Aug 26 2025

from “The Homeless Adjunct”

“V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is because of the high price of college faculty. He has NO IDEA what he is talking about. At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs.”
…
“All around the country, our undergraduates are being taught by faculty living at or near the poverty line, who have little to no say in the way classes are being taught, the number of students in a class, or how curriculum is being designed. They often have no offices in which to meet their students, no professional staff support, no professional development support. One million of our college professors are struggling to continue offering the best they can in the face of this wasteland of deteriorated professional support, while living the very worst kind of economic insecurity. Unlike those communist countries, which sometimes executed their intellectuals, here we are being killed off by lack of healthcare, by stress-related illness like heart-attacks or strokes. While we’re at it, let’s add suicide to that list of killers — and readers of this blog will remember that I have written at length about adjunct faculty suicide in the past.”

Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university. …

Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money …

“Anything not immediately and directly related to job preparation or hiring was denigrated and seen as worthless — philosophy, literature, art, history.”
…
“So what is the problem with corporate money, you might ask? A lot. When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money. Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research. Corporations donate to departments, and get the use of university researchers in the bargain — AND the ability to deduct the money as donation while using the labor, controlling and owning the research. Suddenly, the university laboratory is not a place of objective research anymore. As one example, corporations who don’t like “climate change” warnings will donate money and control research at universities, which then publish refutations of global warning proofs. OR, universities labs will be corporate-controlled in cases of FDA-approval research.”

How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps

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Aug 26 2025

from The Fall of Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg

“Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself.” p2

Yes! All managers. Tend to forget they serve. Their job is to enable others to do their jobs well. They are merely facilitators, organizers—of resources, schedules, payments …

“Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties.” p2

“Generally speaking, search firms [for senior administrators] rule out candidates about whom anything at all negative is said when they investigate candidates’ backgrounds. This practice introduces a marked bias in favor of the most boring and conventional candidates.” p5

“… I am always struck by the fact that so many well-paid individuals have so little to do. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. … While these activities are time consuming, their actual contribution ot the core research and teaching missions of fthe university is questionable. Little would be lost if all pending administrative retreats and conferences, as well as four of every five staff meetings … were canceled tomorrow.” p41

“One activity with which underworked administrators can and o busy themselves is talk. … For example, at a recent ‘President’s Staff Meeting,’ eleven of the eighteen agenda items discussed by administrators at one Ohio community college involved plans for future meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings.” p42

Chap 3 “Managerial Pathologies” – sabotage, shirking, squandering …

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Aug 24 2025

from ” Required awareness to handle climate change is impossible” by Godofredo Aravena

“Based on my experience, average human has, let´s say, a six-dimensional perception of the world. Own body, family, house, job, grocery store (stores in general) and neighborhood. Anything beyond this limits, it is outside of a truly understanding (something happens out there, but nobody dares to find out what and how). Nation is a distant concept understood only because our job and family require some security provided by the concept of nation. Most people do not understand how the nation-system works. Water and electricity are there, always available. Food, at the grocery store. Job, a place to go and do something for what we receive some fiat money. Garbage, is taken by the garbage truck, to who knows where. Dirty water goes somewhere. Smoke vanishes into the air. Outside these limits, nobody knows what is really going on. Nobody knows how things happen.The mechanisms.We are unable to connect the dots. Concurrently, nobody knows their footprint and the effects of it to the rest of this world (present and future). Nobody cares.”
…
“We are just like those young sicarios (hired killers) that we see in Mexico, young boys (16-17 years old) with a gun, that can kill anybody without any remorse. Totally unaware of the consequences of their acts. Too immature. As our society today. Too much power, too immature to handle it.”

Required awareness to handle climate change is impossible

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Aug 22 2025

“… and when they notice the screams …”

“And we keep making these choices, every day, choosing dams over salmon, oil over whales, cars over polar bears, death over life. And when I say we keep making these choices, I do not mean you and me — we have essentially nothing to do with it — I mean the politicians and CEOs who run this country. They are killing the planet and, when they notice the screams, they turn up the volume on Fox News.”

