Wonder if Chicken Little is kin to The Boy Who Cried Wolf?
Once heard Karma described as a Transceiver – a combination of Transmitter and a Receiver. Signals aren’t just sent (transmitted) out locally, they are also sent out universally. Same for the returning (receiver) signals. Karma isn’t limited.
Are the Republicans—primarily the more radical MAGA Republicans and Conservatives—sending out signals of defeatism in advance of the Presidential election? What would the returning signals be like?
Hurricane Helene apparently dropped a lot of conspiracies along with the rain. I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene is suggesting and/or hinting that Biden/Harris ‘Weaponized Helene’ by “cloud seeding” it.
This is a map of hurricane affected areas with an overlay of electoral map by political party shows how hurricane devastation could affect the election.
On the right 1/3 down on that map it shows “State Customers Out” and then list states with numbers next to them. People without electricity? I’m sure she has a point, but humble me can’t see it…
I’m remembering that Amy Chua insisted her daughters learn an instrument and gave them a choice of violin or piano, discussion finished. Made me wish I had a son the same age as her daughters, so we could move next door and practice the bagpipes. At 5:00 am. At just the right spot in the yard that the sound reached her bedroom window. Real loud.
I see that a woman is now saying that Trump attended party’s with Combs.
I also read that BO is stepping in to try to save Harris.
Longshoremen strike over, for now. Wonder what Harris/BO promised them? And what happens in Jan?
No, No, I don’t want to be the new head of Hezbollah.
By launching a large-scale missile attack against Israel on October 1, Iran has made a critical attempt to regain escalation dominance.
This strike differed from Iran’s April 13 attack. This time, Iran employed a blitz salvo of ballistic missiles rather than a mixed strike package of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, giving Israel minimal warning.
The Iranian ballistic missile barrage saturated, and to some extent evaded, Israel’s air and missile defense architecture. Israel’s passive defenses, especially its public shelters and hardened military bases, provided extensive protection to civilians and defense equipment.
An Iranian attack with weapons of mass destruction would be catastrophic for Israel at its current interception rate.
[…]
At the time of this writing, the ball is in Israel’s court. Israel’s political and military leadership is likely considering three main target sets:
1) Critical nuclear and military facilities.
2) Hydrocarbon production and export infrastructure.
3) Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s inner circle, including the top of the IRGC’s chain of command.
None of these options are mutually exclusive, and each might help Israel tilt the scales of escalation dominance back in its favor. In return, each option will determine Iran’s next step in the regional power play.
To restate Kasapoglu, the dozens of ballistic missiles which got through the Israeli Arrow defensive system demonstrate Israel’s utter vulnerability to a nuclear tipped missile attack.
From my point of view, hitting Iranian oil commerce is pointless to eliminating that defense and security vulnerability.
Therefore, destroying Iranian nuclear-weapons development rises to the top of any necessary target list, with decapitation of the Iranian governmental power structure and toppling the regime not far behind, if not running neck-and-neck.
Both these aims, however, are going to be dependent on achieving air dominance over Iran (if air supremacy isn’t reasonably within reach) which in turn necessitates a widespread destruction of Iranian air defense as a first order of business.
After which, Katie bar the door.
You really are too obtuse to understand what’s going on, in 1992, walkin lawton delayed the declaration of emergency to make dade country particularly country walk suffer, in 2005, landrieu and nagin refused to evacuate new orleans, using the bus fleet, their predecessors had looted the levy fund and they blamed w for the damage, yes michael brown was not optimum, but W did try to evacuate,
they spread ridiculous stories of cannibalism at the super bowl, DIABLO’s like Geraldo and Shep Smith can be counted on to demagogue to maximize the death price, but when they are in charge, they refuse to take responsibility,
the following year the dems diverted relief funds to other projects, in 2012, obama deserted sandy victims, and stay puft christie went along, in 2017 with Trump on site with Katrina but a corrupt Puerto Rican government which was refused to upgrade the power grid, well guess who they blamed, I have a whole stack of receipts like this,
Israel has reserved the right to strike adjacent targets like the airbase as Isfahan, the one at Bushehr is problematic, because it would contaminate much of the Persian Gulf,
bombing kharg island would probably drive oil prices to 120 dollars a barrel, and we have no cushion because they have depleted the reserves, in every way possible they have impaired any real resolution of this conflict,
I think hitting their chain of command might make the iranians hold back,
I had it open in my browser tabs and finally got around to reading it. It is excellent! Thanks to whomever posted it, and thanks to Matt for stating so eloquently what so many of us are witnessing. There are nearly 1,000 comments. I read a handful. A lot of changers commenting, giving mini histories of their pasts, when they believed the regime, especially Democrat politicians.
My attitude regarding American politics reflects Taibbi’s identically, at least based on what is in his speech. He explains that free speech is not a right, it is a human quality, and he gives some excellent, and humorous anecdotes about the affect on human behavior in parts of the world where government attempts to control and punish speech. The story about the American businessmen in Moscow is great!
Taibbi also speaks on some of the history of how and why the Founders used the precise words they did in the Bill of Rights. Every American schoolchild should be taught this annually. It is our birthright and it not only belongs to anyone who obtains U.S. citizenship, it is incumbent on all American citizens to protect and defend it.
The entire piece is well worth 5 minutes of your time.
Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.
America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.
In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.
They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they’re afraid of each other, but they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: they believe things with blinding zeal until 51% change their minds, and then like deer the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.
Art Deco,
From what I recall reading, Amy Chua’s daughters are very well adjusted adults who love their mother and are grateful for their parents.
Barely tangentially, J.D. Vance credits Chua for pushing him to write, “Hillbilly Elegy” and credits her as a key mentor in his life.
I think I also remember hearing Rob Henderson (the brilliant psychologist raised in the foster system who coined the term, “luxury beliefs”) credit Amy Chua for mentoring him.
I know this is old hat to many readers here, and I’ve become pretty jaded as well, but I still found this all pretty shocking.
Editorial in today’s WSJ by Steven Stalinsky, who is doing great work at the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Left, right, red, blue can all point to Congresscritters they perceive as buffoons; and certainly many are.
The key is for all sides to realize this division plays into their (our anointed leaders) hands. As long as we are fighting amongst one another we will never organize to reduce their power and control.
Coincidentally(?) this also plays into the media’s hands, which helps them get more eyeballs and more advertising revenue.
sdferr,
Iron Dome is wonderful and has worked amazingly well. However, as with any artillery it is dependent on a supply of ammunition. I think I read the cost of manufacture of the artillery Iron Dome uses to strike incoming missiles is about 1/10th of the cost of the artillery it is intercepting. That gives them a crucial edge over their enemies, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for Israel to manufacture enough anti-missile missiles to keep it operational.
