, no hidden countries left. Capitalism (be that authentic or crony) begins to cannibalize itself. There's no way to expand into another market without destroying it first. No way to extract oil, unless it's in someone else's backyard. No way to get money, unless it's in someone else's pocket.
We're in a terminal stage of human civilization. It's not just oil, not just the dollar, not just climate, not population - it's everything. Peak everything.
discovery of new resources and markets. By now the entire planet has been explored
Uh, yeah sure, every cubic mile of non-molten underground also has been completely explored! <facepalm>
"There's no way to expand into another market without destroying it first. No way to extract oil, unless it's in someone else's backyard. No way to get money, unless it's in someone else's pocket."
That's absolutely not true. If 'Murika plunders, it's because 'Murika has always plundered and would be hard-put to find any other suvival stategy (that requires brains, education and a heart), not because new markets can't be found.
I'm sure you're aware China is starting a major trade endeavor called the New Silk Road, so they could see opportunities Murikans couldn't. Why can't 'Murika have good, peaceful, clean, win-win trade ideas like that? I'm not sure you'd like the answer, but I guess those Indians who are today gathered like cattle in reservations could give you some good insights on what is a plundering mindset.
Tim Cook. Cooking Apple when he should be cooking an apple pie.
The most important thing I learned in college
If you slice the garlic real thin with a razorblade it will liquify in the oil
Veal, Beef and Pork- Gotta have the pork, thats where the flavor is.
3 small onions is to many fucking onions
I can't wait for Caitlyn J. to give a commencement speech. That will really put those younguns on the right track. You too can become a fruitcake.
I am crying BULLSHIT on the average debt of 25K or even 35K. Where Tim "the fudgepacker" Cook spoke tuition is 50K per year x 4 thats 200K. No Fucking way the families shelled out 175k for a sheepskin from the liberal diploma mill. Dont like that number try Penn State or Rutgers at 35k per year. These are BS numbers. PERIOD.
It's an average, so what it is really telling you is that most kids that go to college come from the upper half of society or get federal aid (or both - met a millionaire yesterday whose daughter got a FULL scholarship. Made me h8 the guy instantly)
Im sure the median is more like 45 - 50k.
The graph at the top of the graph shows Mean and Average (which I believe are the same), I presume Median is supposed to be the top line, at 35k, but at 200k for 4 years, I still dont see the average family shelling out 165k. There are 3-4 million students in college. Upper half of society doesnt have 165k saved for kids college. Upper half might have 10k, it still makes no sense.
He was wearing his gay apple watch.
After 35 years in business I would tell todays grads that taking risks give you a shot at greatness but a far bigger shot at a life of loss. Today most risk takers are simply the front line infantry of shock troops that will be turned to dog food in short order.
The sad reality of post industrial America is that ass kissing, office politics well played, disgraceful self promotion, buck passing while working for stock options in profitless tax dodging tech something or others will server you far better. Take that to the bank
"My fellow students, there is a bright future ahead of you with record loans and shrinking job markets. Don't worry, if you get more loan to buy the iPhone 6+ and Apple Watch, it has a powerful app that will help you to get ahead of the slave job queue. Look at the bright side, the stock market and housing are in record high making huge profit. The truth is you sheep fellow students can never afford it in your life time but 'be an American', love you country and help the 0.1%, ME, to get richer."
Take your risk. Put everyone else into slavery. Fuck Yeah, Foxcunt! Fuck them hard, fuck them good, fuck them forever. And that's your road map, kids.
Figure one states that the fed considers 45kish to be middle class. WOW.
Lynn-sy Graham/Caitlyn Jenner GOP ticket in 2016! a fag and a tranny, win some blue states you bitchez!
Somebody should of just beamed the fucker in the head with a hardball.
small typo there
The real theme here is not Cook’s advice on risk but the selection of a commencement speaker who is indentified with the radical change in a free enterprise society to collectivism and fascism.
For Apple represents the cooperative future between government and industry and Cook represents the new man: anti-Christian and anti-American worker (widespread use of Third World labor and loss of American job priority).
The American economy and culture is now in the hands of the socialists and the collectivists which support the eruption of fascism. Cook represents secular humanism, a religion of opposition to free enterprise European Christian values. His New York Times’ editorial supporting homosexual marriage disqualifies him as an industry spokesman for American job opportunity because he transfers himself from technology leadership to radical social activism.
What I’m saying is, if I were a graduate, I would not listen to his advice regarding my future because he is a man with an agenda.
Long ago, as summarized in the Reece Committee Staff Report, the bleak destiny for these young American graduates that Cook addresses had already been established. Writes Robert Henry Goldsborough:
“The Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Carnegie foundations had funded a grandiose effort to change the direction of America from a Christian, nationalistic, free enterprise nation to a secular-humanist, internationalistic, socialist nation. The report charges that through teachers and teachers’ colleges, through the introduction of John Dewey’s liberal philosophy and through the publishing of revised history texts, many of America’s youth had been indoctrinated to desire the collectivist, secular-humanist changes promoted by the foundations. [George Bernard] Shaw’s ultimate goals were being realized by using the Fabian Society’s techniques of infiltration and permeation to bring about a gradual rather that a blood revolution.
"Shaw’s army was named the Fabian Society and his troops were trained to be ‘intellectual change-agents.’ Socialism was the goal of Shaw, just as it was the goal of Stalin and Lenin.”
In a further effort to destroy the sovereignty of the United States and promote the globalist technique to bring America into the New World Order, the method being used is immigration to destroy America’s sovereignty and change her culture, customs and Christian heritage.
Perhaps no other company symbolizes the outsourcing of American jobs and the depression of American technology salaries, such as America’s engineers', more than Apple.
EPIC post!
In summary of those wise words you wrote:
Those psychotic, cash bloated, inbred retards and Wall Street perverts, in their wet Ponzi dream are fornicating with those mentally challenged Silicon Valley megalomaniacs, squirting “green” feces off their rotten minds onto in faces of hard working US taxpayers, calling it creative disruption, during their cerebral herpes induced seizures of sick imagination. That’s cruelty.
Unable to get hard on with sex, booze and drugs they get high of orgasmic chaos and inhumane exploitation of their cheerleading serfs.
Interesting take on those parasites of reasonable mind I found at:
https://sostratusworks.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/smell-of-silicon-madness/
"In his address, Cook also told these millennials, "Don't shrink from risk.""
Seems like dropping 100 grand plus on a worthless degree in a world saturated with degrees in a job market where 50% or more of college grads are working low wage jobs that don't even require a degree is the greatest risk one can take. I'd say these students are such extreme risk takers, it's wreckless.
"Don't shrink from risk" is more for our benefit than theirs. Steve Jobs helped multitudes by the risks he took; millions of other risk-takers only hurt themselves (and whoever loaned them money) when their dreams failed.
I wonder if Tim Tim mentioned when he was bringing welfare queen APPLE Inc offshore untaxed profits back to help pay for some of these costs & debts?