Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable.

Everybody who is actually working in education (as opposed to blabbing stupidly about it) have been saying this only from the beginning of the MOOC idiocy.

The problem is that all you need to understand that MOOCs are hopeless is to be a teacher. But it’s very hard to explain to a non-teacher why this was a dead-end project from the start. You can’t scale teaching. Just like you can’t scale dentistry, no matter what Dr.Phil with his online clinics will tell you. You can only teach when looking people in the eye and engaging with them as individuals. 

One of the greatest principles of teaching is: if you don’t know a student’s name, you aren’t really teaching him.

Some people have absolutely no shame. What kind of a stupid prick do you have to be to appropriate the name of the Black Lives Matter campaign to make some idiotic point about a country you understand as little as all of the other countries you stupidly blab about?

Of course, this “Yves Smith” person is actually a former (yeah, right) Goldman Sachs employee. It’s quite obvious she is being paid to discredit Liberalism by posting these silly and hysterical posts under the guise of a progressive blogger with a French (seriously?) name.

Rand Paul declared that parents own their children.

Everybody with a functioning brain gagged.

When will this silly bit of fluff finally remove itself from public view and let adults engage in politics? His Daddy issues are beyond boring.

Republicans have decided to blame their plummeting relevance to the young on scary, evil professors. Scott Walker has started making some silly beatings about the need to burden professors with so much teaching that they have no time to think or learn. Obviously, there is nothing such professors can teach anybody but that’s precisely the point.

Remember what I told you about political parties that will try to hang on to power by offering  $19.99 solutions to complex problems? This is one example.

The $19.99 parties are doomed, and this plan by the hapless Walker is really doomed but, in the meantime, the especially facile will feel relief. The easy, snappy solution has been found! The nation-state is crumbling because Daddy (professors are obviously representatives of the symbolic father) is not working hard enough. Let’s force Daddy to provide, and everything will be right again.

But adults don’t get a Daddy to provide for them. They get to grow up and provide for themselves. And Scott Walker can’t give you a Daddy provider, no matter how much you whine and beg.

We are facing an enormous global transformation, and populists like Walker and Syriza are just wasting our time with their empty promises to turn back the clock and undo globalization, the information revolution, the Internet, the digital technology, etc. Walker, Syriza and Putin are peddling a fantasy where all of these developments can be taken back but that fantasy is silly, childish, and escapist.

I wish more idiot Russians came over to the blog and I could insult them in a wide variety of languages like I just did with a freak who has the gall to identify as “Russian_and_Proud.”

Russians, do me a favor. Come here and be kicked and humiliated by me. This makes me feel good. I know many languages, and I can swear like a drunken sailor in all of them.

Any decent person who has the great misfortune of being Russian experiences shame and horror today. It took my husband a month to write a letter to the Russian Embassy because he’d get to the phrase, “I, such and such, am a citizen of the Russian Federation” and just couldn’t proceed. Because he’s normal and he’s ashamed of belonging to such a horrible country and such horrible, vicious people.

The Clinton result is hardly surprising, more interesting is that 77% of these 18-34 year

-olds cannot name either of their US senators. The finding provides fodder for the suggestion that millennials are relatively uninformed political citizens

.

Oh, come on. I couldn’t name my senator either. I suck at names. It sometimes takes me a moment to come up with my own name, so what? Do I look very uninformed about politics?

People are not good at memorizing stuff that can be found on Google within seconds, so what? How is that an indication of anything?

Syriza came to power on a lie. It’s promising to preserve the nation-state, and the nostalgic voters are so ignorant and deluded that they believe it is possible to check out of the rest of humanity and preserve a little secluded nation-state paradise in Greece.

Of course, there is enormous hypocrisy in this position. The Greeks are just as post-nation as anybody else. They sigh for the nation-state handouts yet agree that the defense of their nation-state should be a burden carried by the NATO.

We will now see many of these “parties of the especially infantile” who promise their voters that it is possible to preserve the goodies of the nation-state without having to experience any discomfort to do that. These parties or political leaders of the infantile will promise easy, snappy, pain-free fixes to the decline of the nation-state: abandon the Euro zone, refuse to pay debts, expel immigrants, create a multipolar world, cut governmental waste, etc.

The voters will love these easy, convenient, pain-free solutions because the logic of the market has taught them that a consumer should always have such solutions to extremely complex issues available for “three easy payments of $19.99”.  They are rebelling against the logic of the market that has robbed them of their nation-state, yet they are doing it within the logic of the market. And this tells us just how useless their struggle is.

So we keep hearing how Republicans are all for “small government”, right? And there are enough idiot losers out there to believe that shit. So the idiot losers go and elect the “small government” Rauner as the governor of Illinois. And what does the “small government” Rauner do the second he gets into office? Right you are, he starts spending even more of taxpayers’ money in a broke state on bureaucrats:

Bruce Rauner keeps calling for “shared sacrifice” to get Illinois out of its huge financial hole, but his message sounds a tad hypocritical now that we know the sacrifices don’t apply to his staff.

Nine of his top 10 staffers are being paid more than their counterparts in Gov. Pat Quinn’s office – anywhere from 11 percent to 94 percent more. In dollars, it’s an extra $380,000 for those positions.

Up to 94% more! If this isn’t an egregious case of governmental waste, I don’t know what is.

I find it unbelievable that anybody voted for this stupid lying crook.

Fox News did a very bizarre thing today. A newscaster narrated the recent video where ISIS burned a Jordanian man alive in a cage. The viewers weren’t shown the video. The newscaster described it, frame by frame, in painstaking and horrible detail.

I have no idea what the point of this activity was. Is describing horrible scenes in minutest detail supposed to be less traumatizing than showing them? Was this an equivalent of a trigger warning a la the Republican crowd?

The TV where this was broadcast was placed right in front of my Helix at the gym so I had to stay there for the whole thing. By the end of the newscast, I discovered that I was running 2,5 times faster than usual on the Helix.

I just saw a terrifying video of the Russian soldiers shelling an apartment building in the Ukrainian city of Uglegorsk.

“We were told the building is full of Nazis,” a fat Russian standing next to a tank calmly explains. He looks extremely bored with this excuse.

The so-called “Ukrainian separatists” all speak with very distinctive Russian accents that nobody in the Donetsk and Lugansk areas could even imitate successfully.

The next step for the Russians might be Kharkov, the city where I grew up. I have no idea how I will be able to deal if that happens.

It’s taking those American weapons way too long to arrive. Putin already has all of Russia convinced that nobody but the NATO Nazis are fighting on the Ukrainian side.