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Great news!

Less opportunities for anti-intellectual, spoiled-brats to indulge in their little beer bonging, trying to get laid fantasies--which is what college is perceived as among adolescents.

Maybe this will separate the boozing, hedonistic morons from the kids who REALLY want to and should be there!

Sorry brats....the party's over!

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That's what you get when you feel the need to "educate the masses". When culture or education is geared "towards the masses", you're going to have a degenerated form of it.

There's simply not enough resources to lift every educational hopeful to the status of a "chef".

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Have you ever considered putting the blame squarely on the kids, their crap culture, and their careless, permissive parents?

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Well, I plan on getting a few scholarships (National Merit, high ACT score).

A capable student can find plenty of money this way.

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Is this why you hate capitalism so much, Redstar?

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The kid can do what a lot of people do, join the service, use his/her GI Bill and or Tuition Assistance program (which pays some 90% of tuition costs) and get his degree that way.

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Or if he is near the top of his class he can apply to one of the service academies. ALL of them are certainly respected universities.

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I'm not sure that college costs as percentage of income has changed substantially in the past 20 years or that college is any less affordable today than it was 20 years ago.

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I'll stay in this evil capitalistic society even at the risk of "flipping burgers".

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Oh, puhleze, most people in the service have never killed anyone.

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But I'm not holding my breath waiting for you to honor their service, redstar.

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Who have we colonized?

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quote (BBC):

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Rice joins Rumsfeld on Iraq trip

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is making an unheralded visit to Iraq, joining US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who arrived hours earlier.

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Well, everything you've seen is not supported by statistics published by the U.S. Department of Education.

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Why is paying for college such a big issue to a communist?

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Yes, I wondered how long it would take for you to compare U.S. servicemen to Nazis. I see it didn't take all THAT long.

Or to compare the US military to the SS. How typical for a radical lefty communist.

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Then again, a couple earning over $110K a year can only put away $10K for their son's educational expenses is pretty pathetic.

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quote (Charles Krauthammer):

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America haters and apologists who loved to sling around the charge of modern American imperialism have little or no understanding of the word in the context of world history. They confuse global power for empire.

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American Marines and GIs are not much different than Americans who don't enlist in the military.

Some are jerks, but most aren't.

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Are all military personnel brain-washed, blood-thirsty, Bush-loving, imperialist, automatons?

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quote (WBBM Newsradio):

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Chicago Gang Graffiti In Iraq

Street gangs born in Chicago are making their presence known 6,000 miles away.

The Sun-Times reports Chicago gang graffiti is showing up in Iraq, the handiwork of gang members now in the military.

Army Reservist Jeffrey Stolesonhas taken hundreds of pictures of gang graffiti in Iraq.

A Defense Department official says he's identified 320 soldiers as gang members and he thinks that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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Have a nice day, Mr. Cynical.

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quote (San Francisco Chronicle):

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Ron Burkle was raised in Claremont, a quiet town in suburban San Bernardino County. His father was an executive at the Stater Bros. supermarket chain and Burkle, armed with nothing more than a high school diploma, started at the stores as a bag boy...

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Burkle worked his way up through the ranks until, as a senior executive, he tried to lead a leveraged buyout of the chain. He failed and was fired in 1986.

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But...he won the support of the group that had offered financing for the attempted buyout, including Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, and other financiers in the company's circle. Burkle eventually became a close friend and affiliate of Michael Milken and with his help assembled a California supermarket empire.

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He eventually sold the chains, including Alpha Beta, Ralphs and Food 4 Less, to Kroger for nearly $13 billion in 1999. Previously, he bought Chicago's Dominick's chain and sold it to Safeway for $1.2 billion, earning himself and his investors enormous returns.

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quote (San Francisco Weekly):

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But Can He Predict the Weather?

f you think there's something different about the address above the entrance of KRON television headquarters, the fortresslike building at 1001 Van Ness Avenue, you're right. The number 552 has been added.

The reason?

A station exec's astrologer advised that 1001 was a bad number for business.

And business at San Francisco's venerable Channel 4 hasn't been good lately. Advertising is down, its entertainment and local news shows lag in the ratings, and parent company Young Broadcasting, which spent $825 million to buy KRON in 2000, is swimming in red ink.

So the station's honchos turned to East Bay astro-numerologist Jesse Kalsi to provide a "patch," which is numerology lingo for fixing a bad number. Now, what you see over the door is 1001552.

"Obviously, there are skeptics who think it's a bunch of hooey, but I can tell you things seem to have improved since the change," says KRON Programming Director Pat Patton, who says he brought in the psychic with the approval of station management.

