Opinions, art, debate
Scammers enroll AI bots in online courses in community colleges in order to claim financial aid.
As a result, 25% of applicants to community colleges in California are now bots.
Will this finally put an end to the entire concept of online courses? Especially at community colleges where students (I mean actual human students) are signally unable to learn anything without being physically present in a classroom.
My Duolingo app tells me that the most popular Duolingo language in Sweden is … Swedish.
In somewhat related news, out of the 8 international students on my campus who had their visas revoked, 7 already have them back.
Very hopeful that we will finally start swimming out of the situation where prattling airheaded ladies with low IQs influenced our foreign policy because nobody cared to put them in their place.
This is the weakest novel in the Palliser series because the protagonist, Phineas Finn, is a trifling, uninteresting person. He is a young man with political ambitions but no money, so he runs around London trying to foist himself on some rich woman who can finance his career. Phineas Finn’s superficiality makes his endless “fallings in love” with one woman after another feel quite repetitive.
By the end of this coming-of-age novel, Phineas is thirty and finally, with enormous effort and endless whining, manages not to be a complete toad. That’s a great achievement for him but fails to impress readers used to Trollope’s complicated, deep, and admirable male characters.
It’s still a good novel that I enjoyed because of the humor, the language, and the quirky portrayal of England’s political system. But I hope nobody makes it the first Trollope novel they read because it’s not representative of how strong the rest of his writing is.
All true but so incredibly slow. Not an expert in sight to explain what’s happening, leaving Trump to unravel this, veeeeery sloooowly by himself.
This is a result of wiping out the very class of experts who are not political operatives. There should be people who provide expertise in their highly specialized field without using this as an opportunity to foist their political opinions on everybody. Such experts used to exist. One example is Philip Bobbitt from whom I first found out about the hollowing out of the nation-state by neoliberalism. He advised several US presidents on the subject.
Nobody can be knowledgeable on everything. The world is complicated and is not growing any simpler. There should be experts. People who love what they do more than they love their often inane political opinions. But we left the age of Philip Bobbitt and entered the era of Timothy Snyder, a brilliant historian who abandoned the discipline in which he was the brightest star and became a dime-a-dozen political operator.
People often say that COVID killed the idea of a trustworthy expert class. This is entirely untrue. The people who lied to us were not the experts but the bureaucrats and the journalists. The entirety of my knowledge of what COVID actually was came from the habit of reading one scientific study per day in the first few months and per week later on. The experts were always extremely helpful. Real science revealed the truth. Real science made it abundantly clear by April 15, 2020 that children were at no risk. By mid-May of 2020, real science made it clear that, unless you were elderly, morbidly obese or extremely unwell, you weren’t going to die of COVID. So no, experts did not fail.
Leaving that aside, it’s tragic that there’s nobody to advise Trump on such things as the Russo-Ukrainian war. He’s figuring it out but at a snail’s pace because it’s not an easy topic and nobody should be expected to understand it without learning a lot of the backstory.
Virginia Giuffre, one of the most consistent and public accusers of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, committed suicide.
We will never know the names of the pedos that Epstein served or see any arrests. Every witness and accuser will get suicided before that.
RIP Virginia. Hers was a truly tragic life.
The “Maryland Dad”, the “deported 2-year-old citizen”, and the “judges get arrested in dictatorships” media blitzes demonstrate that our media space is still completely colonized and controlled by the most dishonest of liberals. These stories are built on egregious lies, yet they spread like wildfire, infecting every news platform and discussion space.
None of this is surprising but the number of normal, good people who still take these stories as literal truth and question nothing about them is. Nothing has inoculated them from placing complete trust into the media that lied to them so many times before.
People who are that incapable of learning will not do well in the economy that demands constant change and pivoting. Forget neoliberalism, I don’t understand how these people live in capitalism, period. Do they buy everything they see advertised? Do they get new cars on lease? Do they only pay the minimum payment? How do they make their childish trust survive in the world ruled by the profit motive? I love capitalism but it’s a system that is not kind to the very trusting.
During the debate about the future of our department today, I said that if the merger with another department was inevitable, I wanted to derive as many good, useful things from it as possible.
My opponent looked at me with sincere pity.
“That’s not how life works,” she said. “We don’t live in the land of pink unicorns. Not everything has a positive side. That’s not how life is.”
That is how my life is, actually. I decided a long time ago that it is like that and that’s how it became.
The colleague in question is a good person. I’m not criticizing her but pointing out how different people’s life philosophies are. I like my land of pink unicorns and I’m staying in it.
Only in the past 12 months, I’ve had a lot of heavy stuff to deal with. COVID, foot injury, diabetes, a cancer scare,* surgery, the administration trying to close down languages, the prospect of having to look for a new job. I could sit here and weep and feel sorry for myself with every justification. But pink unicorns demand care and attention, so I’m distracted from the unpleasant parts.
*of the same cancer in the same spot of the same body part where my mother was diagnosed a month earlier. I’ve received all clear but those were unpleasant 3 months.
What really happened?
A mother took her toddler to her country of origin. This is the huge scandal. If the mother had chosen to transition the toddler to a boy, that would be great. But traveling with her to Honduras, no, that’s very wrong. Please keep track.
Every propagandist is posting a tiny snippet of the story because the truth is inconvenient.
The closing speaker at the large meeting we had today was a white woman who said that her biggest dream is that in 20 years there would be significantly fewer white people on campus. All of the white people sitting next and in front of me clapped.
Please, Lord oh God, grant me the patience and enough feelings of charity.
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