College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.
When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions (“1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?”) I think you have an obligation to say, “Sir, I'm going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way…”
When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, “perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class…”
When you discover that one class after another has so many people in a giant room watching a tenured professor far far in the distance, perhaps you could mention the debt part to the dean and ask if the class could be on video so you could spend your money on interactions that actually changed your life.
The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.
“This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!”
Phi Beta Iota: Virtually everything we have been “sold” as essential (e.g. university credentialing, sub-zero fridges) comes with time-energy costs that are not known to the public. Now, increasingly, the true cost versus true worth of alternative time-energy expenditures (e.g. two years spent traveling around the world versus four years listening to tenured professors pretend to teach), is “visible.” 2012 could be the year of great convergence-emergence in which all of the pent-up possibilities of the Information Era begin to visibly drown all of the drawn-out losers of the Industrial Era.
Now that a few Democrats and the remnants of the AFL-CIO are waking up to the destructive impact of jobs offshoring on the US economy and millions of American lives, globalism’s advocates have resurrected Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter’s discredited finding of several years ago that jobs offshoring by US corporations increases employment and wages in the US.
At the time I exposed Slaughter’s mistakes, but economists dependent on corporate largess understood that it was more profitable to drink Slaughter’s kool-aid than to tell the truth. Recently the US Chamber of Commerce rolled out Slaughter’s false argument as a weapon against House Democrats Sandy Levin and Tim Ryan, and the Wall Street Journal had Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary, William S. Cohen, regurgitate Slaughter’s claim on its op-ed page on October 12.
I sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the editors were not interested in what a former associate editor and columnist for the paper and President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy had to say. The facade of lies has to be maintained at all costs. There can be no questioning that globalism is good for us.
Cohen told the Journal’s readers that “the fact is that for every job outsourced to Bangalore, nearly two jobs are created in Buffalo and other American cities.” I bet Buffalo “and other American cities” would like to know where these jobs are. Maybe Slaughter, Cohen, and the Chamber of Commerce can tell them.
Last May I was in St. Louis and was struck by block after block of deserted and boarded up homes, deserted factories and office buildings, even vacant downtown storefronts.
Michael Nasuti of Kabul Press recently published an article in which he calculated that killing each Taliban soldier in Afghanistan costs on average of $50 million to the US. The article, seemingly carefully. researched with all assumptions laid out so that anyone can examine them, is well worth reading. Nasuti, “Killing Each Taliban Soldier Costs $50 million.” He points out that at this rate, killing the entire Taliban forces (only 35,000) would cost $1.7 trillion, not a small amount for a country suffering from a severe economic downturn to spend on a war with no apparent purpose. And Nasuti's number, of course, assumes that they coud not be replaced faster than they are killed, but it appears that they can, easily.
Nasuti, who actually uses a “conservative” number (assuming that he has undercounted the number of Taliban casualties by one half), states that he had previously served “at a senior level” in the United States Air Force. He says,
The reason for these exorbitant costs is that United States has the world’s most mechanized, computerized, weaponized and synchronized military, not to mention the most pampered (at least at Forward Operating Bases). An estimated 150,000 civilian contractors support, protect, feed and cater to the American personnel in Afghanistan . . . The ponderous American war machine is a logistics nightmare and a maintenance train wreck.
Oil giant Chevron's new ‘We Agree‘ ad campaign recently made unintended headlines when notorious pranksters The Yes Men teamed up with Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch to release a simultaneous fake press release and website that mimicked Chevron's new campaign while derailing the company by calling it out for its alleged failures and mistakes.
The group has now launched the Chevron Thinks We're Stupid website, calling on all creative individuals to submit their own spoof Chevron ad, and join in the lambasting of the company for their greenwash.
Funny Or Die has stepped up to the plate with a hilarious rendition that nearly frame-for-frame lampoons one of Chevron's own commercials. The video not only mocks Chevron's useless dropping of key words like “renewable energy,” but also its character's bearded-in-denim imagery to appeal to environmentalists.
“Chevron is spending tens of millions of dollars on this ad campaign because it's easier than just making changes,” the impersonated Chevron employee says, admitting that really they just “think you people are f–king idiots.”
Source Home PageTowards a Curriculum for the Teaching of Jihadist Ideology aims to provide an introduction to the intellectual infrastructure of the jihadist phenomenon and the process of radicalization, and to furnish materials for a textbook primer to what is still largely an ideological terra incognita for the western reader. It is designed for the use of academics, security professionals, policy-makers and the general reader alike.
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[T]he work’s conclusions emphasize the need to avoid making assumptions based on old analytical habits, to study the wealth of open source information available on the ideology – which should be taken seriously and at face value – and to understand that the ‘Jihad’ is primarily a re-education endeavour and therefore very much a war of ideas. It calls for the improvement of both the quality and spectrum of research and analysis, preferably through a multi-disciplinary approach that can accommodate the return of the religious dimension to international affairs.
