#11 I'll see you one car antenna for your smokestacks on the Moon, eb. ;-)

#13 Snoofy begins his insightful comment with this: "Pretty common one from back in the day."

Fortunately, most people grow and learn from common things back in the day, based on knowledge gathered since.

Unfortunately, some people never grow and learn no matter how much knowledge had been gathered since back in the day.

#11 ;-)

#5 clowns**** lives up to his name when he says, "HIV was made in a lab in New York and spread to the LGBT community on purpose."

While sitzkrieg declares, correctly, that "Philosophy that ignores how reality works is just fiction," ...

... Snoofy nails it with "Can we please leave Ayn Rand out of this?"

#6 ... and you succeed, my friend, Doc.

Success!

#25 WQSR Quad 102.5 FM, in Sarasota, Florida, was a pioneer in quad broadcasting.

WQSR played the King Biscuit Flower shows, along with other fantastic programming.

This was around the same time that Bradenton's Bishop Planetarium played the laser/planetarium light show in accompaniment with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

#4 Thanks, Doc.

You're good people.

snip ...

And so, those three courses have attracted just one student each. And... it's the same student in all three cases.

The planned course offerings have already been slashed to 18, and one imagines they will be cut even more. Since we are not at WVU, we don't quite know what they will do. Most classes can be, and are, approved to fulfill one requirement or another. But at most schools, that's a pretty arduous process, and requires approval from the faculty Senate.

Presumably, the WVU Senate isn't even sitting right now, and even if it is, students have presumably already enrolled in classes for Fall. Getting the classes accredited might eventually help some, but that's a solution that probably has a target date of Spring 2027, at the earliest.

For now, the West Virginia legislature is probably going to have to satisfy itself with putting Fox on the TVs in the student gym. (Z)

snip ...

West Virginia is, perhaps, the reddest state in the nation. And so, the state legislature is absolutely dominated by Republicans (the state Senate is currently 31R, 2D; the House of Delegates is currently 91R, 9D, which certainly gives an appreciation for the feats of magick Joe Manchin pulled off in his last two or three elections). The legislature decided they would like to get in on the brainwashing, and so they appropriated $3 million for the creation of the Washington Center at WVU. After all, WVU is the Harvard of... well, West Virginia.

We wonder how the faculty at WVU felt about this money. On one hand, faculties like it when money rolls in. On the other hand, they tend to dislike it when the money is clearly meant to purchase legitimacy for problematic ideas. When (Z) was in grad school, the UCLA Department of History was offered multiple millions to establish a chair in Turkish history, and the faculty rejected it outright, because it was clear the real plan was to promote Armenian Genocide denial.

Whatever the WVU faculty felt about the $3 million, they did not get a vote, since it was an independent center being created, as opposed to an appointment within an existing department. And so, the Washington Center was established, and given office and classroom space, and a director, Dr. Patrick Lee, was hired at the bargain salary of just $300,000 per year. Do you know how far $300,000 goes in West Virginia?

The center announced an ambitious slate of 24 courses, including "Woke," "Nation and Migration" and "The New Right." But then the rubber finally met the road. You can appropriate money, allot space, hire a director, etc. by fiat, but eventually students have to enroll voluntarily. And students tend to avoid classes that won't help them graduate, while they positively loathe anything that has the faintest whiff of "propaganda."

snip ...

Some, maybe many, people on the right have indulged in the fantasy that universities are left-wing brainwashing operations, and that professors have the power to turn students into wild-eyed radicals who are left of Marx and Trotsky. **

We have something like 70 years' university teaching experience between us, and we can tell you, it's just not so. Oh, it's probably true that the average student leaves college a little more liberal than when they came in. And some of them leave a lot more liberal. But that's almost entirely a product of developing critical thinking, being exposed to new ideas, and living in a much more cosmopolitan environment. Most professors are not interested in indoctrination, and are not trying it. And even if we were, we can't even get students to format their essays properly, much less turn them into mini-Mamdanis.

