Category — Higher Education

Keep in mind this actually did happen.

This is someone who was moving from an insurance claims office.

This is how I imagine this conversation went:
Walmart Employee: ‘Hello ‘dis be Walmarts, how can I heyp you?’

Customer: ‘ I would like to order a cake for a going away party this week.’

Walmart Employee: ‘What you want on the cake?’

Customer: ‘Best Wishes Suzanne’ and underneath that ‘We will miss you’.

STOP LAUGHING! They are products of our public schools.

If the Boston Globe describes the tax to as “how to strangle an economy”, then it must be a good idea. When did the fish-wrapper ever care about that? And why should these schools be “exempt” in the first place?

Dr. Lawrence Britt is a Secular Humanist which explains his reluctance to include any of the Marxist/Communist/Progressive governments engaged in heinous conventions. There cannot be any argument that all Islam incorporates this definition; they define the term. Additionally, he says nothing about Woodrow Wilson or the biggest fascist in this hemisphere, FDR.

Ah yes, he incarcerated (interned) about 120,000 Japanese, 62% (74,400) were American citizens. Furthermore, in the early ‘30’s FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court to overrun the Constitutional dictum on the Separation of Powers. All to get his socialist New Deal policies operating.

I ask that the reader look at the actions of the Soviet Union with the following in mind. Examine China too, along with Cuba, Venezuela.

The U.S. Congress of today regarding the disparagement of the wealthy and ideas about corporate “patriotism” a la Obama attain the true bill describing Fascism.

One finds that all countries may flirt with fascism at times. Those that have a strong constitution and follow that will step back. The shredding the document by redefining it as one “needs” removes the restraining chains, giving freedom to the slippage. Today’s Congress, particularly the House, exhibits many symptoms.

General characteristics of a Fascist Country

1. Fascism is commonly defined as an open terror-based dictatorship which is:

• Reactionary: makes policy based upon current circumstances rather than creating policies to prevent problems; piles lies and misnomers on top of more lies until the truth becomes indistinguishable, revised or forgotten.
• Chauvinistic: Two or more tiered legal systems, varying rights based upon superficial characteristics such as race, creed and origin.
• Imperialistelements of finance capital: Extending a nation’s authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political domination of one state over its allies.

Though a dictatorship is the most common association with fascism, a democracy or republic can also be fascist when it strays away from its Tenets of sovereignty. In the 20th Century, many Fascist countries started out as republics. Through the use of fear, societies gave up their rights under the guise of security. Ultimately these republics morphed into Fascist states.

2. Fascism is an extreme measure taken by the middle classes to forestall lower-working class revolution; it thrives on the weakness of the middle classes. It accomplishes this by embracing the middle-class’ love of the status-quo, its complacency and its fears of:

1. Generating a united struggle within the working class
2. Revolution
3. Losing its own power and position within society

In a more simplistic term the people currently in control fear that if they allow equal rights and equal consideration to those being oppressed, they will become oppressed and lose everything. Generally those in power are of a smaller segment of society, but they hold the wealth and control of key systems like manufacturing, law, finance and government position, [snip]

In reality it is the oppressors’ fear of retribution by the oppressed that perpetuates fascism; for justification they dehumanize, demonize, strip them of rights, add new laws, restrict movement and attempt to control them by whatever means possible to prevent an uprising. It is very common in a fascist system to have the oppressed referred to as sub-human, animals, terrorists, savages, barbarians, vermin or any other term designed to create justification for the acts of terror and fascism perpetrated on the oppressed. [snip]

Propaganda also empowers the oppressors with elitism racially, socially, intellectually and/or spiritually.

The 7 conditions (Warning signs)that foster & fuel fascism are:

Instability of capitalist relationships or markets
The existence of considerable declassed social elements
The stripping of rights and wealth focused upon a specific segment of the population, specifically the middle class and intellectuals within urban areas as this the group with the means, intelligence and ability to stop fascism if given the opportunity.
Discontent among the rural lower middle class (clerks, secretaries, white collar labor). Consistent discontent among the general middle and lower middle classes against the oppressing upper-classes (haves vs have-nots).
Hate: Pronounced, perpetuated and accepted public disdain of a specific group defined by race, origin, theology or association.
Greed: The motivator of fascism, which is generally associated with land, space or scarce resources in the possession of those being oppressed.
Organized Propaganda:

a) The creation of social mythology that venerates (creates saints of) one element of society while concurrently vilifying (dehumanizing) another element of the population through misinformation, misdirection and the obscuring of factual matter through removal, destruction or social humiliation, (name-calling, false accusations, belittling and threats).

b) The squelching of public debate not agreeing with the popular agenda via slander, libel, threats, theft, destruction, historical revisionism and social humiliation. Journalists in particular are terrorized if they attempt to publish stories contrary to the agenda.