I would say, it’s in his top 5
that theme from the film, is so poignant, it chills one to the bone, even when you haven’t heard a note,
I thnk I learned about MEMRI from Charles Johnson before he went utterly off his rockers now we know from widlanski that tom friedman’s arabic is so poor he couldn’t fail to make simple mistakes,re the shatila massacre, that he corrected in his book, but some one on staff should be able to publish excerpts of what they actually say, nick kristof was trained as an arabist, then they sent him to Moscow and Beijing, because of course, but he seems to learned the Dhimmi catechism, blame Israel excuse Islamists,
the Post has gotten worse since its acwuisition by Bezos, with David Ignatius having forgotten most everything he learned in his first 10 years as correspondent, and turtles all the way down,
Art Deco @10:25am,
Personal artistic taste is personal, and millions agree with you, but I much prefer the swingin’, up tempo, Nelson Riddle Frank.
Iron dome has nothing to do with intercepting ballistic missiles. So.
Our first count is that 32 missiles struck Nevatim Air Base (pins) — although three impact points are obscured by clouds in the 50 cm Skysat and had to be made with 3 m Dove images (white pins). @DuitsmanMS @sam_lair @dex_eve @JamesMartinCNS
I just did some Internet reading. Hopefully my sources are accurate. So it looks like David’s Sling and Israel’s Arrow System are calibrated for ballistic missile defense. My apologies for lumping all that into the term, “Iron Dome.”
I admit limited knowledge on the subject of Israel’s defense systems. The point I wanted to make is, I watch news footage of Israel intercepting so much of the stuff Iran and other nations launch and it is inspirational. I am amazed at the genius and effectiveness of the Israeli people. However, in this recent barrage I started thinking about the sheer volume of stuff being lobbed their way, and realized it must be difficult for Israel to manufacture the needed, defensive artillery to supply their defense systems.
thats a peculiar target, a relatively small settlement deep in the southern negev,
one is reminded of the helwan rocket project that nasser had commissioned with german expat scientists, (it’s the back story for the odessa file) lightly touched on in the film, the circumstances of how the program was sabotaged, suggests what MI-6 did not let on to Frederick Forsyth, Peter Miller was really closer to Otto Skorzeny in function, but peculiarly he was rarely reference even by Jack Higgins, another popular novelist,
the Iron defenses are not perfect systems, they are meant to provide the most protection for key population centers like Tel Aviv or Haifa for example,
Yes, beyond difficult, the actual task of a perfect passive defense against a moderate salvo of incoming nuclear tipped ballistic missile warheads is impossible. Foolish. Stupid. Pointless. Insane. It can’t work.
Hence, other measures must, simply must be undertaken. And, sad to say, time has just about run out. Only a tiny sliver of possible action remains, with even that as sketchy of success as one might imagine. The shit has already hit the fan and is now spewing broadly across their space.
Forgot to add: Thanks, Obama!
As usual, a bracing Friday column by James Howard Kunstler at his Substack site with the sanitized Web address, in which he touches on the VP debate, Hurricane Helene, and Israel:
A sample: “So, no aid for you, baskets of deplorables, shivering in the dark in your hills and hollows of Appalachia, your houses splintered, scant chattels lost, and your beloved hound-dogs carried away in the roaring torrents. The money that might have helped you begin to recover from the complete devastation of your lives is paying for Guatemalans to bunk in the Roosevelt Hotel and order-in quesadillas and churros, and refill their government-issued debit cards so they can afford a few nice things as they wait for mysterious others to cast ballots in their names.”
Kunstler’s Clusterf*ck Nation blog was mysteriously zapped last month, but he is continuing at his new address to live up to Matt Taibbi’s closing exhortation in the speech that Rufus referenced above.
Ben’s voice hasn’t changed either.
“Art Deco @10:25am,
“Personal artistic taste is personal, and millions agree with you, but I much prefer the swingin’, up tempo, Nelson Riddle Frank.”
Sinatra was a singular talent who could get his phone calls returned by the best of the best: Riddle, Don Costa, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, et al. Sinatra did a great album with Count Basie in ’63 or ’64 called It Might as Well be Swing. The arranger was none other than Quincy Jones.
I didn’t want to repeat “Matt Taibbi’s closing exhortation” at risk of offending the ladies present 😉 , but it’s a great close to a great speech!
I agree with the commenter who suggested some enterprising patriot put it on a t-shirt and initiate mass sales.
Imagine the cliche’d live news piece of lines at the local polling place on election day. Now imagine as the camera zooms in you notice a lot of the patient electorate are all wearing the same shirt. On the front of that shirt, Taibbi’s slogan. It just may make the regime shutter a bit.
Sgt. Joe Friday,
I love that Quincy Jones album.
It is nearly inconceivable* the volume, breadth and quality of Jones’ work! I can’t think of another producer/composer/arranger who navigated so many genres so successfully. And to stay current with popular music through so many decades and changes. From Sinatra to Michael Jackson! And movie soundtracks across so many genres.
A true genius.
*It would be inconceivable, except Quincy actually did do it.
Rufus: excellent idea. Me, I’d like to see a United-Colors-of-Benetton-type video with various public figures all repeating Taibbi’s line. Kind of like the creepy totalitarian celebrity “I pledge…” video that the Obama campaign rolled out in 2012.
Can you imagine Martha Stewart intoning “M**********r, I’m an American”? Charles Cooke? Roger Kimball? VDH? Thomas Sowell? Heather Mac Donald? Neo (from behind her apple)? AI MITT ROMNEY?! It would be better than Barbara Billingsley speaking jive.
Mark Huneycutt walks 1.5 mi. into Chimney Rock, N.C., talks to folks there (20:00 min): https://youtu.be/MYdC-6nShdc
@ Rufus > “A few days ago someone here posted a link to Matt Taibbi’s recent speech on the Washington DC mall”
I second the recommendation to read Matt’s speech.
As a disaffected Democrat, because that’s what “liberals” were at the time, he doesn’t pull any punches about the current state of the Party.
It’s interesting to see people jumping from one ship to the other, with NeverTrumpers going left and honest journalists going right.
Matt started his speech like this:
In a pre-Trump universe chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell, Bret Weinstein and I would organically get together for any reason, much less an event like this.
True, everyone speaking has been censored. The issues were all different, but everyone disagreed with “authoritative voices” about something.
Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!” defiance is in our DNA.
Now disagreement is seen as threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former Presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices.
In the open he said this! Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told Forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.”
What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment, yes, but more importantly: us. Complainers. That’s our shared experience. We are obstacles to consensus.
@ Mike Plaiss > “Editorial in today’s WSJ by Steven Stalinsky, who is doing great work at the Middle East Media Research Institute.”
Great post. The first section was “old news” but the later reports were shocking.
His last grafs:
Among the terror supporters whose online activities my organization monitors is a New Orleans man who regularly praises Hamas and recently tweeted, “America needs to get October seventhed.” Another is a Maryland man who works as an “energy infrastructure contractor” and boasts that he has a federal security clearance. He posts on Twitter about his support for Hamas and warns he has access to sensitive government sites.
