[MindingTheCampus] The United States has been considered a truly "exceptional" place because it excels in so many ways. It has the biggest output of goods and services. It has had the most powerful military presence on the planet for many years. Its technological advances have been the greatest of any nation. And, more relevant to this readership, surveys of higher education, conducted in such diverse places as London and Shanghai, say that America has a commanding proportion of the world’s greatest universities.
Yet, over the last generation, a remarkable and disturbing development has occurred: American universities are increasingly downplaying, ignoring, or even condemning their distinction in the production and dissemination of ideas that they have, historically, done so well. The genesis of this development goes back several decades. Around 1960, time-use data suggest that the typical college student spent around 40 hours per week in class, studying, writing papers, working in laboratories, etc., while earning a 2.4 or 2.5 grade point average—roughly one half "B" grades and one half "C"s. Fast forward to the present. Twenty-first-century data suggest a typical American college student spends under 30 hours per week on these activities (probably about 28), a 30% reduction from two generations earlier, yet the average grade point average is above 3.0—mostly "B"s, with a smattering of even higher grades. Detailed dive at link.
Stop giving out participation trophies!!!!
#1
Dr. Vedder clearly has no understanding of Social Equity, progressivism and reform. Old knowledge and historical reference must be put aside. New wine must be put into new wine skins. [sarcasm off]
#2
Used to be, you had to make the grades to get in, then you had to pay for it and make the grades to get out with a diploma.
Now, if you check the right boxes, you don't need grades or gelt, coming or going.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/17/2023 5:41 Comments ||
Top||
#3
They hit the level mediocrity long ago and continued their excavation.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
02/17/2023 7:33 Comments ||
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#4
I noticed several companies and activities have directed their HR departments to stop using a college degree as a job requirement. That's the issue that started reducing colleges into paper mills. HR was too lazy to develop criteria for each job and simply defaulted to a paper chase.
#7
Its not that they aren't interested in education, just not education for the masses. Much easier to manipulate that way. Even better, teach them wrong.
Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity.
-Brick Top, Snatch
(Wimp Lo goes around saying he will kick anyone's ass)
Pay no attention to Wimp Lo. We trained him wrong on purpose...as a joke.
-Master Tang, Kung Pow
[BLAZE] Elon Musk used an unlikely forum this week to protest the formation of a single global government: the "World Government Summit."
Speaking at the conference in Dubai via remote signal, Musk warned that a one-world government creates "a civilizational risk" that could result in the collapse of modern society.
"I know this is called the 'World Government Summit,' but I think we should be a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government," Musk said.
"If I may say, we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having — frankly, this may sound a little odd — too much cooperation between governments," he added.
Musk explained that throughout history civilizations have risen and fallen. But neither their rise nor their fall "meant the doom of humanity as a whole because there’ve been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances."
#3
Soviet Central Planning doesn't work even if Brussels and Washington insist on repeating it. Eventually all the interventions result in collapse. However it gives the players the false sense of control and power up till the end. Just like drug addicts.
[FrontPageMagazine] Raising money to finance illegal activity is illegal for anyone - so why do the rules not apply to the Left?
Antifa, like the Democrat Party, is built on the model of nonprofit support infrastructure.
In the party, that means everything except the most direct campaign activities are outsourced to networks of nonprofits that use tax-deductible donations for everything from voter registration and outreach, media and messaging, to funding election infrastructure ‘Zuckerbucks’ style.
Unlike its Black Lives Matter allies, the Antifa networks aren’t funded by a single nonprofit. Antifa’s illegal activities and the radical tendencies of its participants, many of whom are involved in a variety of radical groups, some of them domestic terrorist organizations, makes that a non-starter. However, unlike conservative groups which have been ‘debanked’ from Big Tech fundraising platforms, Antifa gains support through leftist 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) groups which includes fundraising platforms, bail funds, street medics and promotional media organizations.
One of the worst examples also operates arm in arm with the Democratic Party.
The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund raises money through crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, Patreon and FundRazr (also utilized by the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Cambridge) despite clear bans on raising money for illegal or criminal activity.