3. Fascism dovetails business & government sectors into a single economic unit, while concurrently increasing in-fighting and distrust between the units fostering advancement towards war.

4.

• Fascism promotes chauvinist demagogy, (appealing to the prejudices and emotions of the populace) by fostering selective persecution and accepted public vilification of the target group. It then promotes this a “patriotic”, “supportive” or “the party line” and disagreement with such as “anti-government”, “anti-faith” or “anti-nation”.
• Fascismcreates confusion through “facts”. It relies on junk science, revisionism, the elimination of cultural records/treasures and obfuscations to create its case and gain acceptance. Fascism can also combine Marxist critiques of capitalism or faith based critics of the same to re-define middle class perceptions of democracy and to force its issues, confuse logic and create majority consensus between targeted groups. This is also referred to as creating a state of Cognitive Dissonance, the mental state human beings are most easily manipulated.

5. Both middle and upper-middle-class dictated democracy and fascism are class dictatorships that use organized violence (verbal or physical) to maintain the class rule of the oppressors over the oppressed.

The difference between the two is demonstrated by the policies towards non-lower-working class classes. Fascism attains power through the substitution of one state’s form of class domination with another form, generally a middle class based republic segues into an open terrorist dictatorship, run by a few elite.

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism

by Dr. Lawrence Britt

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14-defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism -
   Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights -
   Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause -
   The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military -
   Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism -
   The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media -
   Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security -
   Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined -
   Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected -
   The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed -
    Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts -
    Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment -
    Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption -
    Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections -
    Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Commentary - Melanie Scarborough: Stop throwing tax dollars at well-funded colleges

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - When a friend’s daughter was in town a couple of years ago visiting American University, where she had been accepted as a freshman, I showed the girl — a California native — the sights of Washington, D.C.

As we crossed the National Mall, she asked me what that big building was at the end. I told her it was the Capitol, and she asked, “What’s that?” I explained that was where Congress meets, and she asked, “What’s that?”

The girl was weeks away from graduating from a swank high school, had been accepted into a supposedly competitive university, is the daughter of parents with post-graduate degrees … and she’d never heard of Congress.

I would have assumed she was an anomaly or blamed the California school system if I hadn’t heard similar comments from other young people who attend top-rated high schools in Virginia, such as the daughter of a co-worker who mentioned a classmate visiting Europe — “one of those places that starts with an A.” Amsterdam? Austria? Antwerp? “No,” she said. “I think it was Alcatraz.”
[snip]

So you wonder why they put pictographs on the Mickey D’s cash registers?

When Bush said the illegals were doing jobs Americans won’t do, I thought he meant won’t. He didn’t, he meant CAN’T. There is a large group of Illexicans working fast food. I guess they’re smarter, they know what the pictures mean.

The failure of secondary education means that a college degree is roughly the equivalent of what a high school diploma was a generation ago. Consequently, college instruction is not necessarily higher education; in many cases, it’s remedial, with universities having to teach freshmen basics they should have learned in ninth grade. Employers know that, which is why even the most menial of jobs now requires a college degree — spawning lower-tier state universities that are essentially seat-selling operations.

For example, at Radford University in southwest Virginia, the average SAT score for incoming freshmen is a meager 990. Only 6 percent of students graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class; 28 percent finished in the bottom half.

Yet Virginia taxpayers send about the same amount of money to Radford ($58 million in fiscal 2009) as they send to the College of William and Mary, where the average SAT score is 1350, and 85 percent of students were in the top 10 percent of their class in high school.