Hamas itself has called for attacks on the U.S. “Oh Americans, Allah will punish you” and “declare war on you,” Haniyeh once warned in a speech. Top Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri called for “violent acts” against America in December 2023. In a speech posted online on Aug. 20, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal ordered his followers among them students in the West to conduct “martyrdom operations,” meaning suicide bombings, on Israeli and Western targets.
For nearly a year, American supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah have been freely promoting terrorism, often targeting and trying to intimidate the nation’s Jewish communities. Jewish student groups on college campuses have been attacked, as have Jewish-owned private businesses, synagogues and nonprofits across the country. It’s past time that these people are exposed and their activities condemned and investigated.
One AesopSon used to work in the space industry and had a lowish level security clearance: he had to report his on-line affiliation with a fanfic group that had non-American members writing anime parodies.
If the FBI hasn’t already shut down and indicted the “energy infrastructure contractor” with the security clearance, they aren’t going to investigate anyone.
Could be because the current Regime does NOT condemn their activities.
sdferr
Just your normal residential household in Southern Lebanon, stocked full of rocket launchers and various accoutrements.
Which is why the IDF’s time in southern Lebanon will concentrate on locating and destroying the Hezbollah arsenal. Because the weapons search will be house-to-house in Shiite communities, it will take a while.
(My understanding is that non-Shiite households do not have arsenals.)
Lebanese cooperated by fleeing north, so that the IDF will be able to concentrate on arsenal-destroying without a lot of house-to-house combat.
Makes a decent framework, I think, rather than a certainty of outcome.
they are mostly on the same team, change my mind, the way they are still fishing j6 participants, as if they were public enemy no#1
so these lousiana and maryland men, are not big crawfish or crab eaters I don’t think
we had dental assistants that became atrocity deniars, and others of that ilke
the type of fare one usually gets covering these matters like the Jewish Press I remember in South Florida, mind you this was early in the Oslo delusion are just terrible
@ Hubert – Kunstler’s post was interesting.
The commenters had some information that may explain yesterday’s concerns about “bulldozing” a community and confiscating lithium mines.
J Boss “(after repeating the same Tweet “report” we shared here)
My mistake on the lithium mine location. Sorry! But the reports about actions controlling the area around the mind [mine]are very consistently in line with what I described.
IndependentThinker
There are quartz mines near Asheville in Spruce Pine–very important quartz mines. The area around the mines was decimated by the storm. So, you’re not entirely mistaken. Carolina Journal
carolinajournal.com LINK
› home › wnc quartz mining operations halted, risking global semiconductor supply
WNC quartz mining operations halted, risking global semiconductor supply
3 days ago – The two WNC mines have quietly become an industry juggernaut as they supply nearly 99% of all high-purity quartz. That ultra-high concentration of such a critical material supply piqued interest before the advent of Hurricane Helene; now the worst case scenario…
Stanley Yelnats (AF: I like his nom reference)
When they talk about Lithium mining they says it’s in King’s Mountain. Kings Mountain is near Charlotte, not near Ashville or Boone, where most of the hurricane destruction is.
That said, it’s completely possible (probable?) the land you speak of is in danger of being confiscated by government/big corp for its resources. But there’s no knowledge that there’s lithium in that area.
Hard to believe anything about Hurricane Helene and FEMA. True or False?
1) Did Trump lie about the ‘Federal Emergency Management Agency can’t respond well enough to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene because it’s diverted so much money to helping migrants’?
2) Did ‘Republicans Vote against FEMA Funding before Helene hit’?
Back to the Open Thread topic – I’ve been listening to and about Ben for several years, but didn’t know he was a violinist, much less such an accomplished one.
This surprised me a bit, knowing the leftist lean of the theater world.
(Joe McCarthy was a jerk, but he was correct about Communists in the Movies — and they stayed there.)
“Shapiro’s parents both worked in Hollywood. His mother worked as an executive of a TV company and his father as a composer.”
Israel’s ballistic defense system evaluates incoming attacks and passes on intercepting inbounds that track as impacting areas with little or no hazards to life. Such as at Nevatim AB, where impacts landed in open areas, for the large part. They try not to waste money intercepting every missile coming in, when so many damage little to nothing.
Why yes, that is TwoSet at work. They start with the Ave Maria I linked on the Hitler thread, but listen to that performance first because they dissect it minutely here.
@reepicheepsfriend
3 years ago
Anyone who is here to complain that they criticized Ben’s playing totally missed the point. They are giving him free advice. The world of classical performance revolves around constructive criticism and advice; to anyone who has been trained this way, it is normal. Ben even said on his twitter account that he agreed with them. So you guys can relax because they are actually doing him a favor and providing something for free that most people have to pay for.
This is my favorite line:
“Intonation doesn’t care about your feelings,”
That line was from a comment, not the TwoSet narration.
Here’s a post showing Ben reacting to the performance Neo started with, and he also explains why his technique is not so good anymore, as TwoSet noted: he decided that he didn’t want to devote his life to practicing, despite his high-quality early training and being at one point a world-class violinist.
In all sincerity, a national, popular trend of something similar, with a PG message could take off.
Alan Colbo @3:39pm,
Amazing!
AesopFan,
“Intonation doesn’t care about your feelings,”
That is hilarious!
From what I recall reading, Amy Chua’s daughters are very well adjusted adults who love their mother and are grateful for their parents.
==
It’s fortunate for all concerned that there wasn’t at the time a second tiger mother with her children in the Chua girls’ classes insisting her girls be ‘the top student in the class in any subject except gym’.
==
It’s agreeable for Chua that her daughters don’t hold a grudge about being called ‘garbage’ by their mother.
Discriminating with relatively harmless conventional warheads in a salvo which appear trajected to impact unpopulated ground and nuclear tipped warheads which look just like conventional warheads in a salvo aimed at similarly nominally unpopulated ground, well, that simply doesn’t work: it’s fatal.
Art Deco,
Apparently you have omniscient insight into Amy Chua’s mind and conscience. I do not, but I have been a mother’s son as well as bearing witness to Mrs. Firefly raising our children. I love my mother and she put tremendous effort into raising her children under difficult circumstances. And, during the 18 years I lived with her I can recall a few words and actions on her part that she would not want retold*. And there are 100 fold rude, malicious, harmful things I said and did to her.
And the same for my wife and our kids.
And, absolutely the same for me as a father. Sometimes I was tired. Sometimes my kids were pushing my buttons. Sometimes external forces were challenging me when my kids needed me.
In other words, in the families I’ve been a part of I was not 100% perfect nor ideal 100% of the time. I was a human son and a human father.
I have no idea what it was like to be Amy Chua’s child, and neither do you, but either her daughters are liars, or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, or they are grateful they had the mother they had.
