[MSN - HuffPost] From my aisle seat, I was well positioned to access the lecture microphone. Just beyond it stood Hillary Clinton. It’s too bad I was only able to ask her one question the entire semester I spent in her course.
Last fall I learned that Clinton would be teaching a class at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. I did not hesitate to apply — and neither did 1,200 other students.
My application essays were impassioned. I was certain Clinton’s five decades of public service would enrich my own leadership ambitions. I had imagined that spending two hours each week with a former senator, secretary of state, first lady and presidential nominee would embolden me in new ways. Unfortunately, my idealistic hopes got the best of me.
Clinton’s course, titled "Inside the Situation Room" and co-taught with SIPA’s Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, promised students an opportunity to understand the key factors that underpin a nation’s most crucial decisions.
"But what is her class really like?"my peers often asked me.
Well, the thing is, it wasn’t really a class — it was a production.
On my first day, I expected to enter a classroom with 30 other students, which would be typical of classes in my program. Instead, I approached a swarm of several hundred. Next to them was a sea of cameras belonging to journalists from various major outlets. Just to their right, I spotted Secret Service personnel whispering into their radios. It was only 11:30 a.m. — our lecture didn’t begin until 2:10 p.m.
Perhaps the enormous class size was to be expected. It was, arguably, an equitable decision made to meet the high demand from students across a diversity of programs, all of whom hoped to learn from the same distinguished political figure. Unfortunately, our shared enthusiasm was leveraged to what felt like the detriment of our own learning experience.
Every Wednesday for 12 consecutive weeks, I sacrificed my lunch break to queue alongside 350 equally eager students for the chance at scoring a front-row seat. The third week of class, I overheard one classmate say he felt as if he was "waiting for a celebrity concert ticket." He mused: "I wonder if I can sleep here tonight so I can get up front and ask my question tomorrow."
On our first day of class, after making it past the Secret Service agents, we settled in for a much-anticipated two hours with the onetime presidential nominee. But the class abruptly ended half an hour early — and continued to do so every week. Only a handful of students were given time to ask their prepared questions.
Why did we lose a quarter of our scheduled class time? The crew filming each session needed time to disassemble their equipment. I’m not surprised; it’s an elaborate setup. Rumor has it that next year the same class will be offered, but instead of in-person lectures with Clinton each week, students will be offered the videos of our class via a platform called Columbia+, which sounds to me more like a streaming service than a scholarly site.
Together in class and on tape, we acted much like an audience at a late-night talk show, distracted by the cameras and yet immersed in the vanity of the production. We followed an unspoken script where we were both active and passive at once — expected to laugh at certain anecdotes, but not encouraged to raise our hands.
It’s no secret that celebrity professors are thought to be great for universities. A recognizable name and an impressive pedigree like Clinton’s attract valuable attention, bringing in students, donors, funding and opportunities for new institutions, like Clinton’s recently launched Institute of Global Politics at SIPA.
But these benefits come with a cost.
Week after week, hour-long lines wrapped around the lobby of the lecture hall, as students employed aggressive strategies to secure near-microphone seats for what became known as "the Hunger Games Q&A." Subjecting ourselves to this wait was unavoidable if we had any hope of asking even one question during the semester. (Rachel Szala, associate dean for communications and external relations at SIPA, told HuffPost in an email: "Secretary Clinton and Dean Yarhi-Milo held open Q&A for at least 20 minutes at the end of each class. Student questions were not pre-screened and students were allowed to ask more than one question over the course of the semester, even if they had previously asked a question ... During the first class after Oct. 7, they offered twice as long as normal (40 minutes) for questions on the conflict or any other topic students wanted to discuss. And in the last class, Q&A was over an hour." Despite what Szala says, I will note we were told at almost every lecture that "if you have already asked a question, you are not allowed to ask another one.") Much more at the link. I am not surprised. It was all about Hillary.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
12/11/2023 00:00 ||
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#3
Student's admitting they behaved like they were trying to get a rock star's autograph says it all about what a phoney thing the ivys are these days.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/11/2023 5:49 Comments ||
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#5
Can’t imagine putting up with that baloney for anyone. Can you imagine going through a scaled down version to be imparted with all the wisdom that is Brian Stelter.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/11/2023 8:43 Comments ||
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#6
^ Who is a potato
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/11/2023 9:01 Comments ||
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#7
I would have paid to be allowed not to be in that class.
