“The government is paying for the medical services so they have the right to dictate details of those services,” said Justice Kagan today. If you hear this and still think that universal healthcare is a great idea, then I refer you back to my post about calcified brains.

“But would you rather an insurance company did the dictating?”

Yes, you absolute child. Of course, I would. An insurance company wants to make a profit. Its motives are economic, not political or ideological. It’s a catcher of coins, not souls. It might very well stiff you. But it has no power or interest to unperson, jail or torture you for thought crimes.

I’ll take my chances with the insurance company any time.

Our course offerings in Spanish used to take 2,5 pages in the online catalogue. Now they take one page. The size of the page didn’t change. Neither did the number of students. We simply are offering a lot fewer courses at every level.

This is happening because we have fewer people teaching. Faculty retired. Lecturers had to be let go. We used to have 5 Spanish lecturers. Now we have zero. Again, the enrollments are robust. This isn’t COVID either. In the Fall of 2020 I had 3 lecturers in Spanish and scrambling to hire one more. In a little over a year, we went to zero even though – and I repeat – we have more students.

The “free college,” of course, has had a devastating effect. I asked somebody with access to the depths of our college’s budget, “is it true that there’s no money or are they lying to us?” This is a very left-wing person who’d never lie to cover up for the administration. He said, “I’d love to tell you these bastards are lying but it’s unfortunately all true. There’s really no money.”

I’d love to discuss this with somebody but it’s impossible because people have memorized the word “adjunctification” and will keep repeating it stupidly long after every non-tenured worker is fired.

In the meantime, the catalogue looks like a cemetery, and the offices would be empty even without the quarantine. The little plaques by the doors still have their names but the people are gone.

And this gem is from Kagan:

“The best way for people to prevent spread is to get vaccinated. ..second best is to wear masks.”

Somebody will come out with the seatbelt analogy any second now. This is the entirety of the repertoire of the early dementia patients these days: smallpox and seatbelt analogies.

I have zero hope for today’s SCOTUS debate on the constitutionality of the COVID vaccine mandates. These are pretty old people on the court. There’s very little chance that they will figure out that these vaccines work very differently from the polio or measles vaccines AND that they’ll be able to process that these vaccines don’t stop infection and spread.

Sotomayor has already asked how “a human spewing virus is different from a machine spewing sparks.” As one’s brain ossifies with age, one begins to perceive the world through analogy. Everything gets referred back to one’s past experience. Everything is “just like.” Accepting that anything can be genuinely new means facing that one is outdated, possibly even mortal. And no, not every old person is like that. There are rare but important exceptions. For the most part, though, this is exactly how it works. If you don’t subject your brain to rigorous daily training in processing new information from new sources, you will become that sad old fart who “justlikes” every conversation into the ground.

One what? Menstrual cycle?

These absolute clowns.