That’s good enough for me.
*I know some Polish words that are worse than “garbage.” When my mother was particularly exasperated with me she’d switch languages. And I’m sure, 99.9% of the time she was correct.
Biden, predictably, insanely wrong of course, demands Israel not attack Iranian nuclear sites.
Donald Trump: Israel should take out Iran’s nuclear sites.
A grim note on Helene recovery: A friend, who lives in WNC, works for a company that makes DNA identification machines. They are installing an extra one in Asheville for police identification of bodies.
I have no idea what it was like to be Amy Chua’s child, and neither do you, but either her daughters are liars, or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, or they are grateful they had the mother they had.
==
She wrote an entire book delineating what it was like to be her child, which included an admission that she called her children ‘garbage’. Well, we all have our shabby lapses, but few of us defend them in trade books.
==
I found Chua’s account of herself vaguely amusing and vaguely dismaying.
@Art Deco:I found Chua’s account of herself vaguely amusing and vaguely dismaying.
I found the pants-wetting reactions to her account horrifying. There are people (at that time, as well as today) graduating college without being able to read or work with fractions, but Amy Chua was pushing her kids too hard. Eighth-graders in remote Chinese villages are better-educated than American high school graduates. Being pushed too hard is NOT our problem.
There are people (at that time, as well as today) graduating college without being able to read or work with fractions,
==
About 45% of each cohort obtains a baccalaureate degree. I’m sure in a set of nearly 2,000,000 people, you’ll find some strange anomalies. I doubt either of these is a systematic problem.
== but Amy Chua was pushing her kids too hard.
==
Yes, some people thought her priorities were out of order and she was needlessly confrontational with her daughters. You put out trade books advancing contentious theses, not everyone on board.
@Art Deco:I doubt either of these is a systematic problem.
I do, based on my experience teaching seniors at a four-year state university a little over ten years ago. Maybe your experience teaching was more recent than mine, but I doubt it’s improved much. I used to pretest my seniors on basic math and you would be stunned what percentage of them could not add fractions.
You can read a recent article in the Atlantic about the difficulty in getting students in the Ivy League to read a whole book, but at least they CAN read.
The Atlantic’s core audience doesn’t think so much about fractions, but remedial math courses–what my colleagues and I used to call Math 0 and Math -1–are increasingly assigned in the Ivy League.
Cheating is increasingly rampant and students having passed college math courses is no longer indicative of their having any mastery of the material. I used to see in transcripts 3 attempts at calculus with D or F, followed by summer calculus with an A or B, and a complete inability to do calculus in my class the next fall.
Cheating is increasingly rampant and students having passed college math courses is no longer indicative of their having any mastery of the material.
==
Stop giving take home examinations and the problem goes away.
are increasingly assigned in the Ivy League.
==
Less than 2% of the freshman each year matriculate at the Ivy League. If they have any students who require remedial mathematics, it’s because they’re patronage recipients.
== You can read a recent article in the Atlantic about the difficulty in getting students in the Ivy League to read a whole book, but at least they CAN read.
==
Assign them the book and quiz them on the contents.
@Art Deco:If they have any students who require remedial mathematics, it’s because they’re patronage recipients.
If by “patronage” you include DEI, sure. But the problem is not limited to Ivy League; it is least bad in the Ivy League and at small state universities and liberal arts colleges it is catastrophic.
Stop giving take home examinations and the problem goes away.
Assign them the book and quiz them on the contents.
If a university administration cared to enforce standards, especially against the chronically underprepared DEI admissions, these obvious suggestions would be all that is needed–not that cheating can’t be done in class, of course it can and is.
The things you suggest are of course the first thing anyone thinks of. I assume that you have teaching experience and are already aware that if you implement those ideas, and too many of your students fail, or too many of the wrong protected class fail, or too many complain in your evaluations, you get a stern talking to from your chair, your dean, the Dean of Students, or maybe even the chancellor.
And if you don’t accept that feedback and do things their way, you won’t be teaching the next semester. Because only a small minority of instructional staff are professors with tenure. (Even tenure doesn’t protect someone like Amy Wax at Penn who really torques the administration.) The majority are “academic staff”, many of whom are paid by the course hour and don’t know from one semester to the next what courses they will be teaching at what institution or how many.
I’m not sure if you have any institutional teaching experience yourself, but even if you don’t, I’ll be interested to hear your suggestions for how the lowest-ranking people who can be dismissed at will can reform their institution’s administrative corruption singlehandedly. You may think of something in the few minutes you give to the problem that thousands of academics over twenty years haven’t, and an outsider’s perspective is often useful.
In my case I butted heads with administration as long as I could, and then changed careers.
About 56% of faculty employed at post-secondary institutions are “full-time”. The last set of data collected had it that part-time teach 37% fewer credit-hours than full-time faculty, so account for about 1/3 of the teaching manpower. Around 40% of all f/t faculty are tenured.
==
I cannot help but note that about 70% of all post-secondary students at any one time are seeking degrees in occupational subjects. A great many faculty should be working professionals who make their primary living in the field.
==
If..If..If.. You’re telling me you won’t do banal things (in-class tests and short quizzes) because the department head / instructional dean / provost will reprimand you and see to it your contract is not renewed.
Saeed Atallah (Hamas military wing in Lebanon) & Hashem Safieddine (Hezbollah’s new leader) were killed, and maybe Esmail Qaani also (Quds Force general of IRGC – had replaced Qasem Soleimani).
Wisconsin Democrats are terrified a radical outsider will catapult Donald Trump into the White House.
The swing state party members fear Green Party candidate Jill Stein will steal votes from them and hamper Kamala Harris’ chances of election victory.
The far-left Stein is often considered a spoiler candidate who swung votes away from Hillary Clinton 2016. She is back on the ballot in 2024 and determined to make a statement.
Stein believes that anti-Israel sentiment – along with rhetoric about the Jewish state committing ‘genocide’ – from Muslims and Arab Americans in swing states like Michigan will ultimately deny Harris the presidency this November.
However, it’s in Wisconsin where Stein’s Green Party seems to be causing liberals the most anxiety, after Joe Biden won the state by just 21,000 votes in 2020.
@Art Deco:About 56% of faculty employed at post-secondary institutions are “full-time”.
Academic staff can be “full time”, that’s just a measure of how much they are teaching, and the teaching load of a “full time” academic staff is different from the teaching load of a “full time” professor (usually double) because professors are considered to have other responsibilities besides teaching. Academic staff, even those teaching “full time”, usually work semester to semester.
You’re telling me you won’t do banal things (in-class tests and short quizzes) because the department head / instructional dean / provost will reprimand you and see to it your contract is not renewed.