Still, this fundamentally conspiratorial claim makes great copy, and great material for podcasts, and talk radio, and the various shows on Fox and the other right-wing entertainment channels. The problem is when right-wingers actually start to believe it, and try to put the idea into practice. As a case study, we give you West Virginia University.

#120 bell boi pukes out, "People have a Constitutional right to run over law enforce,ent agents with their vehicles!" - The left.

Problem with that "logic," bell boi, is that no one on "the left" is using their vehicles to run over anyone.

(Unlike, say, James Alex Fields Jr., who was convicted of driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters during the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. The attack killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others. **)

You're just swallowing the lies, hook, line and stinker, and you actually believed that no one would see right through it.

That's because, bell boi, you and MAGAts post and regurgitate absolute chicken --- because you and they believe that everyone is as stupid and gullible as they are.

** With MAGAts it is always projection or confession. Always.

Today, during a discussion on Trump, the Iraq don't-you-dare-call-it-a-war, war, and the deceitful way the Pentagon has been underreporting casualties, John Heilman invoked what he called The Haberman/Swan Rule**:

"..where they spoke about the challenges of uncovering the truth about a president for whom deceit is a default setting."

Actual, truthful, and verifiable PROOF

#14 T/Y

#5 DBT2 states, without any proof, that "Americans don't want democratic socialist populists."

Actually, some Americans want that very thing. Just look at Mamdani's victory in NYC.

And it is also true that there are Americans who don't want that.

snip ...

But part of the problem is internal. The 62-member Congressional Black Caucus, which is entirely Democratic, has been focused on swing seats. A leader of its PAC, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), said: "The PAC has always been focused on electing Democrats in tough seats so that we can reclaim the majority. That goal, that focus, has not changed." Note that he said nothing about holding Black seats or supporting Black challengers to Republicans. In most cases, it is supporting white candidates who have a good chance of holding a tough blue district or flipping a marginal red one. The CBC's priority is maximizing the number of Democrats in the House, not the number of Black Democrats.

In fact, it could also be phrased as

The priority is...maximizing the number of Democrats in the House, not just the number of Progressive Democrats

Otherwise, for example, Jim "Gomer" Comer would remain chair of the Oversight Committee in the US House if the Democrats don't take the majority this coming November. That's an outcome everyone in the middle or the left side of the aisle should abhor.

snip ...

Some Black leaders in the South are despairing. Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell (D) said: "Republicans in the Legislature and the Supreme Court have said that it's okay to turn back the clock and reverse civil rights progress in this country. They're basically giving these Southern states what they have consistently and persistently wanted, which is to suppress Black voices." Some people are more explicit where the problem is. Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., said: "The Democrats sort of allowed for this behavior to regularly happen," referring to the Democrats' failure to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act when they had the trifecta.

snip ...

snip ...

In contrast, Republican leaders have no problem offending Black, gay and trans people, and others outside their core demographic, since they don't expect any votes from them, and their (increasingly male) base doesn't mind offending people and getting into fights.

snip ...

For the Democrats, the situation is very different: There is no dominant base. The party's voters include large groups of Black voters, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other racial minorities, along with LGBTQ voters, Jews, affluent college-educated suburbanites, single women and young voters. There are also some urban union members who are still Democrats. And while the vast majority of Republicans identify as conservative, Democrats are much more mixed, with progressives, liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives counting themselves as Democrats.

snip ...

The Republican Party has a clear base: straight white Christian working-class men (and their wives, who typically vote as their husbands do). There are other groups that vote Republican, too, like evangelicals, but they are a bit of an awkward fit because their religion teaches them things the Republicans hate (like that you should help the poor). Republicans intuitively know that if there were honest and free elections everywhere, with no gerrymandering, no voter suppression and no monkey business of any kind, with every vote counted no matter when it arrived, Democrats would probably have most of the power in most places most of the time. Consequently, Republican voters tend to fall in line quickly.