What I like about talking to a mortgage specialist is that now they say things like, “Without a down payment, there’s nothing to discuss” and “If your credit score is under 640, we’ll have to end this conversation.” I don’t know how serious they are about it, but at least they now show a willingness to be more serious.

I’ve got to tell you, folks, there’s got to be something seriously wrong with a system where a person who

a) defaulted on a card;

b) has a history of missing 1-2 payments in a row;

c) is very much into the concept of minimum payment;

d) is genetically predisposed to be irresponsible with money;

e) is a wastrel of major proportions

has a higher credit rating a person who

a) never defaulted;

b) never missed a payment;

c) has always paid every single balance in full;

d) is extremely responsible and careful with money;

e) embraces a Spartan lifestyle.

It is obvious that the system that calculates these ratings is primitive, doesn’t take into account some pretty obvious variables, and is going to make a wrong judgment more often than a correct one. So the events of 2007-8 are not at all surprising.

“While claims for victimhood used to be in the past not so well-regarded phenomenon, sometimes even viewed as a sign of inadequacy and failure, now they are power tools. . . Victimhood has also been absorbed by an all-encompassing consumer society that is eager to experience safely controlled aseptic “emotions” but that does not have the taste to analyse the implications and contradictions behind them” (45).

Cazorla-Sánchez, Antonio. “From Anti-Fascism to Humanism: The Spanish Civil War as a Crisis of Memory.” Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion. Ed. Aurora G. Morcillo. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014. 21-50.

This is very interesting. I never looked at the enjoyment of victimhood as a way of experiencing emotions in a controlled and “safe” way, but this analysis makes sense. Remember the idiot we discussed the day before yesterday? The one who thinks his cushy office job is “like slavery”? This is definitely somebody who is terrified of reality and is borrowing the emotions and experiences he saw in some stupid movie to pretend like he is alive.

There are people who think that paying $12 to see a movie about slavery purchases them the right to speak in the name of a slave.

A talented blogger writes about a new fad in education methodology:

The “flipped class” is too traditional.  It had its moment, but the buzzword has been around for a few years now.  Years!  And think about what the term evokes.  We flip burgers.  We flip pancakes.  Red meat and carbs.  Things that are bad for you.  Is that what we want for our students?

Anyone who is serious about better teaching has abandoned the outdated “flipped” class and is embracing the scrambled class.  What are the virtues?  First, it’s new.  That’s important.  Second, we will pretend that it is radically different.  Third, everybody will have to buy new books and software to do this, and pay fees for the workshop presenters and consultants who will help institutions to implement this model, so that’s important.  The scrambled class is in the most rapid revenue-generating stage of the obsolescence cycle.

So true. All of these flipped, scrambled and hard-boiled classrooms are nothing but an excuse for lazy, useless administrators to justify their stupid existences and for textbook publishers to sell more air.

Just look at these idiots who are coming up with all the flipped and scrambled teaching methods. The most recent one is introduced at IHE as follows:

Pamela E. Barnett is associate vice provost and director of the Teaching & Learning Center at Temple University.

Associate vice provost, got it? A provost is a  pro-vice-chancellor. So an “associate vice provost” is a vice-vice-vice chancellor.”

I wonder how many adjuncts have to be exploited to give this stupid parasite her enormous salary.

Any school that hires crowds of administrators and gives them these ridiculous titled to make them feel important should be ashamed of themselves. This is a disgrace, and what is more disgraceful is that IHE is publishing the rantings of these losers as if they could ever contribute anything of value to the learning process.

And the saddest part of all this is that I’m sure that crowds of facile idiots will be in a rush to demonstrate their servility to Ms. Vice-vice vice and start reporting on how they are trying this ridiculous method she invented and how it changed their lives.

And now I’m going to make some Jewish penicillin for my ailing husband*. I’m sure everybody knows what that is, and it shouldn’t be a riddle, right?

* He has a dislocated disc in his spine, which is not normally treated with penicillin, but hey, it isn’t like anybody has ever been hurt by the Jewish version of this medicine.

When I was a kid, it was “Eat your vegetables. Think of all the starving kids in India.” (I never really understood the connection. My response was, “Then send the vegetables I don’t eat to those starving children.” But I digress. . .)

Really?? Wow, some experiences do translate across cultures and oceans. I was also exhorted to eat (not vegetables because there were only potatoes and cucumbers, but to eat, period) in the name of the starving kids. My “starving kids” were never in India, though. They were in Africa and the US.

Did you have this experience? Where were your “starving kids” from?

“So are you planning to celebrate St. Valentine’s?” I asked my students in class.

“No! Bleh! We hate it! It’s almost as bad as Thanksgiving!” they responded in unison.

After that, all they wanted to do is discuss how much they hate this holiday, and it took me a while to get them to settle down and talk about types of rhyme in Spanish poetry.

Question: Why do my students hate St. Valentine’s so much?

Hint: No, it isn’t because they don’t have a date. Would I ask a question that has such a boring answer?

BFF suggested the following as a wedding dress for me:

I could totally see myself in it. BTW, I’m buying a house and having a wedding. Because why the hell not?

“He’s just like these creepy guys who try to pick up chicks in bars!” a student excalimed after we read a sonnet by Gongora in the carpe diem tradition. (For the Spanish speakers, the sonnet in question is “Mientras por competir con tu cabello.”)

I pretended to lack knowledge as to what went on in bars.

Capitalism in the West and especially in the United States is basically dead. It has turned into a government-sponsored griftopia where a small filthy rich class with government sanction uses their control over capital to force the worker class to turn over the majority of the wealth they produce to their owners. For the majority of workers it is little different from slavery, except that you can choose slavemaster A or slavemaster B.

Whenever I read this kind of thing, I always wonder if the author of these words would have the courage of his opinions to approach a black person and say, “Oh, your  ancestors were slaves? That’s totally like working in a warm, cozy office 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I, like, totally know all about slavery because I once had an office job.” I mean, if he really believes what he is saying, then it shouldn’t be a problem, should it?

These spoiled little losers keep whining about the imaginary horrors of their useless lives and imagining themselves as some sort of heroes who bravely resist great adversity. It would be funny if it weren’t so offensive.

If you manage to get through the rest of the article by this intellectual impotent, you will see that it contains an absolutely hilarious explanation of why Soviet economy failed. The idiot’s answer: because consumers couldn’t provide enough feedback.