No, because this is not a hypothetical. What I’m telling you is that instructors ARE doing these very obvious things–I did all those things and many more it would be boring to relate, I never cut standards–and WHEN these things cut significantly into passing rates for students, or fail too many of the protected classes of students, or if too many students complain, THEN they are reprimanded, and if they don’t get with the program, they are not renewed and more pliable staff is brought in to replace them.
Because I’m very good at documentation, and because the administrators could not say on the record what they really wanted me to do, and because my course was required for so many programs and not many could teach it, I was able to change careers at the time of my choosing without sacrificing the integrity of my courses. Those were stressful years and most people don’t want to put themselves through that kind of noise.
Tenure-track professors are filtered out by the tenure-award process, which takes several years. If a tenure-track professor starts to enforce standards that materially cut into pass rates, or if too many students complain–and they don’t bring in big research grants–they will be denied tenure and they will not be back next year, and they have the risk of sinking into the academic staff pool. They all know that; either they do bring in big research grants and so don’t care much about teaching anyway, or they don’t and don’t want to destroy their career, either way they conform.
Most of the people who teach at the university level love their field and want to teach it right and don’t want to pass students who cannot possibly do the work Most of the people who administer the universities care primarily about keeping butts in seats so the budget stays up. That has to do with how universities are funded and governed; reform has to start there. I’ve heard some promising things out of Florida in dismantling the academic DEI bureaucracies but that’s the easy thing.
So Niketas is an ex-professor, that explains the lecturing style?
physicsguy is a retired professor but he doesn’t lecture. Yah!
Takes all kinds.
@ om > “Takes all kinds.”
Indeed it does.
Thank goodness we have so many different people commenting here!
That’s the only kind of diversity that really matters.
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Wonder if Chicken Little is kin to The Boy Who Cried Wolf?
Once heard Karma described as a Transceiver – a combination of Transmitter and a Receiver. Signals aren’t just sent (transmitted) out locally, they are also sent out universally. Same for the returning (receiver) signals. Karma isn’t limited.
Are the Republicans—primarily the more radical MAGA Republicans and Conservatives—sending out signals of defeatism in advance of the Presidential election? What would the returning signals be like?
Yes they can control the weather.
Hurricane Helene apparently dropped a lot of conspiracies along with the rain. I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene is suggesting and/or hinting that Biden/Harris ‘Weaponized Helene’ by “cloud seeding” it.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has a map of hurricane affected areas with an overlay of electoral map by political party
On the right 1/3 down on that map it shows “State Customers Out” and then list states with numbers next to them. People without electricity? I’m sure she has a point, but humble me can’t see it…
I’m remembering that Amy Chua insisted her daughters learn an instrument and gave them a choice of violin or piano, discussion finished. Made me wish I had a son the same age as her daughters, so we could move next door and practice the bagpipes. At 5:00 am. At just the right spot in the yard that the sound reached her bedroom window. Real loud.
I see that a woman is now saying that Trump attended party’s with Combs.
I also read that BO is stepping in to try to save Harris.
Longshoremen strike over, for now. Wonder what Harris/BO promised them? And what happens in Jan?
No, No, I don’t want to be the new head of Hezbollah.
Hudson Inst., Can Kasapoglu, “The Israel-Iran War Enters a New Stage“,
https://www.hudson.org/defense-strategy/israel-iran-war-enters-new-stage-middle-east-north-africa-defense-intelligence-can-kasapoglu
To restate Kasapoglu, the dozens of ballistic missiles which got through the Israeli Arrow defensive system demonstrate Israel’s utter vulnerability to a nuclear tipped missile attack.
From my point of view, hitting Iranian oil commerce is pointless to eliminating that defense and security vulnerability.
Therefore, destroying Iranian nuclear-weapons development rises to the top of any necessary target list, with decapitation of the Iranian governmental power structure and toppling the regime not far behind, if not running neck-and-neck.
Both these aims, however, are going to be dependent on achieving air dominance over Iran (if air supremacy isn’t reasonably within reach) which in turn necessitates a widespread destruction of Iranian air defense as a first order of business.
After which, Katie bar the door.
You really are too obtuse to understand what’s going on, in 1992, walkin lawton delayed the declaration of emergency to make dade country particularly country walk suffer, in 2005, landrieu and nagin refused to evacuate new orleans, using the bus fleet, their predecessors had looted the levy fund and they blamed w for the damage, yes michael brown was not optimum, but W did try to evacuate,
they spread ridiculous stories of cannibalism at the super bowl, DIABLO’s like Geraldo and Shep Smith can be counted on to demagogue to maximize the death price, but when they are in charge, they refuse to take responsibility,
the following year the dems diverted relief funds to other projects, in 2012, obama deserted sandy victims, and stay puft christie went along, in 2017 with Trump on site with Katrina but a corrupt Puerto Rican government which was refused to upgrade the power grid, well guess who they blamed, I have a whole stack of receipts like this,
Israel has reserved the right to strike adjacent targets like the airbase as Isfahan, the one at Bushehr is problematic, because it would contaminate much of the Persian Gulf,
bombing kharg island would probably drive oil prices to 120 dollars a barrel, and we have no cushion because they have depleted the reserves, in every way possible they have impaired any real resolution of this conflict,
I think hitting their chain of command might make the iranians hold back,
His best effort. Change my mind.
==
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DopzOCeKJc
A few days ago someone here posted a link to Matt Taibbi’s recent speech on the Washington DC mall: https://www.racket.news/p/my-speech-in-washington-rescue-the
I had it open in my browser tabs and finally got around to reading it. It is excellent! Thanks to whomever posted it, and thanks to Matt for stating so eloquently what so many of us are witnessing. There are nearly 1,000 comments. I read a handful. A lot of changers commenting, giving mini histories of their pasts, when they believed the regime, especially Democrat politicians.
My attitude regarding American politics reflects Taibbi’s identically, at least based on what is in his speech. He explains that free speech is not a right, it is a human quality, and he gives some excellent, and humorous anecdotes about the affect on human behavior in parts of the world where government attempts to control and punish speech. The story about the American businessmen in Moscow is great!
Taibbi also speaks on some of the history of how and why the Founders used the precise words they did in the Bill of Rights. Every American schoolchild should be taught this annually. It is our birthright and it not only belongs to anyone who obtains U.S. citizenship, it is incumbent on all American citizens to protect and defend it.
The entire piece is well worth 5 minutes of your time.
Art Deco,
From what I recall reading, Amy Chua’s daughters are very well adjusted adults who love their mother and are grateful for their parents.
Barely tangentially, J.D. Vance credits Chua for pushing him to write, “Hillbilly Elegy” and credits her as a key mentor in his life.
I think I also remember hearing Rob Henderson (the brilliant psychologist raised in the foster system who coined the term, “luxury beliefs”) credit Amy Chua for mentoring him.
I know this is old hat to many readers here, and I’ve become pretty jaded as well, but I still found this all pretty shocking.