The End of Civilization and the Extinction of Humanity

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Aug 21 2025

from Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn about Work from the People Who Do It, Karen Messing

First, note that the title really should be “…from the Women Who Do It”

Second, a great read along with Caroline Criado Perez’s “Invisible Women”

Chap 2 “The Invisible World of Cleaning” – very enlightening for those who’ve never had a cleaning job, including about the idiocy of those in management positions

“… the village where the women’s backs were all bent because their brooms were too short …”

“We concluded by suggesting that shoe who designed and built the train cars be required to ensure that their components could be easily cleaned.” p26

The bit about the one-size-does-NOT-fit-all garbage bags is sheer insanity—that has caused so much unnecessary pain! p29 (And yeah, if they’d been men, changes would have been made.)

And the idiot who thought mirrors on the walls in the lobby would be cool … yeah. He obviously never had to clean a wall of mirrors. p30

“Cleaners … were almost never consulted on the choice of flooring, wall, and furniture surface materials, yet they were blamed when the new black, rought-textured office furniture always looked dusty.” p30

DUH.

“… and would have suggested that they add a chapter on design of toilets.” p30

Indeed. Something I have often thought of, on my hands and knees, trying to clean around those knobby things and reach around the back and along all the curves and grooves … Why couldn’t the whole assemblage be contained in an easily wiped box thing?

Chap 3 “Standing Still – another great chapter that every bank manager and grocery store manager should read.

The whole ‘clerks and cashiers must stand’ is crazy and apparently only North American crazy. They can sit (ad presumably do their jobs just as well) in Greece, France, Italy, China, Sweden, Peru, Brazil, Thailand, and Cameroon. Even here in North America, toll booth clerks are able to do their jobs quite well while sitting down, so why the fuck do grocery cashiers have to stand 8 hours at a time??

“… the owner had bought beautiful new dishes that were much heavier than the old ones and their arms, shoulders, and backs were suffering. It was the same phenomenon we had seen with the cleaners—their supervisors, following their aesthetic impulses, had with one thoughtless act worsened the waiters’ everyday working conditions.” p53

Thoughtless. Every day.

“She [a hotel cleaner] also suggested that management think twice about such practices as offering clients with young children complimentary jigsaw puzzles with dozens of tiny pieces …” 61

DUH.

And the bits about attendants in nursing homes … p67-8

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Aug 18 2025

Dear Americans-who-blame-us-for-the-smoke

Dear Americans-who-blame-us-for-the-smoke:

“If Canada can’t get these wildfires under control, they need to face real consequences … We won’t sit back while our air becomes a health hazard.”

So says Rep. Calvin Callahan from Wisconsin and others from Iowa, Minnesota, New York, and North Dakota who filed a formal complaint. Against Canada.

Excuse me? EXCUSE ME??

You’re blaming US for the SMOKE? We should be blaming YOU for the FIRES!!

We’re ALREADY facing real consequences. Of YOUR behavior. And YOU apparently expect US to sit back while our climate becomes a health hazard!

Your complaints sound like something we might see from a third-world country that cannot educate its kids, not a country with the likes of Harvard and Yale. Do you really not know about climate change/global warming (better called, now, global heating)?

Who the fuck do you think is RESPONSIBLE for the fires? Not only here in Canada, but in Portugal, Spain, France, Greece, Australia … oh, and, the U.S. (so far this year, you’ve had over 43,000 fires; https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn).

I guess you don’t teach Science in your schools anymore, so let me explain the basics:

1. Engines that use oil (or coal or natural gas) exhaust carbon dioxide.

2. Carbon dioxide is a ‘greenhouse gas’, which means that just as glass keeps the heat inside the greenhouse, carbon dioxide keeps the heat inside our atmosphere.

3. When conditions are hot and dry, vegetation more easily ignites.

4. And fires are harder to extinguish.

5. Especially when there is no road access or firefighting infrastructure. (Have you even seen a map of northern Canada? The boreal forests? I guess you don’t teach Geography in your schools either. Canada is the second-largest country in the world, but almost half of that is remote and inaccessible forest.)

