“DISECONOMIES OF SCALE” IN HIGHER ED. Higher ed is so screwed up it seems to have managed to make economics work backwards.
Archive for 2025
December 3, 2025
GREAT GIFT: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 16GB (newest model). #CommissionEarned
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES: Resist the AI apocalypse: Students want to be ‘capable humans, independent thinkers.’
Like many other humanities professors, he’s retooled his classes. “An A.I.-resistant English course has three main elements: pen-and-paper and oral testing; teaching the process of writing rather than just assigning papers; and greater emphasis on what happens in the classroom,” Rotella writes.
Professors are using more short quizzes to hold students accountable for doing the reading. He now tells students to “scan and turn in their mark-ups — underlinings, marginal notes, highlighting — of the hard copy they’re reading, which is as close as I can get to watching them think as they read.”
Some “emphasize teaching the process of writing — breaking it down into a series of steps that a teacher can see and respond to — rather than simply grading the product.”
Rotella has students write brief responses to the reading that can be turned into first drafts and then final drafts. Reading all the drafts is more work for him, but it means he’ll notice if the final paper doesn’t reflect the student’s thinking. He’s also added “a conference in which the student tells me about conceiving and writing a paper.”
Smart.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Minnesota Added To Trump's Third-World Travel Ban https://t.co/wGLQSNrheV pic.twitter.com/XceWzmNeLB
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 2, 2025
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:
🚨#BREAKING: An 18 year-old in Charlotte NC is being held on a staggering $5.3 MILLION bond after he was charged for 16 (!!!) shootings across Charlotte.
This is his 3rd arrest in 3 months…
…AS AN 18 YEAR-OLD!!!
Due to Iryna's Law, he's being held in jail. pic.twitter.com/bKu380iseL
— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) December 3, 2025
YOU GOTTA PUMP THOSE NUMBERS UP, THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS IN THIS RACKET, TIM: Californians Scoff: Tim Walz Is Amateur Welfare Fraud Hour Compared to Gruesome Newsom.
IT ISN’T REALLY ABOUT DENZEL: Washington’s Spending Train Is ‘Unstoppable.’
WELL-KNOWN: Childhood instability accelerates women’s sexual strategies, study suggests. “Faster strategies align with earlier sexual debut, more short-term mating, more lifetime partners, and more offspring at younger ages. Slower strategies align with later sexual debut, safer reproductive behavior such as monogamy and contraceptive use, fewer lifetime partners, and greater parental investment.”
IT’S COMPLICATED: The H-1B Scam. “I think the $100,000 via application fee should kill most (but not all) the abuses. Another reform could be to set a minimum threshold of a $150,000 salary for an H-1B job, which will probably price Cousin Sanjay out of the market. And more scrutiny from the three agencies involved in the H-1B process (Departments of Labor, Homeland Security and State) should help cut down the chain migration problem.”
Lots of good info at the link.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: NYC principal denies request for Holocaust survivor to speak at school: ‘Given his messages.’
A Brooklyn middle school principal denied a parent’s request to have a Holocaust survivor speak to students about antisemitism — saying the victim’s pro-Israel views are not appropriate for a public school.
MS 447 Principal Arin Rusch wrote to the parent Nov. 18 claiming Nazi labor camp survivor Sami Steigmann’s opinions would not be “right” for the Boerum Hill school.
“In looking at his website material, I also don’t think that Sami’s presentation is right for our public school setting, given his messages around Israel and Palestine,” Rusch claimed.
“I’d love to explore other speakers,” she said, insisting that lectures about the Holocaust — the Nazis’ slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II — and combating antisemitism are still welcome.
Steigmann, 85, does not discuss the Israel-Hamas war on his homepage or in his bio.
During some posted online lectures, he makes it clear he’s a proud Jew who supports Israel and the Jewish state’s right to defend itself from enemies such as Hamas.
“What’s happening in the Middle East, we will prevail. We will win,” he said in a lecture posted on YouTube. “In every generation they tried to annihilate us. We prevailed.”
HOW IT STARTED: Trump Is the New FDR.
Progressives have long pined for another FDR. Here in the first couple of months of 2025, they’ve gotten one.
President Trump’s mad opening dash is like nothing we’ve seen since Franklin Roosevelt’s historic first 100 days.
It’s a cliché to say that we live in an unprecedented era, but it’s not the first time we’ve had a frenetic, action-oriented president who cares more about the results than the rules and, oh yeah, is interested in serving more than two terms in office.