The demand for more college seats creates a demand for more financial aid, and Congress blithely complies. Last week, the House passed a measure to spend an additional $20 billion on financial aid to students — the biggest boost since the G.I. bill of 1944. It did so not only without asking whether all the students eligible for financial aid need to be in college, but whether the colleges they will be attending need the additional money. [snip]

This is why we are heading for a recession? When this great waste arrives at the end of the tracks, you will see a train wreck bigger and longer than the Great Depression.

I hope we can hang those responsible.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is spewing his usual nonsense on illegal immigration.  But here’s an interesting tidbit that veers outside his usual claims of racist inspired hate:

Here’s the problem. The naysayers once again let their fear of what could happen blind them to the fact that, well, it already has happened. 

When lawmakers proposed a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, the naysayers reflexively called it “amnesty” — which is, in essence, what we have now.

When lawmakers proposed offering that path to young people who pursue higher education, the naysayers called it — wait for it — “amnesty” — and imagined a scenario where illegal immigrants would attend U.S. colleges and universities, which is what happens now. 

According to Mr. Navarrette, if a law doesn’t stop an illegal activity, it should be legalized.  We share the roadways with drunk drivers despite the law, so why not legalize driving under the influence?  After all, we aren’t stopping it.  Why waste the time and effort, right?

However, what he doesn’t consider is that although we may not stop an activity, we certainly don’t want to provide incentives for it.  For example, allowing illegal immigrant children to attend college for free, which is what need based financial aid will produce for people with little to no documented income, provides a hell of an incentive for more illegal immigrants to cross our border.  This is especially true when you look at all the citizens, AKA people who are actually suppose to be here, who graduate with 10s of thousands in student loan debt. 

Besides, even if these proposals weren’t encouraging more illegal immigrantion, we are under absolutely no obligation to make criminals’ lives easier.  What next?  Proposals to make thieves bank vice presidents.  This is a nation of laws.  Get real.

This is remarkable; finally, here is Gov. Spitzer saying that the elementary and secondary schools have dumbed down the students about as far as they can.

The solution is of course a liberal one: more money. However instead of fattening up the NEA’s coffers, Spitzer is proposing that the colleges provide remedial course work.

This is tacit admission that the K-12 teachers cannot perform their task of imbuing their charges with a desire to learn, they are not instructing them in the rudiments.

New York isn’t alone; Vermont too has pseudo-adults exiting 12^th grade, who will not get into college, for they can’t read at a level to get or keep a job. Ask not about math. Tossing this into the colleges will dumb them down further, a BA is equal to a high school diploma, A BS is rare; now grad degrees are the acceptable level for employment.

Governor To Bet Billions on SUNY

Colleges Eyed for Role in High Schools

Envisioning a dramatically greater role for universities and colleges in the remedial education of secondary students, the Spitzer administration is planning to pump billions of additional dollars into the State University of New York and the rest of New York’s higher education system, sources said.

A higher education commission appointed by Governor Spitzer in May is discussing a concept called “education empowerment zones,” which would provide financial incentives for colleges and universities to collaborate with public high schools and middle schools. [snip]

In doing so, the commission is hoping to combat a persistent problem: More than half of students entering community colleges require math and reading remediation.

The emerging recommendations appear to represent a second costly prong in Mr. Spitzer’s education strategy.

“They seem to be assuming that despite a massive increase in K-12 aid, they are still going to have a large number of kids in need of remediation,” the director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy in Albany, E.J. McMahon, said. “It should come out of the school district’s share of the tax dollars. We shouldn’t be spending more on top of more to get less.” [snip]

This mess falls on those who embraced the “better way” 45 years ago. No phonics, “new” math, the absence of history and civics became the curriculum in the mid-‘60’s. With this step down, most teachers didn’t get a basic education. Every year ejects a class of students less equipped to accept the role of educators. The newly minted teachers who are less equipped to teach with broad knowledge impairs the next group. This is the reverse side of this counterfeit coin.

The obverse side of this coin is the parent, who learned in this black hole of education. The necessity of a high achievement curriculum for many parents is not in their experience.

Before the roar of outrage commences, look at who promotes public schools and who sends their kids to private/parochial education. I’ll leave it to the reader to do the spade work, but here’s a hint. It isn’t the family living in a trailer.

It is axiomatic that 50% of the teachers graduated in the bottom half of their class. Someone also had the privilege of occupying last place. If you are going to say “So What” then you won’t mind having the doc who played golf through med school be your chest cutter for your triple bypass; same goes for any other skill. You insist the Volvo mechanic is top notch. If this shoe fits, corns you should get!