And although emissions from the U.S. have declined a bit, you are second only to China in terms of how much carbon you’re spewing into the world’s air.

Which is why THE FIRES ARE VERY MUCH YOUR FAULT.

(The two of you are competing for world domination, in the process destroying the world you hope to dominate. Imagine standing on a scorched earth with no water, no food, no nothing, fist in the air shouting “WE WON!” You are fucking insane, both of you.)

And as for the smoke …

6. Fires cause smoke.

7. Smoke is carried by wind.

8. Neither you nor I can control the wind.

9. As smoke travels, it sinks … more and more of it reaching breathing height.

These are facts. Not as in ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’. But as in ‘gravity makes things fall down, not up.’

But I get it. You don’t accept the facts. Because so many Americans lie. It’s the norm in businesss: almost every ad lies, and CEOs say whatever will maintain or increase profit. It’s the norm for politicians: consider your current president (who is, as we speak, destroying the evidence of global heating). It’s the norm online: ‘fake news’, ‘misinformation’, ‘a photoshopped image’ on social media—let’s call it what it is: lies. It’s all just lies.

And maybe that’s why you don’t accept the fact of global heating. But consider the list above. Do you really not believe that engines exhaust carbon dioxide? Get an air quality tester and see for yourself. Do you honestly not believe that things ignite more easily when they’re hot and dry? Do an experiment: in your bath tub, put two piles of leaves, one dry, one wet, and then drop a not-quite-extinguished cigarette onto each pile. Do you seriously not think that fires are harder extinguish when there’s no road access, no water access? As for carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas, okay, that one takes more knowledge about molecular structure than you or I have, but look online for scientists’ reports dating to the 1970s and 1980s, when such reports were more trustworthy. Because we’ve known this since then.

Furthermore, don’t you even trust your own experience? Or what people over 50 tell you? The summers ARE hotter; there ARE more heat waves. The droughts ARE longer. The storms ARE more severe. And there ARE more of them. It’s not ‘just the weather’. You dismiss it all as anomalies, but at some point (a point we’ve passed), anomalies become trends.

Okay, so, now that I’ve explained it, you know.

Now you can’t say “I didn’t know”.

You know now. You fucking know now what you’re doing, what you’ve done.

Every time you get into your car (transportation, 28% of emissions), every time you use electricity (25%), every time you buy shit you don’t need (industry, 23%), you turn up the heat. FOR ALL OF US.

It’s too late to make amends. (The damage has been done, and it’s irreversible.) But I doubt you’ll even apologize. You’re just not that mature.

Prove me wrong.

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Aug 16 2025

from The Hunger of the Wolf, Stephen Marche

“Capitalism can be good, proper, brutal fun, the biggest schoolyard game in the world.”

Indeed. Schoolyard.

“What do you think she would be like in bed?”
“I’ve nevr met her.”
“How would that matter?”

So telling.

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Aug 15 2025

from “Losing Earth” by Nathaniel Rich

from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

“The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.”

“Because of the lag between cause and effect, it was unlikely that humankind would detect hard evidence of warming until it was too late to reverse it.”

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Aug 05 2025

John Kerry on Trump (on Bill Maher)

“Trump responds more to his Twitter ‘likes’ than his briefing books and the Constitution of the United States.”

(And that was about his first term.)

“He has the maturity of an 8-year-old boy and the insecurity of a teenage girl.”

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Aug 04 2025

a few bits from John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

(a collection of pieces from his “Whatever” website at https://whatever.scalzi.com/)

“They don’t really advertise that they kill people,” said marine reservist Stephen Funk, about why he refused to report for active duty. “I didn’t really realize the full implications of what I was doing.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/2/03

responding to that, Scalzi says “You have to be a really interesting sort of ignorant not to know that the Marines kill people from time to time. Your first hint: The big rifle so many of those Marines carry around. …” p177

Agreed.

“This is what you get when the President of the United States is a man who has a level of self-introspection that is best described as canine …” p355

Love it. (And he was talking about George W.Bush)

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