I’m sitting here with a writhing lump of chronic ache at the base of my spine. It’s a cruel beast that occasionally stabs out with daggers of pain, and it’s capricious in that there are no rules specifying when it will lash out. I’m lying in bed, unmoving: knife up the right side! I’m walking carefully, everything moving smoothly: lance that kidney! I reach out to flush the toilet: oh, don’t do that, here comes the spiked mace. I’m having a tough time finding any motivation to do anything.

There is good news: I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in an hour! Modern medicine will fix me right up, won’t they? Of course modern medicine has to first figure out what’s wrong, and modern medicine hasn’t done the greatest job of that the last few weeks.

In other good news, the first wave of textbooks expelled from my shelves has reached various recipients. If you haven’t got it yet, it’s coming. Meanwhile, there’s a third giveaway waiting for volunteers to accept the burden of knowledge.

I think it’s part of the Right’s efforts to undermine education — steal the word “university” and attach it to rank garbage. Think PragerU. Think Trump University. Think University of Austin. All trash. Now how about this: a blockchain university, Woolf U.

In a lengthy August 2018 interview with Disruption Hub, Woolf’s founder Joshua Broggi — a philosopher of religion at Wolfson College, Oxford — tells how he was first inspired to blockchain by a student who wanted to pay his university fees in cryptocurrency.

Broggi thinks “blockchain” could solve all manner of issues in higher education, even the problem with adjunct teaching, the gig economy of academia — “when I look around my faculty, they spend a significant portion of their time acquiring their next temporary position, and that’s really a wasteful use of these extremely talented peoples’ time” — even though Woolf’s plan is also a gig economy. His answer to this detail is that the Woolf model will assure a steady supply of students for the independently-contracting academics to teach.

As of October 2018, Broggi was still confident in the blockchain approach — “We literally could not do what we are doing without a blockchain,” he told ABC News — though actual blockchain academic Michèle Finck told ABC she considered the project fundamentally “misunderstands what a university education is about,” and would be a GDPR disaster.

Broggi also stated at this time that tuition would be $5,000 per year — down from the $19,200 he had estimated in March 2018.

Perhaps it’s my limited imagination, but I fail to see how blockchain helps anything here. Broggi seems to be getting fired up about a tool (a bad tool) for managing payments to administrators, which is a bizarre focus for a university, but a pretty good one for a scam, where the money rolling in is all that matters. I’m trying to remember the 1980s when spreadsheets were all the rage…did anyone propose a Spreadsheet University, where everyone was excited about using VisiCalc to track budgets and grades? This is not to imply that blockchain has all the utility of a spreadsheet — it doesn’t — or that spreadsheets aren’t extremely useful for managing grades (I use them all the time), but that no one would look at a tool like that and say, “Hmmm. I am inspired to wrap a whole university in that, it’s far more important than trivialities like a curriculum.”

Poor Broggi. He seems to have lately realized that you shouldn’t name your scam “Scam University”, and “blockchain” has become synonymous with “scam”, so he’s had to delete the word “blockchain” from his promotional materials.

The word “blockchain” seems to have vanished from Woolf’s site some time between September 2018 and January 2019 — and the page title changed from “Building The First Blockchain University” to “Building a Borderless University.” The main headline is now “Not your typical online university,” and the front page speaks of video tutorials with a “real professor” and two or three students.

That leaves me wondering what makes Woolf University different from other fly-by-night student-loan-exploiting fake university out there. The answer is…nothing.

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Oh hey, speaking of fake universities, let’s check in with the University of Austin. June 2022 is a big month for them, because this is when they have their very first course offering, “The Forbidden Courses“. They’ve had to scale back a bit, unsurprisingly. The courses will not be held in Austin — they’ve rented some lovely spaces in Dallas for the whole thing. The “course” is all of 4 days long, and there are two course sessions…you could apply for both if you wanted. It is not accredited.

No, our program is not a credit-bearing or degreed program. Students may not earn continuing education credits, credit hours, or a diploma for participation in this program. Each course will occur over ten hours in one week.

The “course” itself is an incoherent schmear. They’ve gathered together a set of ideologues and told them, apparently, to talk about whatever they feel like. There is no clear theme, no synthesis, just third-rate conservative rock stars asked to talk at the students.

WEEK ONE

Niall Ferguson on free vs. unfree societies in the 20th century
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on free speech, religion, and women’s rights
Dorian Abbot on approaches to climate change
Rob Henderson on the psychology of social status

WEEK TWO

Kathleen Stock on varieties of feminism
Jacob Howland on ideology
Deirdre McCloskey on capitalism: catastrophe or triumph?
Thomas Chatterton Williams on black male writing from Richard Wright to Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are also “workshops”. It is not clear what they are workshopping.