Editorial in today’s WSJ by Steven Stalinsky, who is doing great work at the Middle East Media Research Institute.
https://archive.md/s7qhq
Karmi,
Left, right, red, blue can all point to Congresscritters they perceive as buffoons; and certainly many are.
The key is for all sides to realize this division plays into their (our anointed leaders) hands. As long as we are fighting amongst one another we will never organize to reduce their power and control.
Coincidentally(?) this also plays into the media’s hands, which helps them get more eyeballs and more advertising revenue.
sdferr,
Iron Dome is wonderful and has worked amazingly well. However, as with any artillery it is dependent on a supply of ammunition. I think I read the cost of manufacture of the artillery Iron Dome uses to strike incoming missiles is about 1/10th of the cost of the artillery it is intercepting. That gives them a crucial edge over their enemies, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for Israel to manufacture enough anti-missile missiles to keep it operational.
I would say, it’s in his top 5
that theme from the film, is so poignant, it chills one to the bone, even when you haven’t heard a note,
I thnk I learned about MEMRI from Charles Johnson before he went utterly off his rockers now we know from widlanski that tom friedman’s arabic is so poor he couldn’t fail to make simple mistakes,re the shatila massacre, that he corrected in his book, but some one on staff should be able to publish excerpts of what they actually say, nick kristof was trained as an arabist, then they sent him to Moscow and Beijing, because of course, but he seems to learned the Dhimmi catechism, blame Israel excuse Islamists,
the Post has gotten worse since its acwuisition by Bezos, with David Ignatius having forgotten most everything he learned in his first 10 years as correspondent, and turtles all the way down,
Art Deco @10:25am,
Personal artistic taste is personal, and millions agree with you, but I much prefer the swingin’, up tempo, Nelson Riddle Frank.
Iron dome has nothing to do with intercepting ballistic missiles. So.
https://x.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/1841985294368964944
Satellite image at link.
https://x.com/TheMossadIL/status/1842141183553704279
40 sec video at link.
sdferr,
I just did some Internet reading. Hopefully my sources are accurate. So it looks like David’s Sling and Israel’s Arrow System are calibrated for ballistic missile defense. My apologies for lumping all that into the term, “Iron Dome.”
I admit limited knowledge on the subject of Israel’s defense systems. The point I wanted to make is, I watch news footage of Israel intercepting so much of the stuff Iran and other nations launch and it is inspirational. I am amazed at the genius and effectiveness of the Israeli people. However, in this recent barrage I started thinking about the sheer volume of stuff being lobbed their way, and realized it must be difficult for Israel to manufacture the needed, defensive artillery to supply their defense systems.
thats a peculiar target, a relatively small settlement deep in the southern negev,
one is reminded of the helwan rocket project that nasser had commissioned with german expat scientists, (it’s the back story for the odessa file) lightly touched on in the film, the circumstances of how the program was sabotaged, suggests what MI-6 did not let on to Frederick Forsyth, Peter Miller was really closer to Otto Skorzeny in function, but peculiarly he was rarely reference even by Jack Higgins, another popular novelist,
the Iron defenses are not perfect systems, they are meant to provide the most protection for key population centers like Tel Aviv or Haifa for example,
Yes, beyond difficult, the actual task of a perfect passive defense against a moderate salvo of incoming nuclear tipped ballistic missile warheads is impossible. Foolish. Stupid. Pointless. Insane. It can’t work.
Hence, other measures must, simply must be undertaken. And, sad to say, time has just about run out. Only a tiny sliver of possible action remains, with even that as sketchy of success as one might imagine. The shit has already hit the fan and is now spewing broadly across their space.
Forgot to add: Thanks, Obama!
As usual, a bracing Friday column by James Howard Kunstler at his Substack site with the sanitized Web address, in which he touches on the VP debate, Hurricane Helene, and Israel:
https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/october-surprise
A sample: “So, no aid for you, baskets of deplorables, shivering in the dark in your hills and hollows of Appalachia, your houses splintered, scant chattels lost, and your beloved hound-dogs carried away in the roaring torrents. The money that might have helped you begin to recover from the complete devastation of your lives is paying for Guatemalans to bunk in the Roosevelt Hotel and order-in quesadillas and churros, and refill their government-issued debit cards so they can afford a few nice things as they wait for mysterious others to cast ballots in their names.”
Kunstler’s Clusterf*ck Nation blog was mysteriously zapped last month, but he is continuing at his new address to live up to Matt Taibbi’s closing exhortation in the speech that Rufus referenced above.
Ben’s voice hasn’t changed either.
“Art Deco @10:25am,
“Personal artistic taste is personal, and millions agree with you, but I much prefer the swingin’, up tempo, Nelson Riddle Frank.”
Sinatra was a singular talent who could get his phone calls returned by the best of the best: Riddle, Don Costa, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, et al. Sinatra did a great album with Count Basie in ’63 or ’64 called It Might as Well be Swing. The arranger was none other than Quincy Jones.
Hudson Inst., “Oct. 7th One Year Later”, Zineb Riboua and Mike Doran, (1 hr):
https://www.youtube.com/live/i5ig9ftKAk4
Bullwinkle Pulls Your Finger
Hubert,
I didn’t want to repeat “Matt Taibbi’s closing exhortation” at risk of offending the ladies present 😉 , but it’s a great close to a great speech!
I agree with the commenter who suggested some enterprising patriot put it on a t-shirt and initiate mass sales.
Imagine the cliche’d live news piece of lines at the local polling place on election day. Now imagine as the camera zooms in you notice a lot of the patient electorate are all wearing the same shirt. On the front of that shirt, Taibbi’s slogan. It just may make the regime shutter a bit.
Sgt. Joe Friday,
I love that Quincy Jones album.
It is nearly inconceivable* the volume, breadth and quality of Jones’ work! I can’t think of another producer/composer/arranger who navigated so many genres so successfully. And to stay current with popular music through so many decades and changes. From Sinatra to Michael Jackson! And movie soundtracks across so many genres.
A true genius.
*It would be inconceivable, except Quincy actually did do it.
Rufus: excellent idea. Me, I’d like to see a United-Colors-of-Benetton-type video with various public figures all repeating Taibbi’s line. Kind of like the creepy totalitarian celebrity “I pledge…” video that the Obama campaign rolled out in 2012.
Can you imagine Martha Stewart intoning “M**********r, I’m an American”? Charles Cooke? Roger Kimball? VDH? Thomas Sowell? Heather Mac Donald? Neo (from behind her apple)? AI MITT ROMNEY?! It would be better than Barbara Billingsley speaking jive.
Mark Huneycutt walks 1.5 mi. into Chimney Rock, N.C., talks to folks there (20:00 min): https://youtu.be/MYdC-6nShdc
@ Rufus > “A few days ago someone here posted a link to Matt Taibbi’s recent speech on the Washington DC mall”
I second the recommendation to read Matt’s speech.