But its primary fundraising platform is also utilized by the Democratic National Committee.
Connected by a shortlink titled ‘DefendAntifa’, the International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund, its fundraising page flying the Antifa flag and bearing a banner “Free All Antifa Prisoners” describes itself as providing “direct, immediate support to anti-fascists” including medical bills, legal defense and an “antifa prisoner fund”, uses the Action Network: a leftist 501(c)(4) and (c)(3).
The Action Network boasts that “after three months of using Action Network the DNC shattered all sorts of fundraising records.” The Antifa defense fund, which claims to have dispensed $75,000 in three years, is apparently also doing well with the overlapping DNC donor base.
What is the Antifa defense fund raising money for?
While the Action Network home page shows off a picture of Biden to promote its DNC fundraising, the International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund’s blog features a story about helping out during the Biden inauguration riots featuring of black masked antifa thugs bearing a banner featuring an AK-47 and the message, “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge.”
The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund post describes how “stuff got vandalized and Dak, one of the sole arrestees, was left holding the bag, taking a plea deal that kept him out of prison but also left him on the hook to pay for all of the property damage done in both actions – nearly $50,000USD in all!.That’s a lot of money for anyone to come up with. A donation page has been set up to help with those costs and the Defence Fund… decided to help contribute directly.”
This would appear to refer to the Biden inauguration riots in Portland during which the windows of the Democratic Party of Oregon headquarters were smashed and vandalized with the anarchist ‘A’. Police seized “Molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray and a crow bar”.
Is a fundraising platform used by the DNC also raising money for antifa rioters smashing Democrat offices? If so it would be one of many examples of Democrats incubating the leftist radicals who are destroying their party and the country.
The Action Network was set up by Senator John Kerry’s digital director during the Occupy Wall Street riots, is emblematic of the relationship between the Democrat establishment and the most extreme elements of the Left. As is an antifa defense fund raising money for a defendant in the Biden inauguration riots using the Action Network whose home page features Biden’s picture.
Beyond the DNC, the Action Network is the fundraising platform for the AFL-CIO, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, the DSA and Communist Party USA. The spectrum reflects the growing extremism that the Democrats have become complicit in and even directly support. Read the rest at the link
[ThePipeline] You may wonder with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) having failed to catch the most obvious and significant fraudsters—Madoff and, allegedly, FTX—how well it is performing the duties for which it was created. If you harbor any such concerns, its proposal last year –with over 100 footnotes—to require disclosure of "climate change" effects on companies’ business operations will not diminish the perception that it has gone off the rails.
The commission is currently reported to be backstroking away from this misbegotten idea. But should scrap the notion entirely as unworkable and get back to its main job for which it was created: protecting investors and the economy from fraud and manipulation of the sort that led to the Great Depression. Some background:
All publicly listed U.S. companies must file financial disclosure statements with the SEC. The purpose of an SEC disclosure statement is to provide useful information for investors about the profitability of their investments. Normally, companies are required to disclose things like debt and litigation vulnerabilities, expenses, liquidity and capital resources. Filings are reviewed by a branch of the agency, the Division of Corporate Finance:
In its filing reviews, the Division concentrates its resources on critical disclosures that appear to conflict with Commission rules or applicable accounting standards and on disclosure that appears to be materially deficient in explanation or clarity. The Division does not evaluate the merits of any transaction or determine whether an investment is appropriate for any investor. The Division’s review process is not a guarantee that the disclosure is complete and accurate — responsibility for complete and accurate disclosure lies with the company and others involved in the preparation of a company’s filings.
We're all doomed, as usual.
While the SEC lacks the power to criminally deal with false disclosure statements there are penalties for inaccurate disclosures. Among them is the power to impose substantial fines for such conduct, the penalties assessed depend on whether the misstatements were the result of negligence, fraud or failure to exercise due diligence in the issuance. It does have the power to investigate and refer cases of suspected false disclosure filings to the Department of Justice for prosecution.
