At least for one video, after a long absence. Guess what has motivated her to speak up?
As always, she’s forthright and blunt — hers is a voice I’ve missed for some time.
I’m just sitting here, behaving myself, writing some stuff this morning, when my wife gets up and says those words:
“Happy Anniversary!”
What? No! I forgot! Aaieee, I’m a bad, bad husband. I’m a trite cliche from a misogynistic cartoon. I hadn’t even thought…
It completely reset my brain. I had to think for a few minutes. What day is it? What year is it? When did I get married? It was so long ago! Deep breath. Deep breath. It’s no fair slapping me with arithmetic when I haven’t even finished my cup of coffee!
OK, let’s think. It is…16 March, 2018. We got married on…16 March (Damn! She’s right!) in 1980. That makes it 38 years…whew. At least it’s not one of the big round numbers. Think, think, think.
“Yes, happy anniversary! Shall we go out for dinner tonight? There’s that Thai place in Benson we’ve never been to before.”
She accepts! Score! Brain saves the day! This is clearly why humans evolved these large cerebral cortices, precisely for the purpose of thinking flexibly on the fly and coming up with solutions in moments of dire distress.
Just look at what’s being done to the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.
Many professors in Wisconsin saw their fears of a 2015 change to state tenure law realized last week. That’s when the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point announced its plan to cut 13 majors — including those in anchor humanities departments such as English and history and all three of the foreign languages offered — and, with them, faculty jobs. Tenured professors may well lose their positions.
Here’s what’s being cut:
The shock was part size, part substance. Cutting 13 majors — in any disciplinary area — is significant. But the cuts are concentrated in the humanities and social sciences, raising serious doubts about the institution’s ability to deliver on its liberal arts mission. Here is the full list of nixed majors: American studies, art (excluding graphic design), English (excluding English for teacher certification), French, geography, geoscience, German, history (excluding social science for teacher certification), music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology and Spanish.
Note that what’s being demolished isn’t the whole program in those fields — just the possibility of majoring in those disciplines, which means that these fields of study are being reduced to support programs for more valued programs, which happen to be the sexy and more readily vocational STEM side of campus. So students won’t be able to drink deep from the well of English literature, but they’ll just get little bit of exposure they need for their computer science degree, which ain’t much. They’ll still keep a few English professors around, but they aren’t going to be happy with a job that is reduced to teaching a few low-level service courses to biology and physics majors who resent being there. As for the other disciplines…chemists and auto mechanics don’t need no music literature or philosophy or art. They’ll wither and die.
UWSP is going to be reduced to a vocational college.
The plan is part of the campus’s Point Forward initiative to stabilize enrollment by investing scarce resources into programs Stevens Point sees as distinctive and in demand. Those include business, chemical engineering, computer information systems, conservation law enforcement, fire science and graphic design.
Business schools don’t even belong in a university. Those other majors certainly are legitimate and useful, but they are all specifically applied skills, which is fine, but they aren’t going to have the depth that I expect out of a university’s curriculum.
The key phrase there is “scarce resources”. They aren’t that scarce, they’re just not given to universities by the state as part of an ongoing strategy of gradually starving education out of existence. Wisconsin has just lurched farther ahead in this destructive program than other states, but Republican legislatures everywhere would love to cut the education budget and use it to pay off lobbyists and their own election campaigns.
It’s not just UWSP. You know they’re also gunning for the jewel in the crown of Wisconsin’s educational system, UW Madison. UWSP is just a harbinger for every other college in Wisconsin and the country.
You’d think this would be a straightforward crime to interpret. A woman, Emily Javier, is fed up with her boyfriend, Alex Lovell, who spends all of his time playing video games, and further, she suspects he’s been cheating on her. So she buys a samurai sword, tapes it to the side of their bed, and in the middle of the night, while he’s sleeping, starts hacking him up.
At this point, I’m thinking she’s a terrible violent person, she deserves to have the book thrown at her, what a ghastly crime. But then the boyfriend, who did survive with some serious injuries, opened his mouth.
When police did arrive at the scene on March 3, they found Lovell curled up in the blood-spattered bedroom, according to the probable cause affidavit filed by police in Camas, a Washington state town northeast of Portland, Ore. Remarkably, he survived the attack despite serious injuries. Lovell almost lost the index, middle and ring fingers on his hand. But in interviews this week, the competitive gamer sounded happy to be alive.
“I was just so proud for beating this samurai wannabe crazy lady with hate in her heart,” the 29-year-old told the Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’ve been preparing my whole life for something like this.”
Javier — who pleaded not guilty this week to first-degree attempted murder, according to the Columbian — had also allegedly been preparing.
Alex Lovell — known as “Biggie” in his local gamer scene — is an avid player of “PlayerUnknown’s Battleground,” a multiplayer online fighting game. As he told the Oregonian/OregonLive, Lovell has been recently logging 12 to 13 hours a day playing the game. The regimen also required “exercises for his hands, wrists and shoulders and also practicing mouse moves and techniques to maximize performance,” the paper reported.
“I wasn’t a sweaty nerd, more of an Ethlete,” Lovell told the Oregonian/OregonLive.
And with that, I changed my verdict and started thinking it was more of a justifiable attempted homicide. They better keep me off the jury.
Yes, you’re all right. That last line was making light of what was done to Lovell, which he did not deserve at all, no matter how smug he seems. I apologize for a bad joke.
Washington state is exactly like this, too, but there we had a strict policy that when you were asked about the state, you’re just supposed to say, “It rains all the time.” Now Oregon is bragging openly.
Oregon, do you want Californians? Because this is how you get Californians.