Posted by: lord garth ||
12/11/2023 15:42 Comments ||
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[WND] My appreciation for our freedom of movement was re-ignited recently when I finished up an engine swap into my rare-but-not-collectable 1995 Ford Thunderbird. It had blown a head gasket and had far more than 200,000 miles on it, so in went a junkyard-fresh 4.6L V8 with only 40,000 miles on the clock, or so said the yard I bought it from.
My use of the term "freedom of movement" on this site goes back to my article in March of 2022, where I pointed out that the Biden administration is hell-bent on forcing us into a mass-transit-heavy society, in part through regulations and restrictions that made it less convenient and more expensive to drive a car. I pointed out that subsidizing absurdly expensive EVs and forcing car makers to implement tech that shuts down cars (allegedly only for drunk drivers) are part of the plan. The totalitarian leftists at the Daily Kos promptly published a hit piece on me, calling me every name in the hysterical leftist playbook.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Vadim Bondar
[REGNUM] December 10 marks the 75th anniversary of the UN adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then, in 1948, against the backdrop of the recent end of the bloodiest and most destructive war, some saw the future as peaceful and almost idyllic, while in the eyes of others it was already taking on the contours of a new battlefield, and any international institution, any adopted international document was conceived and assessed with from the point of view of its subsequent use as a tool of confrontation.
Continued on Page 49
#1
The bug in the code is that all you have to go is call people Gazans, then it's ok to conduct siege warfare and ethnic cleansing against them. Don't think that the deep state isn't noticing. We can look forward to such treatment of Americans soon. They declare us equivalent to Hamas as Hayden and other deep state ghouls have already done and Alakazam, they have all the tools they need to make war on us with no pesky human rights issues in the way.
#3
Deductive reasoning vs. inductive reasoning. Sadly, oftentimes now described as 'conspiracy thinking.'
Deductive reasoning, also known as deduction, is a basic form of reasoning. It starts out with a general statement, or hypothesis, and examines the possibilities to reach a specific, logical conclusion, according to Norman Herr, a professor of secondary education at California State University in Northridge. The scientific method uses deduction to test hypotheses and theories, which predict certain outcomes if they are correct, said Dr. Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, a researcher and professor emerita at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
"We go from the general — the theory — to the specific — the observations," Wassertheil-Smoller told Live Science.
In deductive reasoning there is a first premise, then a second premise and finally an inference (a conclusion based on reasoning and evidence). A common form of deductive reasoning is the syllogism, in which two statements — a major premise and a minor premise — together reach a logical conclusion. For example, the major premise "Every A is B" could be followed by the minor premise, "This C is A." Those statements would lead to the conclusion "This C is B." Syllogisms are considered a good way to test deductive reasoning to make sure the argument is valid. Link to Live Science article
#6
As Frank Zappa said, "I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/11/2023 6:56 Comments ||
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#7
Also this gem from the Murphy's Law Calendar:
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/11/2023 6:57 Comments ||
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#8
The glass is neither half full or half empty. The glass is twice the size that it needs to be.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
12/11/2023 9:20 Comments ||
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#9
Not speaking for the other Jews on the board, I think this explains us pretty well.
For generations and generations, the Jews who said, "We have nothing to worry about. We are totally okay. I'm sure they won't attack us."
Have been weeded out of the ashkenazic genetic base.
#10
^IMO, the other way around. You can't live with the thought than any moment your neighboors may rise up to kill you & your family. So, over the time Jews learned to ignore reality.
#13
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/11/2023 12:57 Comments ||
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#14
Both Penguin and Grom are correct with regard to the Jews over history. Both variants are always present in the population — each being selected for or against as conditions change locally… but not globally.
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.