Like Trump, FDR was an improviser who didn’t sweat the details and a big personality who prided himself on his showmanship and never displayed anything other than supreme confidence in public.
Like FDR, Trump doesn’t quail at remaking the economy on the fly and can’t stand judges who get in his way.
Obviously, it’s a mistake to exaggerate similarities between the patrician Democrat who overcame polio and drastically increased the size and power of the American state, and the billionaire Republican who, tariffs aside, has been a deregulator and tax-cutter.
—Rich Lowry, NRO, April 9th.
How it’s going: Maddow Suggests Trump’s America Is Akin To Japanese Internment.
MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow traveled over to CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday for a three-segment interview that concluded with her hyping her new podcast about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, which she and Colbert suggested is analogous to the present day.
Colbert set Maddow up by asking, “You have a new podcast. All right. Burn Order. It’s about the Japanese internment in the U.S. in the 1940s. You’ve said that history is here to help in times of crisis. What is the story of Burn Order, and how does that history help us now?”
Maddow began her reply with a history lesson, “So, when we went to war with Japan in World War II, there were zero Japanese Americans who worked as spies for Japan. There were zero Japanese Americans who participated in any sabotage or helped Japan in the war against us in any way. There were some people in this country who were spying for Japan, but they were generally white, homegrown American fascists who liked Japan for the same reason they like Germany and Italy. Like there really—Japanese Americans were not implicated in any bad stuff at all, and military intelligence knew it, and the DOJ knew it, and the FBI knew it.”
In other interviews, Maddow has more explicitly compared internment with the Trump Administration’s deportations efforts. However, unlike Japanese Americans during the war, illegal immigrants have, by definition, done something wrong by being in the country illegally.
—Alex Christy, NewsBusters, today.
Tacitly admitting there’s a new FDR at the helm, Maddow is arguing that America is once again at war, but not everybody in her party has gotten the message:
INSANE
Democrat Jack Reed dismisses criminals smuggling illegal drugs into the U.S. as not "narco-terrorists," just people trying to make money.
"Usually, people are not significantly involved…It's the way they make money." pic.twitter.com/8xIrMG1mtn
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 2, 2025
Maddow herself envisions an enemy much more underpowered than they actually are: Rachel Maddow Has a Theory for Why Trump’s Targeting Totally Innocent Fisherman in Rowboats.
.@Maddow https://t.co/1ayNnLFhzX pic.twitter.com/3Y7vITf5Fr
— Dr. Richard Harambe (@Richard_Harambe) December 3, 2025
Related: Fascist Government Shows Its Authoritarianism By Responding to Voters’ Wishes.
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BECAUSE ORANGE MAN BAD: Why Is The Washington Post Defending the National Guard Shooter?
‘SUE-AND-SETTLE’ HONEYPOT FOR LEFT LAWYERS EXPOSED: Such a deal! Sue EPA on behalf of the Sierra Club or one of its radical enviro competitors, EPA agrees to do whatever policy or regulatory change Sierra Club demands in return for settlement, Congress has nothing to say in the process, and, oh yes, taxpayers cover your legal fees.
SPACE: Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples.
The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life. As part of the ongoing study of pristine samples delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft, three new papers published Tuesday by the journals Nature Geosciences and Nature Astronomy present remarkable discoveries: sugars essential for biology, a gum-like substance not seen before in astromaterials, and an unexpectedly high abundance of dust produced by supernova explosions.
Scientists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found sugars essential for biology on Earth in the Bennu samples, detailing their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system.
For life on Earth, the sugars deoxyribose and ribose are key building blocks of DNA and RNA, respectively. DNA is the primary carrier of genetic information in cells. RNA performs numerous functions, and life as we know it could not exist without it. Ribose in RNA is used in the molecule’s sugar-phosphate “backbone” that connects a string of information-carrying nucleobases.
It’s almost as though the solar system was wired to produce life.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Josh Shapiro angrily reacts to how he’s portrayed in Kamala Harris’ new book.
Shapiro knew that I would take one more run at his thoughts about Harris. What he didn’t know was that early copies of her book were then making the rounds among reporters. Having obtained the relevant sections of 107 Days that morning, I asked Shapiro if Harris had given him any heads-up about her book. She had not, he said. Then I told him that Harris had taken some shots at him.
Shapiro furrowed his brow and crossed his arms. “K,” he said.
The man I observed over the next several minutes was unrecognizable. Gone was his equilibrium. He moved between outrage and exasperation as I relayed the excerpts. Harris had accused him, in essence, of measuring the drapes, even inquiring about featuring Pennsylvania artists in the vice-presidential residence; of insisting “that he would want to be in the room for every decision” Harris might make; and, more generally, of hijacking the conversation when she interviewed him for the job, to the point where she reminded him that he would not be co-president.