As a disaffected Democrat, because that’s what “liberals” were at the time, he doesn’t pull any punches about the current state of the Party.
It’s interesting to see people jumping from one ship to the other, with NeverTrumpers going left and honest journalists going right.
Matt started his speech like this:
@ Mike Plaiss > “Editorial in today’s WSJ by Steven Stalinsky, who is doing great work at the Middle East Media Research Institute.”
Great post. The first section was “old news” but the later reports were shocking.
His last grafs:
One AesopSon used to work in the space industry and had a lowish level security clearance: he had to report his on-line affiliation with a fanfic group that had non-American members writing anime parodies.
If the FBI hasn’t already shut down and indicted the “energy infrastructure contractor” with the security clearance, they aren’t going to investigate anyone.
Could be because the current Regime does NOT condemn their activities.
sdferr
Which is why the IDF’s time in southern Lebanon will concentrate on locating and destroying the Hezbollah arsenal. Because the weapons search will be house-to-house in Shiite communities, it will take a while.
(My understanding is that non-Shiite households do not have arsenals.)
Lebanese cooperated by fleeing north, so that the IDF will be able to concentrate on arsenal-destroying without a lot of house-to-house combat.
Gringo and also to others interested: I found this discussion between Liel Liebovitz and Amiad Cohen useful regarding potential Israeli strategic thinking vis a vis their South Leb incursion (best to drag the slider in to the 17:50 min mark, skipping the preliminaries)
https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/rootless/rootless-liel-leibovitz-israel-war-lebanon-gaza-amiad-cohen
Makes a decent framework, I think, rather than a certainty of outcome.
they are mostly on the same team, change my mind, the way they are still fishing j6 participants, as if they were public enemy no#1
so these lousiana and maryland men, are not big crawfish or crab eaters I don’t think
we had dental assistants that became atrocity deniars, and others of that ilke
the type of fare one usually gets covering these matters like the Jewish Press I remember in South Florida, mind you this was early in the Oslo delusion are just terrible
@ Hubert – Kunstler’s post was interesting.
The commenters had some information that may explain yesterday’s concerns about “bulldozing” a community and confiscating lithium mines.
Hard to believe anything about Hurricane Helene and FEMA. True or False?
1) Did Trump lie about the ‘Federal Emergency Management Agency can’t respond well enough to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene because it’s diverted so much money to helping migrants’?
2) Did ‘Republicans Vote against FEMA Funding before Helene hit’?
Back to the Open Thread topic – I’ve been listening to and about Ben for several years, but didn’t know he was a violinist, much less such an accomplished one.
A nice biographical look:
https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/general/1955586/watch-this-ben-shapiro-joins-eitan-katz-to-play-lmaancha-with-violin-guitar-duet.html
This surprised me a bit, knowing the leftist lean of the theater world.
(Joe McCarthy was a jerk, but he was correct about Communists in the Movies — and they stayed there.)
“Shapiro’s parents both worked in Hollywood. His mother worked as an executive of a TV company and his father as a composer.”
A picture from that post, and the musical video, which didn’t play for me in the embedded clip.
https://x.com/Eitankatzmusic/status/991412984009420800
https://x.com/Eitankatzmusic/status/1369320035894910978
Israel’s ballistic defense system evaluates incoming attacks and passes on intercepting inbounds that track as impacting areas with little or no hazards to life. Such as at Nevatim AB, where impacts landed in open areas, for the large part. They try not to waste money intercepting every missile coming in, when so many damage little to nothing.
The video you knew had to exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2IaR8uRzXM
Classical Violinists Reviewing Ben Shapiro’s Violin Playing with Facts and Logic
Why yes, that is TwoSet at work. They start with the Ave Maria I linked on the Hitler thread, but listen to that performance first because they dissect it minutely here.
This is my favorite line:
“Intonation doesn’t care about your feelings,”
That line was from a comment, not the TwoSet narration.
Here’s a post showing Ben reacting to the performance Neo started with, and he also explains why his technique is not so good anymore, as TwoSet noted: he decided that he didn’t want to devote his life to practicing, despite his high-quality early training and being at one point a world-class violinist.
He had other things he wanted to do!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3N3RB0WXaU
Hubert,
That would truly be inspirational.
In all sincerity, a national, popular trend of something similar, with a PG message could take off.
Alan Colbo @3:39pm,
Amazing!
AesopFan,
“Intonation doesn’t care about your feelings,”
That is hilarious!
From what I recall reading, Amy Chua’s daughters are very well adjusted adults who love their mother and are grateful for their parents.
==
It’s fortunate for all concerned that there wasn’t at the time a second tiger mother with her children in the Chua girls’ classes insisting her girls be ‘the top student in the class in any subject except gym’.
==
It’s agreeable for Chua that her daughters don’t hold a grudge about being called ‘garbage’ by their mother.
Discriminating with relatively harmless conventional warheads in a salvo which appear trajected to impact unpopulated ground and nuclear tipped warheads which look just like conventional warheads in a salvo aimed at similarly nominally unpopulated ground, well, that simply doesn’t work: it’s fatal.
Art Deco,
Apparently you have omniscient insight into Amy Chua’s mind and conscience. I do not, but I have been a mother’s son as well as bearing witness to Mrs. Firefly raising our children. I love my mother and she put tremendous effort into raising her children under difficult circumstances. And, during the 18 years I lived with her I can recall a few words and actions on her part that she would not want retold*. And there are 100 fold rude, malicious, harmful things I said and did to her.
And the same for my wife and our kids.
And, absolutely the same for me as a father. Sometimes I was tired. Sometimes my kids were pushing my buttons. Sometimes external forces were challenging me when my kids needed me.
In other words, in the families I’ve been a part of I was not 100% perfect nor ideal 100% of the time. I was a human son and a human father.
I have no idea what it was like to be Amy Chua’s child, and neither do you, but either her daughters are liars, or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, or they are grateful they had the mother they had.
That’s good enough for me.
*I know some Polish words that are worse than “garbage.” When my mother was particularly exasperated with me she’d switch languages. And I’m sure, 99.9% of the time she was correct.
Biden, predictably, insanely wrong of course, demands Israel not attack Iranian nuclear sites.
https://x.com/Doranimated/status/1842333470334624139
Brief video of Trump at link.
A grim note on Helene recovery: A friend, who lives in WNC, works for a company that makes DNA identification machines. They are installing an extra one in Asheville for police identification of bodies.
I have no idea what it was like to be Amy Chua’s child, and neither do you, but either her daughters are liars, or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, or they are grateful they had the mother they had.
==
She wrote an entire book delineating what it was like to be her child, which included an admission that she called her children ‘garbage’. Well, we all have our shabby lapses, but few of us defend them in trade books.
==
I found Chua’s account of herself vaguely amusing and vaguely dismaying.
@Art Deco:I found Chua’s account of herself vaguely amusing and vaguely dismaying.