SEC chairman Gary Gensler made climate-change rules a priority. Perhaps the SEC was just trying to increase jobs for professionals as it did when the government required environmental impact statements: such nonsense would also spawn a new industry of navel gazers. Unlike the rest of the normal disclosure reports, under the proposed regulations, that portion of the disclosure statement relating to the impact of climate change need not be attested to by certified accountants. Ergo, a new market for feather merchants. (And probably for law firms who will claim client losses because of inadequate disclosures.)
Here is the summary of the original proposal requiring, inter alia, disclosure of the companies’ greenhouse gas output. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the rules would be extremely burdensome:
[FrontPageMagazine] Is there anything a leftist group can do to lose its tax deductible status?
In Front Page Magazine’s extensive series on the leftist organizations that the IRS has allowed to keep their tax deductible status, we have covered Chinese Communist front groups, art vandals, domestic terrorists, pedophiles, illegal alien smugglers and the enablers of murderers.
Every time we dive deeper into these investigations, someone asks if there’s anywhere that the IRS will draw the line. A few weeks ago, someone suggested pirates. Surely there couldn’t be nonprofit pirates with tax deductible donations that the IRS has decided is a legitimate charity.
Not only is there a pirate nonprofit, but it’s been denounced by the court, described as eco-terrorists by the FBI, and has shown up on Interpol’s Red Notice while being the subject of international incidents without ever persuading the IRS to drop its 501(c)(3) status.
A decade ago, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling stated that, “you don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl glass containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate.”
The group in question was Sea Shepherd: a trendy anti-fishing organization whose celebrity supporters included Pamela Anderson, Martin Sheen and Sean Penn. And a decade after the Court of Appeals stated that Sea Shepherd’s alleged acts were “clear instances of violent acts for private ends, the very embodiment of piracy”, Sea Shepherd maintains a presence on Facebook, Amazon, YouTube and other Big Tech platforms that purged conservations for “extremism”,where it sells merchandise featuring its version of the skull and bones pirate flag.
And it has retained its status with the IRS as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charity for over 40 years.
In 2002, the Domestic Terrorism Section Chief of the FBI told the House Resources Committee that Sea Shepherd was an example of “eco-terrorism”. The IRS took no action even when it was caught harboring a nonprofit that federal law enforcement had described as eco-terrorists.
Unlike many of the other leftist groups we previously profiled, the IRS did begin an audit of Sea Shepherd a few months after the Court of Appeals ruling. The token IRS effort was likely in response to pressure from Japan whose whaling ships faced harassment from the group.
While the IRS has ignored conservative protests over tax deductible status being granted to domestic terrorist groups, the Japanese government spent years lobbying to suspend Sea Shepherd’s nonprofit status. After a court ruling described the group as pirates, the Japanese could not believe that the Obama administration still refused to take action. Finally the Japanese embassy turned directly to the IRS, including contacting Lois Lerner, who would become infamous for her role in the IRS targeting of conservative and Jewish opponents of Obama.
The IRS went through the motions of auditing Sea Shepherd, then it dispatched a letter claiming that “our examination of the information return(s) indicated above disclosed that your organization continues to qualify for exemption from Federal income tax.” The Internal Revenue Service does not however seem to have consulted the Court of Appeals, the FBI or the law. Read the rest at the link
[NYP] "This is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work."
— Ex-national intel boss James Clapper, Oct. 2020
vs.
"All we were doing was raising a yellow flag ... Politico deliberately distorted what we said."
— Clapper, Feb. 2023
We say: To protect Joe Biden before the 2020 election, ex-national intel boss James Clapper blatantly sought to discredit Post reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop by suggesting it was Russian disinfo. Yet now that Hunter himself admits the laptop was his (and thus our story accurate), and the GOP-led investigation into the whole affair is gaining speed, Clapper is desperately slicing the salami. Shameless.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[MindingTheCampus] The United States has been considered a truly "exceptional" place because it excels in so many ways. It has the biggest output of goods and services. It has had the most powerful military presence on the planet for many years. Its technological advances have been the greatest of any nation. And, more relevant to this readership, surveys of higher education, conducted in such diverse places as London and Shanghai, say that America has a commanding proportion of the world’s greatest universities.
[NYP] "This is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work."
