CSU: Milk Is Racist

By Professor Doom

     I don’t mean to pick on California, but they just keep making standout innovations in insanity that I feel the need to highlight.  Today I see an article from California State University’s Long Beach student paper and…well, let’s just get to it, with the article beginning with the usual claptrap

It may not surprise you that the United States was founded on racism. That every institution we uphold has racist roots that are sometimes difficult to catch and even harder to fight against. This phenomenon affects our voter ID laws, state testing and,  yes, even our federal dietary guidelines. But how can our health guidelines, a system meant to be built upon scientific fact alone, have racist messages? Where there is a deep-rooted tradition to suppress an entire race’s existence, there’s a way.

--to be fair, the first slaves in the New World were Irish, and yes, that includes 17th century Americas, and certainly the period where this nation was being founded.

      This whole “everything is racist” mantra just strikes me as completely self-defeating. If it’s all racist, all the time, then it’s pointless to do anything about it. Granted, this point of view means you can constantly complain about everything all the time, and, inevitably, ask for government support. It must be time to complain about milk:

The federal endorsement of milk in American diets contributes to the problem by uncritically pushing people to drink milk, despite the potential detriment it has on non-white people’s health.

     Hey, milk has potential detriments to white people’s health, too. I mean, seriously, milk is high in fat (bad for you!), high in calcium (that’s what clogs your arteries), the cows are pumped with hormones to produce milk (some of that has to be passed on to the drinker), and I’m sure I could point out some other problems with it as well. I’m not trying to scare anyone, but milk is the stuff that turns tiny little cows into big fat cows in just a few years…it’s not outrageous to consider the possibility that obesity as well as quite a few other significant health problems affecting Americans could be traced back to excessive milk consumption in the modern way. Unfortunately, when you view everything through the narrow ideological lens so popular on our campus, seeing the big picture is impossible.

     Let’s try to follow the argument here:

Our current federal dietary guidelines urge people to drink three cups of milk a day, according to the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The main health benefit of milk is to guard against osteoporosis, a disease that weakens your bones — hence the “stronger bones” rhetoric.

    The Official Government Recommendation (and anyone over the age of 30 who blindly accepts any advice from the government is a fool) isn’t just for people of certain colors…it’s for everyone. How is a recommendation for everyone, even a quite possibly bad recommendation, racist?

While this is a very practical health benefit, osteoporosis affects Africans at a significantly lower rate than it does most Americans, according to an article on Mother Jones.

     The Mother Jones article being referenced here is over a year old. I’d never read anything from Mother Jones, but I’d been warned it was a Left-wing hate site. Truth be told, the student’s article is basically a rehash of the Mother Jones article. One snippet from Mother Jones:

Yet the federal government's dietary recommendations don't account for such distinctions. And that omission, she says, amounts to something like discrimination. "What has happened is the medical community has universalized the particular biology of [Caucasians],"

     Seriously, the racism here is ridiculous. The idea that non-white people (particularly the Africans pointed at by Mother Jones) are so incapable of making decisions for themselves that a blanket recommendation could harm them is just  insulting. It’s such a non-issue anyway: the federal guideline (paid for by the milk lobby, I’m sure) is three glasses of milk a day, and I doubt many drink quite that much.

     Ok, back to the student piece and it’s railing against the racism of milk:

These seemingly coincidental acts of racism are backed by the way milk continues to be represented in American diets…Remember that this is the dietary guidelines for Americans. I want to emphasize that last word. These guidelines are for Americans.

.     So, um, can white people be Americans? It’s jaw dropping that this sort of stuff gets printed, even in a student newspaper, without someone pointing out obvious flaws.

These differences are now leaving the world of health and spilling into our political and social lives. Milk has now become a symbol of racial superiority for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, claiming that their ability to process milk makes them racially superior.

