Did the Russians really rig the 2016 US election? You bet they did!

Dearest Dimitri
I am pleased to report that phase one of Operation Cankles is total success! Soviet implantation of stupid American woman resulted in birth today of hefty girl-child destined to be unelectable candidate 70 years from now.


'Higher' Education.  That's a label I use for some of the crap that goes on in colleges: the suppression of speech, the leftward cliff(lot more than a slant) of teachers who more indoctrinate than teach, the hideous COST of all of it.*  And a lot more kids are seeing it for themselves.

Some things you have to have that paper that says "I put up with the bullshit to learn what I needed, from the real classes, for this field", but more people are saying "Screw this, I don't want to be in debt up to my eyebrows that I'll spend decades paying off for this crap."

So, take the people hearing the Mike Rowe message and going for a skilled trade, take the people sick of the expense and bullshit of going to college, take the availability of online courses, and the university model's in real trouble.  Whether the clowns in charge at so many of them realize it or not.

About time.  And maybe it'll force some changes.


Speaking of colleges,
Over the summer, workmen removed most of the remaining books fromour Science and Engineering Library at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Roughly 80,000 books, worth between $2-$6 million were destroyed or shipped off campus to distant storage facilities.

The act was taken with virtually no faculty input.

In 1990, when I arrived to work at UCSC, I took pride in our Science Library.

By 2000 new journals were no longer displayed.

By 2010 the journal room was gone, turned into a large study. We could no longer browse new journals.

After journals had been vanquished, the next enemy was clear: books.

At the beginning of this Fall quarter I entered the library. No books on the first floor. I walked up to the second floor, where the math and physics collection used to be. Nothing. No books.
...
I’ve since found that the phenomenon of shrinking and destroying university research libraries is international. But as we like to say here at UCSC, we are at the vanguard. Our head librarian prefers the word “de-duplicate” to “destroy”, “remove” or “shred”.

The rationale behind de-duplification? Space. Empty study space with desks for the flood of 600 additional students UC Santa Cruz was pressured to admit this Fall.

How did the library staff decide what books to de-duplicate? Data, analytics, the ubiquitous algorithm, devoid of a human element. If a book had not been touched, according to library data, in the last five years, then it went on their chopping list.

This rationality ignores the library’s clients: humans.


My, Planned Parenthood has had a serious money-maker going here.
Showalter further reports on the highly profitable and brisk business. Planned Parenthood is now proved guilty beyond a doubt, as the actual invoices are produced in the report:

“After paying $60 for a 20-week old fetus at a Planned Parenthood clinic in June of 2014, ABR "sold its brain to one customer for $325; both of its eyes for $325 each ($650 total) to a second customer, a portion of its liver for $325 to a third customer; its thymus for $325 and another portion of liver to a fourth customer; and its lung for $325 to a fifth customer."

“And those costs were only for the fetal organs themselves. Before adding shipping and disease screening fees, on that one fetus alone the company charged its customers a total of $2,275, netting a $2,215 profit.





* When daughter was at OU, one day one of the teachers was trying(again) to get the audio/video system for the room to work.  Finally told everyone "Every one of you is paying a fee as part of the class costs to buy and maintain this equipment.  Every One Of You, and everyone else who takes this class.  They're damned well not using that money to keep this working, so where's it going?"  Which was a damned good question.