“She wrote that in her book?” he said in response to the claim concerning the residence’s art. “That’s complete and utter bullshit.”
“I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies,” he added.
After reading Harris’s book and talking with people from both camps, I found descriptions of the meeting to be mostly consistent. Shapiro arrived in an edgy mood, chafing at efforts among fellow Democrats to sabotage his tryout. (Shapiro, who is Jewish, was especially irked by anti-Semitic innuendo from the left.) The two skipped past any semblance of small talk and Shapiro proceeded to interview Harris, rather than the other way around. “I did ask a bunch of questions,” Shapiro told me, sounding exasperated. “Wouldn’t you ask questions if someone was talking to you about forming a partnership and working together?”
What seemed to bother Shapiro, more than any one detail, was Harris portraying him in ways consistent with the whispers that had dogged him throughout the vetting process and throughout his career: that he was selfish, petty, and monomaniacally ambitious. Given that they’d known each other a long time—“20 years,” Shapiro said with a groan—I asked whether he felt betrayed.
“I mean, she’s trying to sell books and cover her ass,” Shapiro snapped. The governor stared past me now, shaking his head. As I began to ask a different question, he held up a hand. He looked disgusted. With me? With Harris? No, I began to realize: He was disgusted with himself.
“I shouldn’t say ‘cover her ass.’ I think that’s not appropriate,” Shapiro said. His tone was suddenly collected. “She’s trying to sell books. Period.”
With Minnesota’s huge Somali welfare scandal going viral this week, this headline from People magazine in September of 2024 certainly has aged well: Kamala Harris Says Picking Tim Walz as Running Mate over Other Strong Candidates Came Down to a ‘Gut Decision.’
GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY:
USPS EV fleet behind schedule with $3B in taxpayer funds spent — and only 612 trucks built https://t.co/0vJI3TJ2DK pic.twitter.com/amrTr3vSO2
— New York Post (@nypost) December 2, 2025
It’s a Biden-era program, so good luck figuring out where the money really went.
I CAN IMAGINE QUITE A BIT: Imagine There’s No Socialists. I Wonder If You Can.
DUCK AND COVER: Scientists discover 53 powerful quasars shooting out jets up to 50 times wider than our Milky Way. “These monster objects, known as Giant Radio Quasars, are part of a clutch of 369 radio quasars recently discovered by Indian astronomers in data collected by the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT), an array of 30 parabolic dishes located near Pune, India, as part of the TIFR GMRT Sky Survey (TGSS). The TGSS covered around 90% of the celestial sphere above Earth, with the telescope’s wide-sky coverage and high sensitivity making it the ideal instrument to spot distant gigantic radio-emitting structures like Giant Radio Quasars.”
BACK TO THAT TENNESSEE SPECIAL ELECTION ONE MORE TIME:
Some will be mad at me for this but I say it out of love for our country… We won the TN special election by less than we should have.
If you’ve been to this area, you know it should have been a blowout. And this isn’t a knock on Matt Van Epps. He had lower name ID to begin with…
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) December 3, 2025
Key takeaway: “We need to right the ship or voters will sink our ship in 2026. Enthusiasm from 2024 is gone. The blind trust is gone. They want action. The people in Congress need to realize that they aren’t Trump and he isn’t there to carry them on the ballot in 2026. They need to deliver now. And even then we likely have to run ‘26 like a Presidential election with Trump going around the country.”
A special election with a radical and unappealing Dem in an R+10 district should have been a blowout, but Democrats are angry and energized — while the RNC seems largely oblivious. The RNC needs to wake up, because not even Trump can be everywhere and do everything.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend writes:
You know what I think people are missing about the special election in TN? Not unlike NYC, Nashville is now filled with both 20somethings who really cannot afford to live there and are susceptible to all this affordability nonsense and blue state migrants who are gonna import their politics. Both are more highly motivated to vote in these special elections. As for the former: elite overproduction is a thing. Lots of these 25 yo folks who hit all the marks and got their NYU degree are pissed when they look around and see some dude who went to Alabama or Tennessee and studied accounting or see trades people earning more than they are tending bar. Then I think their impulse is to go into politics and figure out how to expropriate it.
Yes.
I WONDER IF THOSE OLD WEAPONS PIPELINES ARE STILL UP AND RUNNING: Is Ireland About to Erupt Into a Civil War Over ‘Illegal Immigration’?