      It’s so weird how the media keeps bringing up Neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Estimates of serious practitioners of neo-Nazism or whatever in the US are 10,000 people or less, at absolute most, country wide. Usually when they have parades and such, only a few hundred people show up. And yet we have endless articles telling us to follow the Leftist ideology, to protect us from these statistically insignificant groups that don’t represent any sort of meaningful threat in any way. You’re more likely to be killed by lightning than by a Neo-Nazi, by many multiples…and yet the incredible dangers of lightning just don’t make the news nearly as often.

      Weirdly, the student contradicts herself in her closing “argument”:

And while there is little logic to the train of thoughts involved in choosing the next inanimate face of racism, our country’s health guidelines certainly take part of the blame for this one.

--Emphasis added; realize, she just chose milk as the next inanimate face of racism here. Little logic there, indeed.

     She basically admits her whole argument is rubbish. I would go further, and say there is NO logic in her choosing milk as an “inanimate face of racism” (where do they even get such phrases?). How did this article get published?

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

-- Ronald Reagan

     It’s not racism, kid, it’s called government, and, I promise you, this isn’t even close to the first time the government has made a decision detrimental to its citizens. The bad advice isn’t racist, it’s just how government works. We shouldn’t continue with the hopeless cause to end racism, as even the “racism hunters” admit, everything is racist, always. On the other hand, we do need to work to reduce government.     

     Unfortunately, such a concept is complete anathema to those who embrace the “everything is racist” ideology, as they perpetually propose more government solutions to the endless “problem” of racism.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Standardized Test Bubble to Pop?

By Professor Doom

      “Fill in the bubble” tests have been a fact of life in our government-run school system for a generation or two now. I certainly remember taking them every few years, and then the biggie, the SAT, in my last year of high school.

     Like everything government-run (see also: vaccinations), the bureaucracy has imposed ever more burdens on the victims trapped in the system. Students in government controlled schools now begin their year with a government mandated pre-test, end the year with a post-test, take a skills test every year in grades 3 through 8, and also another such test in high school. And now there’s the PARCC test, one more comprehensive high stakes test that means absolutely nothing for the student.

      Oh, in addition to all these bureaucracy-imposed tests (which can’t count for a grade, due to the wait times involved from the bureaucratic grading system), students also have to deal with the “normal” tests, quizzes, and assignments in their classes. All those standardized government tests assume the test-takers actually give a damn about tests which don’t matter for a grade, even though the test-takers obviously have to decide whether to study for the useless test, or the assignments that count for something. They need a bit of motivation, right? 

      How do you motivate students? By making the tests “high stakes.” But as test after test after test is stacked up on the student, convincing students every test is “the most important test, EVER” gets ever more difficult.

     One question never asked about all this is the profit motive for these tests. There’s big, big, money in testing. I, and many academics I suppose, have made money setting up test banks and submitting questions and such…but the testing companies make bank on this. We have what, 100,000,000 kids trapped in our schools? Charge $5 a test and that’s half a billion dollars…subtract off the hundreds of bucks you need to hire a professor to make the problems, the million dollars you need to bribe the government official to enforce yet another “high stakes” test, a few hundred thousand collecting (the schools pay the mailing costs, because it’s high stakes) and grading (all Scantron, so pretty quick and easy) and the profit margin here is pretty huge. 

      Seriously, I bid the gentle reader to think about this. We've been burying our kids in standardized tests for at least a generation now, and not one single improvement to education can be attributed to these tests. On the other hand, the testing companies have made many billions, a tiny fraction of which is given to our educrats to have them mandate more tests. It’s really no wonder we keep getting more of these, the wonder is why nobody is asking about all this, but I digress…

     The students are catching on that all these high stakes tests are, well, bullsh*t. It doesn’t matter in the slightest how they perform, and wasting time studying for bogus “high stakes” tests cuts into time studying for tests that actually count for something.

      I’ve mentioned the SAT (or ACT) as important, but they’ve dropped off a bit. You used to need to do well on these to get into a “good” school, but the proliferation of open admissions policies even at what used to be good schools have made these largely irrelevant to most students.