WORKSHOP LEADERS
Arthur Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership, Harvard University
Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, New York Law School; former President of the ACLU
David Mamet, award-winning playwright and author; Pulitzer Prize winner
Peter Boghossian, Philosopher and Author
Bari Weiss, journalist and best-selling author
Carlos Carvalho, Professor of Statistics, UT-Austin
Joshua Katz, Classicist, Princeton University
Lea Carpenter, novelist and screenwriter
Edward Luttwak, military strategist and author
Joe Lonsdale, CEO of 8VC, Co-Founder of Palantir
Balaji Srinivasan, Angel Investor and Tech Founder
Maleka Momand, Co-Founder & CEO, Esper
Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Robert Steffens, Co President, Marvel Entertainment
Geoff Lewis, Founder & Managing Partner, Bedrock
Amber Allen, Founder and CEO, Double A Labs
Jack Abraham, Founder, Managing Partner & CEO at Atomic
Michael Solana, Vice President, Founders Fund

So you show up for one of these forbidden courses, and there’s a mob of like 20 professors waiting to divvy up the 10 hours of instruction, and each one has their own peculiar hobby horse they’re riding, and they anticipate a group of 30-40 students, and then what?

I looked at that mess and figured their student body was going to be tinier than they expect, except they did one thing exactly right. They are paying bodies to attend.

Due to the support of a generous grant from our donors, there is no cost to attend the program. Hotels, some meals, and activities are covered by UATX. A $300 stipend will be given to participants to defray costs from travel, some meals, and other incidental expenses. Any additional costs will be the responsibility of participants.

Whoa. I wish we could just pay our students to attend my university, and take care of their housing and meals at no cost. This is what you get when millionaires and billionaires back your efforts to destroy public education. I wonder what contribution Elon Musk made?

Roy Edroso speculates about future Depp projects.

Saucy Jack vs. The Sea Hags. The woke Disney corporation won’t revive the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise except in a feminazi version, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still have Johnny Depp riding the seven seas as legendary buccaneer “Saucy” Jack Grackle! In this totally separate and original IP he’s put on a little weight, but he’s still the drunk and disorderly rascal you’ve come to know and love. In his glad rags, mascara, and mannerisms he cuts a dashing figure and all the ladies love him — except for the Sea-Hags, an eighteenth-century gang of nasty women who, damaged by daddy issues, roam the high seas in search of psychic compensation and plunder. They despise Jack Grackle for his roguish masculinity and have vowed to sink his ship The Dark Gem and to literally emasculate him! But Jack leads them on a merry chase with much derring-do and CGI, ending in a literally ravishing, literally climactic physical struggle with Hag Queen Millie Bobbie Brown in which he shows her what “rolling in the deep” really means and makes everything work out! With several of Hollywood’s top young actresses as the Sea Hags (who, when they remove their spectacles and shake out their hair, are actually super hot) and, as Jack’s pirate gang, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro as “Half-Pint.” Special cameo by Tom Cruise as The Bitchmaster!

I like it. I wouldn’t watch it, but I appreciate the authenticity of his crew, none of whom could act their way out of a soggy, weevily biscuit. Reality is that while something that blatant wouldn’t get made, poor Johnny is going to have to resign himself to third tier movies and a lot of bad guy roles.

I also notice something in the comments over there: like me, a lot of lefties sat there quietly throughout the trial, doing their best to ignore it all. Maybe that’s not the best strategy? You think?

People were wondering why I put a picture of a Fight Club bar of soap on my post about Marcus Ranum. It’s because he’s a maker — he makes things like bars of soap. I should have just used my own bar of Marcus Ranum soap, but as you’ll see below, it’s been in my office gathering cat hair.

I also have one of his knives.

If ever I have to fight off a crazed attacker, that would be my weapon of choice. It’s wicked sharp and pointy. And then I could wash the blood off with a bar of soap.

Everyone, keep an eye on Marcus, he’s home alone.

Hey! Remember these hot news stories?

• The COVID pandemic? It’s still going on! We’ve got five times the number of new infections as this same time last year. No one cares.
• The war in Ukraine? There’s even more shelling of civilians now! No one cares.
• School shootings? Give it a week, we’ll stop caring about those, too. In a week, there will probably be a couple more, and we won’t even notice.

There are probably some other major events, but I forgot them.

Can an entire country, or possibly an entire species, come down with acute Alzheimer’s disease?

A few fleeting thoughts about these maps:

• I notice that the two states in which I lived the longest, Washington and Minnesota, are among the safest. Coincidence? I think not.
• I have driven across North Dakota and Montana and Idaho. Those bloody dark colors do not lie, although they and Wyoming are also among the more thinly populated states.
• What’s going on in the deep South? Those are places I’ve rarely visited, again suggesting the importance of my talismanic presence.
• Of course, everyone in Europe must be better drivers than most Americans. Or, possibly, they are sensible and don’t drive as much.
• I am intrigued by the mysterious vast empty space in the North Sea. Is it possible that a hidden land mass lurks somewhere in the open ocean there?
• Avoid Wyoming at all costs.