I found the pants-wetting reactions to her account horrifying. There are people (at that time, as well as today) graduating college without being able to read or work with fractions, but Amy Chua was pushing her kids too hard. Eighth-graders in remote Chinese villages are better-educated than American high school graduates. Being pushed too hard is NOT our problem.
There are people (at that time, as well as today) graduating college without being able to read or work with fractions,
==
About 45% of each cohort obtains a baccalaureate degree. I’m sure in a set of nearly 2,000,000 people, you’ll find some strange anomalies. I doubt either of these is a systematic problem.
==
but Amy Chua was pushing her kids too hard.
==
Yes, some people thought her priorities were out of order and she was needlessly confrontational with her daughters. You put out trade books advancing contentious theses, not everyone on board.
@Art Deco:I doubt either of these is a systematic problem.
I do, based on my experience teaching seniors at a four-year state university a little over ten years ago. Maybe your experience teaching was more recent than mine, but I doubt it’s improved much. I used to pretest my seniors on basic math and you would be stunned what percentage of them could not add fractions.
You can read a recent article in the Atlantic about the difficulty in getting students in the Ivy League to read a whole book, but at least they CAN read.
The Atlantic’s core audience doesn’t think so much about fractions, but remedial math courses–what my colleagues and I used to call Math 0 and Math -1–are increasingly assigned in the Ivy League.
Cheating is increasingly rampant and students having passed college math courses is no longer indicative of their having any mastery of the material. I used to see in transcripts 3 attempts at calculus with D or F, followed by summer calculus with an A or B, and a complete inability to do calculus in my class the next fall.
Cheating is increasingly rampant and students having passed college math courses is no longer indicative of their having any mastery of the material.
==
Stop giving take home examinations and the problem goes away.
are increasingly assigned in the Ivy League.
==
Less than 2% of the freshman each year matriculate at the Ivy League. If they have any students who require remedial mathematics, it’s because they’re patronage recipients.
==
You can read a recent article in the Atlantic about the difficulty in getting students in the Ivy League to read a whole book, but at least they CAN read.
==
Assign them the book and quiz them on the contents.
@Art Deco:If they have any students who require remedial mathematics, it’s because they’re patronage recipients.
If by “patronage” you include DEI, sure. But the problem is not limited to Ivy League; it is least bad in the Ivy League and at small state universities and liberal arts colleges it is catastrophic.
Stop giving take home examinations and the problem goes away.
Assign them the book and quiz them on the contents.
If a university administration cared to enforce standards, especially against the chronically underprepared DEI admissions, these obvious suggestions would be all that is needed–not that cheating can’t be done in class, of course it can and is.
The things you suggest are of course the first thing anyone thinks of. I assume that you have teaching experience and are already aware that if you implement those ideas, and too many of your students fail, or too many of the wrong protected class fail, or too many complain in your evaluations, you get a stern talking to from your chair, your dean, the Dean of Students, or maybe even the chancellor.
And if you don’t accept that feedback and do things their way, you won’t be teaching the next semester. Because only a small minority of instructional staff are professors with tenure. (Even tenure doesn’t protect someone like Amy Wax at Penn who really torques the administration.) The majority are “academic staff”, many of whom are paid by the course hour and don’t know from one semester to the next what courses they will be teaching at what institution or how many.
I’m not sure if you have any institutional teaching experience yourself, but even if you don’t, I’ll be interested to hear your suggestions for how the lowest-ranking people who can be dismissed at will can reform their institution’s administrative corruption singlehandedly. You may think of something in the few minutes you give to the problem that thousands of academics over twenty years haven’t, and an outsider’s perspective is often useful.
In my case I butted heads with administration as long as I could, and then changed careers.
About 56% of faculty employed at post-secondary institutions are “full-time”. The last set of data collected had it that part-time teach 37% fewer credit-hours than full-time faculty, so account for about 1/3 of the teaching manpower. Around 40% of all f/t faculty are tenured.
==
I cannot help but note that about 70% of all post-secondary students at any one time are seeking degrees in occupational subjects. A great many faculty should be working professionals who make their primary living in the field.
==
If..If..If.. You’re telling me you won’t do banal things (in-class tests and short quizzes) because the department head / instructional dean / provost will reprimand you and see to it your contract is not renewed.
Saeed Atallah (Hamas military wing in Lebanon) & Hashem Safieddine (Hezbollah’s new leader) were killed, and maybe Esmail Qaani also (Quds Force general of IRGC – had replaced Qasem Soleimani).
The major crack in Kamala’s Blue Wall? Why Democrats in sleepy town are terrified of radical outsider who could catapult Trump into the White House
@Art Deco:About 56% of faculty employed at post-secondary institutions are “full-time”.
Academic staff can be “full time”, that’s just a measure of how much they are teaching, and the teaching load of a “full time” academic staff is different from the teaching load of a “full time” professor (usually double) because professors are considered to have other responsibilities besides teaching. Academic staff, even those teaching “full time”, usually work semester to semester.
You’re telling me you won’t do banal things (in-class tests and short quizzes) because the department head / instructional dean / provost will reprimand you and see to it your contract is not renewed.
No, because this is not a hypothetical. What I’m telling you is that instructors ARE doing these very obvious things–I did all those things and many more it would be boring to relate, I never cut standards–and WHEN these things cut significantly into passing rates for students, or fail too many of the protected classes of students, or if too many students complain, THEN they are reprimanded, and if they don’t get with the program, they are not renewed and more pliable staff is brought in to replace them.
Because I’m very good at documentation, and because the administrators could not say on the record what they really wanted me to do, and because my course was required for so many programs and not many could teach it, I was able to change careers at the time of my choosing without sacrificing the integrity of my courses. Those were stressful years and most people don’t want to put themselves through that kind of noise.
Tenure-track professors are filtered out by the tenure-award process, which takes several years. If a tenure-track professor starts to enforce standards that materially cut into pass rates, or if too many students complain–and they don’t bring in big research grants–they will be denied tenure and they will not be back next year, and they have the risk of sinking into the academic staff pool. They all know that; either they do bring in big research grants and so don’t care much about teaching anyway, or they don’t and don’t want to destroy their career, either way they conform.
Most of the people who teach at the university level love their field and want to teach it right and don’t want to pass students who cannot possibly do the work Most of the people who administer the universities care primarily about keeping butts in seats so the budget stays up. That has to do with how universities are funded and governed; reform has to start there. I’ve heard some promising things out of Florida in dismantling the academic DEI bureaucracies but that’s the easy thing.
So Niketas is an ex-professor, that explains the lecturing style?
physicsguy is a retired professor but he doesn’t lecture. Yah!
Takes all kinds.
@ om > “Takes all kinds.”
Indeed it does.
Thank goodness we have so many different people commenting here!
That’s the only kind of diversity that really matters.