      On the other hand, AP Exams have risen in importance. Doing well on these exams means free college credit—doing well on these can save students thousands of dollars in college tuition and months of their lives as well. The best the student can hope for by doing well on a “high stakes” test is their teacher not getting fired a year after the student graduates from high school (I’m serious, most high stakes test don’t impact the student at all, but can impact the school or teacher involved quite a bit).

      Students are, justifiably, opting out of taking/studying for these pointless tests which would otherwise take up a huge amount of their time.

As parents, community leaders and school officials puzzled over the precipitous drop in standardized test scores at one of the District’s leading public high schools, Emma Buzbee had a logical explanation.

Buzbee, a senior at Wilson High School, said she and other high-performing students either refused to take the test or intentionally flubbed it to focus on Advanced Placement tests, which were given the following week.

--sorry to quote a fake news source, but it jives with what my friends in the government education system tell me.

     Now, like everything government, students are forced to take the test…they’re just not forced to study. So, we do see falling student test scores on the government standardized tests, but we probably shouldn’t panic that much about it. By the time our students take their high school “high stakes” tests, they’ve taken around 30 of these tests, and have never received any benefit for it, have never seen a school benefit for it, have never seen a teacher benefit for it…how can we blame students for not doing well on a completely pointless exercise?

Ellen Leander said her son, who is now a junior at Wilson, answered a few questions on his PARCC exam and then walked out because he didn’t want to miss a chemistry lab.

--Ellen’ son is lucky. Most schools absolutely force their students to take the test, force the taxpayers to increase the revenue to the testing company. It’s a shame people don’t know what fascism really is anymore…

     As the above indicates, you can have a really good student failing the high stakes test because…he just doesn’t give a damn, he’s got better things to do.

     Like most government-induced problems, the solution is easy: stop with all the mandatory tests. Let’s just keep the tests that are only being taken by students that actually are trying to do well…we can use AP and SAT test scores as a measure of what our students are learning, the ones that at least care to learn. Yes, the SAT scores are still dropping (even with dumbing down the tests), but at least we know the students are trying, which means the evidence there is worth something. 

      All we can learn from students doing well on mandatory pointless tests like PARCC is that we’re still doing a terrible job of educating our students: even after being suckered dozens of times to put effort into obvious lies like “high stakes” testing, they get suckered yet again. 

      Of course, the taxpayers are also getting suckered into paying for this crud, so maybe we should have a test for that, as well…meanwhile, the kids are figuring out what a scam these tests are, best I can hope for is they’ll remember it when they’re adults.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Student Loans For Survival, Not Education

By Professor Doom

    
     “I’m getting a new bong.”

--when I was at a fake school, I overheard a student boasting what he was going to do with his Pell Grant “refund.”

     When a student, or someone posing as a student, goes to college, he can easily qualify for Federally guaranteed student loan money. Over half the country can’t come up with $1,000 for an emergency, and I suspect that’s weighted towards the kids coming right out of high school. 

     A student qualifying for a loan need not only get enough money to pay tuition, he can get thousands more than the tuition cost. This is actually quite reasonable, as there are many expenses to college beyond tuition, above and beyond books, parking tags, and whatnot.

      I can’t help but wonder that the easy loan system, combined with the steadily increasing economic stranglehold upon most Americans, has led quite a few people to make a desperate decision: go to college to get loan money, to use to pay everyday expenses.

      Granted, there have always been people using that education money for non-education things, but a recent graphic I saw on ZeroHedge leads me to believe the situation is getting worse, much worse:

     Ok, the graphic is actually from a site specializing in student loan support (warning: it’s quite possible they’re simply taking advantage of victims of student loans).

     I grant the information in a picture on the internet might not be perfectly accurate (see also: “meme”), but I want to talk about those things in the graphic that ring true.