More money is not the answer. Go back to basics and test for knowledge. Get rid of the liberal trash of diversity and multiculturalism. None of that makes a difference if one cannot add and read.

A number of fiscal storms are brewing in MA. Let’s start with the health care reform law, which as predicted here, will consume more and more of our tax dollars:

“Clearly, what’s going to have to happen in the long run is more money will have to be injected in the program,” said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped to write the state’s plan. “We don’t have to in the next year or two, but if you look five or 10 years down the road, if this program is going to continue to exist, it’s going to take more money to keep it going.”

Next, we visit the Tip O’Neill Tunnel. Sadly, it’s consuming our tax dollars just like its namesake did as Speaker of the House:

Some 500 leaks at the roof-wall joints in the Tip O’Neill Tunnel have never been sealed by contractors despite widespread knowledge of the problem as far back as 2001, state officials said. Money disputes and infighting among contractors essentially caused work on those fissures to come to a halt more than a year ago. The work was further delayed by the fatal Interstate 90 Seaport connector ceiling collapse.

And if those aren’t big enough albatrosses around taxpayers’ necks, there’s always our governor:

Efforts to repair bridges are included in Gov. Deval Patrick’s $613 million plan to improve the state’s transportation infrastructure. The upgrades are included in Patrick’s $12 billion spending plan that includes funding for higher education facilities, housing and environmental protection.

I doubt that figure includes the cool $1 billion he wants to give the state’s biotech companies. It’s also interesting to note the 2 pieces of the Patrick campaign you don’t hear a lot about anymore—property tax relief and trimming waste from government.

Add it all up and it’s probably time to join the MA refugees who fled to other states.

It’s not a good sign when the AP headline announcing Governor Deval Patrick’s selection for chairman of the state Board of Higher Education starts with the phrase “Democratic Loyalist…”   Without reading a single sentence of the article, the AP spills the beans on this quid pro quo hack appointment.   And sure enough, it doesn’t take that long to start untangling this web: 

He’s a former director of the Massachusetts State College Council of Presidents, and a former trustee of Bridgewater State College, whose president, Mohler-Faria, is Patrick’s top education adviser. As trustee, Clark voted to promote Mohler-Faria to president.

However, let it be known he was only selected after a nationwide search determined he was the most qualified candidate.  Yeah, right.

Senate bill allows in-state tuition for illegal aliens

HARTFORD — Calling it an investment in Connecticut?s future, the state Senate Friday adopted a bill that will allow illegal immigrants to attend public colleges at in-state tuition rates.

If GOP Gov. M. Jodi Rell lets the legislation stand, Connecticut will become the 11th state to approve such a plan, which proponents argued was only fair for children brought her illegally by their parents, but who can contribute much to the economic health of Connecticut if the path to higher education is smoother.

A recent study found Connecticut is an aging state that will continue to be dependent on the influx of immigrants to offset low birth rates and fill jobs. The Pew Hispanic Centers estimates there could be up 100,000 illegal immigrants in Connecticut. [snip]

State Sen. Majority Leader Martin Looney, D- New Haven, said the students who will benefit “are as thoroughly American” as their classmates, many of whom have gone through Connecticut schools for 12 years. [snip]

In what gated community does Looney live? Does he have any kids in public schools?

We are coming to a time when all conservative and libertarians will need to get out of New England. Take their businesses and money and give it the Ward Bond shout.

After that, we need to fence it off and give it a big spritz of Raid. Follow that up with a DDT dusting to finish off the hardened pests.

Sterilization via the nuclear option is NOT considered bad form either.

The Board of Higher Education thinks letting illegal immigrants get in-state tuition is just dandy because it’ll generate an estimated $2.5 million in extra revenue.  But are taxpayers incurring $5 million in additional costs to generate half that much in revenue?  I’m not a venture capitalist investing during the Dotcom boom after all.  Show me the profit figures because revenue isn’t relevant if you’re claiming an economic benefit.

And if our universities really need more students, why not offer the children of NH residents working and paying taxes in MA legally in-state tuition?  But all we want to do is take those people to the cleaners with as little return benefit as possible.  Write, call, or fax your local representatives and let them know you don’t support in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.