Oh my god. Jesus. Holy fuck. I’m reading this critique of Jordan Peterson by Nathan Robinson, and at every paragraph all that’s running through my head is expletive-laden expressions of disbelief. It’s not at what Robinson says, though — it’s because he has taken Peterson very seriously indeed, gone back to his first book, quotes extensively from it, includes some of the diagrams, and also transcribes some of talks, so the article is like a mega-dose of Petersonisms so thorough that you’re not going to be able to claim these are out-of-context excerpts that distort his meaning. There is no meaning there.
Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.
You have to read the transcript of his lecture about a children’s book to believe it. It starts off with Peterson reading a few lines about feeding a dragon pancakes, and then he meanders off into this long twisty anecdote about how he and his wife were taking care of some kids and they had to give them lunch and one of the kids wasn’t enthusiastic about eating but they were having none of that and then it segues into this totalitarian morality play.
So, we bring all the kids to the table and they’re sitting around and they’re having lunch and the rule is, as I said, eat what is in front of you and be PLEASED AND HAPPY ABOUT IT.
Oh, you better. Because Jordan Peterson is going to sit there for four hours poking your face with a spoon if you don’t eat it all up, and he expects to be able to control your thoughts about it, too. And then the story ends with the kid’s mother coming to pick him up and Peterson is visibly furious about this anecdote from years ago because the mother was far more casual about forcing the kid to eat than he was, and he’s now calling that mother the dragon who probably ruined the kids life. It’s nuts. You can watch the performance, and it’s horrifying. He is supposedly talking about his book, Maps of Meaning, and analyzing this children’s book, somehow, yet he spends 17 minutes in this incoherent angry ramble about a trivial incident that he has stuffed full of nefarious meaning in his head.
I read one chapter of Peterson’s latest book and was dismayed and incredulous that this guy is considered a popular, serious scholar. Nathan Robinson dug deep and reviewed a mountain of Peterson’s work, and I don’t know how he did it. I hope he’s OK.
That one chapter was enough for me to see that he was a worthless pseudo-intellectual. But then, I’ve been reading intelligent design creationism crap for years, and have learned to spot a fraud pretty quickly.
The news has been full of destructive people who have stupidly made fools of themselves — real chumps. And they’ve deserved it.
Betsy DeVos. She got in front of the television cameras and spoke to Leslie Stahl, and revealed that she is the perfect person to implement Trump’s scheme to destroy American education.
All this proves that it is sheer (if perhaps unintentional) genius to have DeVos, who married into the Amway fortune, in her role in the Trump administration. If this is the caliber of the top education official in the land, it hardly speaks well for getting an education. People could quite reasonably conclude that education isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and they wouldn’t go to all the trouble of attending school.
As it happens, this is exactly what Trump needs to secure the future of his political movement. For Trump, the fewer people who get an education, the better off he will be. Exit polls showed a huge education gap in the 2016 election. College graduates favored Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points, while those without college degrees favored Trump by eight points. That 17-point gap was “by far the widest” dating to 1980, according to the Pew Research Center.
Matt Heimbach. This may be the most spectacular flameout in ages. Heimbach, a proud neo-Nazi and founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, was caught boinking his mother-in-law by his father-in-law and wife, and was arrested for domestic assault. The police report is like a caricature of redneck America.
Down to the Walmart! Sex! Trailers! Familial affairs! And there’s a video recording!
Dennis Alexander. He’s the reserve police officer who was supposed to be teaching a gun safety class in a high school (why?), who pulled out a handgun to show the students how to properly handle it, and ended up shooting the ceiling and injuring three students. It was such an effective demonstration of why guns are absurdly dangerous, even in trained hands, that I’m sure Alex Jones is going to come along any moment now and declare it a false flag operation.
Alex Jones. He’s being sued by Brennan Gilmore.
On Aug. 12, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was tragically killed and at least 19 others were wounded when a driver plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during the weekend of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, the close-knit college town where I went to school and where I live now.
I saw this happen right in front of me. To me, it was clearly deliberate. I captured that horrible moment on my phone’s camera, shared the video with police and posted it on social media. Not long after that, I was verbally attacked by Infowars’ Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists, who wanted to portray me as a “deep state” operative motivated by a desire to undermine President Trump and his administration. As a result, my family and I have been attacked and threatened.
That’s why I’m suing for defamation.
The only question in my mind is why he wasn’t sued into oblivion long before this. This is what he does for a living: he makes up horrible conspiracy theories about the victims of crimes. His schtick is to lie to his massive audience about “crisis actors” and claim that the families of murdered children profit from the tragedy.
Also mentioned is Gateway Pundit, another scurrilous source of fake news.
Even mine! But I feel obligated to read them and maybe even take an occasional token poke at the worst of them.
The good news is that Conor Lamb has officially won a special election against a fervent Trumpkin in Pennsylvania.
Voting for Saccone is exactly what the president wanted his supporters to do. Trump cared enough about Saccone winning that he joined him on the campaign trail multiple times and sent Vice President Mike Pence and members of his family, including son Donald Trump Jr. and daughter Ivanka Trump, to stump.
He even pushed a controversial announcement on steel and aluminum import tariffs so it would land a week before the special election.
None of it worked.
Trump voters ended up either staying home or proving they could just as easily cast their votes for a Democrat with the right message, especially when Trump wasn’t the candidate on the ballot.
It’s a loud clear sign that Trump’s influence with the electorate is waning. However, I still worry — the Democratic party has a tendency to get over-confident and blow it in the long run. I don’t want us to be thinking we can sail to victory. I want Democrats to be worried.
Crys and William have reacted to the news of the death of Stephen Hawking, and I have little to add except that he was a man who earned respect for both his contributions to science and his struggle against a debilitating disease. Also, he had a sense of humor.