     Of course students are spending that loan money on something besides tuition. The rents near college campuses are sky-high; it’s been years since I’ve been paid enough to buy a decent house anywhere near campus. Real estate prices keep going up because all that student loan money is flowing into the real estate.

      Another common site near campus is a “region” packed with bars, and these bars are, in turn, packed with students on the weekends (unfortunately, they’re also packed on many weeknights). The graphic is subtitled “beer or textbooks” and I have to agree, many students are spending that money on beer. They say only about 2.5% of the student loan money is going for “drugs and alcohol” but…I don’t think so. The bathroom in my building often smells of vomit in the morning, because of students who drank entirely too much the night before (to be fair, I’m only talking about the men’s room here).

    

     Ok, that’s what the graphic says, but a fake new site says it’s more like $30,000. Either way, this is a pretty nasty way to start life. In the 19^th century, people would get trapped into being indebted to “the company,” and most of the reason for this is the company basically owned everything, up to the point of forcing people to buy at the “company store.” They quickly became indebted, with no way out because the company controlled both income and expenses.

      As I see students forced to buy books from the campus bookstore, forced to pay lab/parking/recreation/technology fees, forced to rent from campus housing…I can’t help but wonder if maybe these similarities are merely a parallel with the abused workers of prior centuries. I grant that students aren’t forced to pay the skyrocketing tuition, although every campus has their tuition rise stratospherically every year. 

     They’re not forced, but accreditation limits the amount of coursework you can transfer to around 1 semester’s worth. With limited ability to transfer courses, students who have already spent a year of their lives on campus are stuck at that school…it’s a big reason why the schools get away with raising prices every year. And, since all schools do it, well, there’s a viscous cycle here.

     Even as I concede some bias in the graphic, financial ignorance is indeed a big problem here. Our students are being indoctrinated in fake economics, indoctrinated into whole fields of fake knowledge, and this indoctrination is justified in the “General Studies” clause of accreditation. Why can’t some of the general studies involve personal finance? Obviously, telling students “don’t go into debt for a degree that won’t pay for the debt,” a basic consequence of sound personal finance, would cut into growth, so I guess that answers my question.

      Wow, a starting salary of $50k? I have nearly 30 years of experience in higher ed and my salary isn’t $50k. I’d love to know where these numbers are coming from, as I suspect not many of my readers got this kind of money right out of college, and seeing as median income for the US is about this much, half my readers probably aren’t making what this graphic says is a starting salary.

     While I dispute some of the numbers in this graphic, it does end with some sound financial advice, advice that our students will not get when they step on campus. I encourage anyone sending kids to school to at least look it over.

     Student debt is rising at an ever increasing rate…I can’t help but wonder just how much of our economy is based around sucking up money that supposedly is for education.

     Our Poo Bahs, with their extraordinary salaries and insane perks, are certainly keeping our high end real estate and expensive restaurant industries doing well, but it’s clear the lower end establishments are also making great profits from the student loan scam, one beer at a time.

      Supposedly, our economy is growing, and definitely, the student loan debt is growing. A few years ago when I started this blog, I warned that “soon student debt would reach a trillion dollars”; last year I was confident in saying “student loan debt is over a trillion dollars.” Now, I’m confident in saying it’s close to 1.3 trillion dollars.

      How much of our growing economy is just pure debt? It’s hard to say, but another graphic points out what will happen by 2030 if student debt continues to grow at the same rate it’s using now:

     Again, I dispute the numbers here. Yes, if it keeps growing, it’ll be over 16 trillion dollars in a bit over a decade from now. But, in the immortal word of ancient Greece:

“If”

      Every day I see another gigantic sign that higher education, in its current form, is on its last legs. Whether it be riots to keep speakers from talking, or yet another “Hate the White Male” course offered on campus, or another planeload of golden parachutes being issued to administration, I see one more thing that I know can’t go on forever.

      Bottom line, things that can’t go on, stop. In this case, I suspect it’ll likely stop before 2030, so I don’t trust the number the graphic gives.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com