I got a note from our university advocate at the capitol, announcing the completion of the Minnesota state budget. Is it good news? I don’t know. It’s not great news, that’s for sure.
The higher education bill maintains current funding for the University of Minnesota’s core operations in the next biennium. The capital investment (also called bonding) bill provides $60 million in bonding to repair and renew existing University of Minnesota buildings across the state. The transportation bill provides $8 million from the general fund for safety improvement to Washington Avenue Bridge. These bills have been sent to the governor, who is expected to sign them as part of the special session agreement.
Although the funding for core operations amounts to a 3.5% reduction when adjusted for inflation, we recognize it was a tough budget year at the State Capitol. UMN Advocates minimized cuts and secured a bonding bill despite narrow partisan divides by helping legislators understand the statewide value of the University.
The legislature held the line. The budget was already skin-tight and our bones were showing, so we’re going to have to cinch it up a little tighter, but it could have been so much worse. But have you ever heard of the Minnesota starvation experiment?
During World War Two, conscientious objectors in the US and the UK were asked to volunteer for medical research. In one project in the US, young men were starved for six months to help experts decide how to treat victims of mass starvation in Europe.
Do we need to repeat it? Really?
Of course there’s deliberate mass starvation unto death going on right now in Gaza.
Never again. Thought those words actually meant something once..
Greta Thunberg and the Madleen crew tried to stop it.Among millions of others globe wide. Yet still it continues.
Meanwhile, there’s a Latina version of Anne Frank hiding in an American attic from ICE..
(Not original to me dunno the author of that – but seems very apt to quote ’bout now.)
<sarcasm>
Apparently, this is the kind of experimental result that needs to be reconfirmed every so often. It was reconfirmed in the 1990s in former Yugoslavia, for example; has been a ongoing massive, long-term-effects study in both Syria and the Sudan-Ethiopia-Eritrea-Somalia region† for well over a decade in Syria and a lot longer near the Horn of Africa; and every golf course in the world is a site of intellectual/moral starvation experiments on an ongoing basis, not just that obvious one in Florida.
† Heckling from the peanut gallery that an unknown but statistically meaningful proportion of the problems are relics of European colonial line-drawing will be ignored (although the people in that region might well stare with envy at the peanuts in the gallery).
My father served in the air force in WW2. He was “volunteered” for high altitude “research”. This consisted of going into a chamber which simulated the low pressures and lack of oxygen at high altitude and being assessed on his ability to perform specific tasks. He found out many years later that it was a screening program to select crews to fly bombing raids over Japan at altitudes above the reach of fighters and anti-aircraft fire. The planes they were to fly in were not pressurised and arms and armour were removed to achieve the necessary altitude. Fortunately for him the atomic bomb stopped all that.
Not so lucky were other servicemen who “volunteered” for another program to test the effects of mustard gas in tropical conditions. The cover story to explain the horrific injuries that resulted was that they were due to an accident handling the gas shells and bombs.