Others scoff at the suggestion that astrology is the answer to the station's woes. "It's nuts, what can I say?" says a staffer, who, like others who roll their eyes at the numerology experiment, insists on anonymity.

One person who doesn't mind being quoted, however, is recently departed former news producer Kevin McCormick. "It encapsulates the absurdity of the place that a numerologist could influence a decision to alter the street address of a television station," he says.

Meanwhile, the KRON door patch is paying dividends for Kalsi. In early April, he appeared as a guest on a KRON weekend interview show and the programming boss says he's entertaining the idea of finding a permanent on-air gig for the psychic. "He deals with marriage problems, health problems, financial problems," Patton says. "We'll see what the future holds."

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quote (Christian Science Monitor):

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A better way to prevent student cheating

NEW YORK – As another academic year draws to a close, amid a rushed flurry of final exams and term papers, it's time for professors to play their least favorite role: cop. With some surveys finding that up to three-quarters of college students cheat, faculty and administrators are making a bigger push for integrity. What most still lack, however, is a compelling moral argument against cheating.

Honor, with its emphasis on doing the right thing for its own sake, is no match for the anxious cynicism of many college students. This point was driven home to me by a junior I met last year in North Carolina. Why not cheat, he argued, given how many of America's most successful people cut corners to get where they are? Cheating is how the real world works, he said. Look at the politicians who lie or the sluggers who take steroids, or the CEOs who cook the books. The student also pointed to the hurdles he faced as he tried to get ahead: high tuition costs, heavy student loans, low-paying jobs without benefits. America wasn't a fair place for kids like him, so it made sense to try to level the playing field by bending a few rules.

Many young people take this bleak view. A 2004 poll of high school students found that 59 percent agreed that "successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating." Young people believe in honor and value integrity; they also worry that living by these beliefs could mean ending up as a loser. In justifying her cheating, one student told a researcher: "Good grades can make the difference between going to medical school and being a janitor." Few professors have a ready retort to this logic.

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quote (Mel Levine):

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In conducting interviews for my new book, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes, I heard repeatedly from employers that their current crop of novice employees appear unable to delay gratification and think long term. They have trouble starting at the bottom rung of a career ladder and handling the unexciting detail, the grunt work, and the political setbacks they have to bear. In fact, many contemporary college and graduate students fail to identify at all with the world of adults.

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The problems start early. While many of today's young adults were growing up, their role models were each other. Kids today don't know or take an interest in grown-ups, apart from their parents, their teachers, and entertainers. That stands in contrast to previous generations, when young people "studied" and valued older people in the community.

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Basically what you're saying is, "max out your credit cards on booze, vacations, and lobster dinners while you can."

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By comparative standards, American colleges emphasize the liberal arts and the humanities more so than Japan and German universities. Foreign students flock to our research universities and for what reason?

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Which means, "please the stupid young college students" with watered down curriculums, fad courses, entice them with special deals and services, grade inflation, scholarships for athletes, and don't fail anyone who doesn't belong there because that's a "loss".

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So what's the communists' solution to the problem? Send more dummies to college?

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I wasn't saying redstar thought they were 'good' but he thinks they are progressive and almost sees them as bourgeois revolutionaries who will install 'modern capitalism'.

My question is what the fuck have they been living under so far, you can't be ruled by the IMF unless you have a basically capitalist infastructure.

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What do communists think of school shootings?

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You don't know why a bully acts the way he does.

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Marx claimed there would be a worldwide, proleterian revolution, caused by a shift in the class conciousness.

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I view dialectics the same way I view 'postmodernism' or 'deconstructionism': meaningless bullshit.

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The fact that the continuation of capitalism for another century would almost definately mean the destruction of humanity or at least civilization as we know it, might make you think that a revolution would be nice.

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Are you being pro-capitalist here or just expressing that capitalism [is] better than its predecessors?

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If it's theorized that capitalism was suppose to erode these types of things, then how and why has religion endured through time?

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The problem is, these are the countries in which such revolution is least likely; they are the rich ones....

I guess you could claim these countries will become immiserated, but of course that's the claim Marx originally made, and we see how right he was.

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Try reading the Wikipedia page on deconstructionism and tell me if you understand it any better after reading it.

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Red star, so am I right in thinking you put support for the myth of bourgeois democracy and other bourgeois views as better than the myth of religion.

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I specifically remember that you never seemed to blame the parents or the kids for that matter in regards to education...it was always "the ruling class's" fault simply because it is they who "set and determine the policies".

Then again, that's typical for a communist...always blaming someone or something else.

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