Lefties in my classes at CSUF were like this - and I beat them like a drum!

http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3050#.U-98w0iXvq3

COMMENTARIES
Our higher education system fails leftist students.

By Michael Munger

August 06, 2014
(Editor’s note: This article is based on the Milton Friedman Day talk given on July 31 in Wilmington, North Carolina, by Duke University professor Michael Munger.)
Too often, American college students face a one-question test, one based not on facts, but on ideology. The test: "Are you a liberal, or conservative?"  
The correct answer is, "I'm a liberal, and proud of it." That concerns me. 
However, the nature of my concern may surprise you. I'm not worried much about the students who get it wrong; for the most part, they actually get a pretty good education.   
I'm worried about those who get it right. The young people that our educational system is failing are the students on the left. They aren't being challenged, and don't learn to think.   
Students on the left should sue for breach of contract. We promise to educate them, and then merely pat them on the head for having memorized the "correct" answer! 
I was Chair of Political Science at Duke for ten years. At a meeting of department heads, we heard from the chair of one our Departments of Indignation Studies.  
(We have several departments named "Something-or-Other Studies." In most cases, they were constituted for the purpose of focusing indignation about the plight of a group that has suffered real and imagined slights and now needs an academic department to be indignant in.) 
At the meeting, the chair of one of those departments said, "I find that I don't really need to spend much time with the liberal students, because they already have it right. I spend most of my time arguing with the conservative students. That's how I spend my time in class." 
This woman was teaching conservative students how to think about arguments and evidence; how to make your arguments in a persuasive way. She was educating them. 
Her liberal students? They were given that one-question test. They were just certified as already "knowing what they need to know." 
It may have come as a shock to the parents of these liberal students that they had learned everything they needed to know…in high school! Having memorized a kind of secular leftist catechism, they were free to wander around the quads of Duke and enjoy themselves. 
Once we realize that the problem with our educational system is that we’re short-changing students on the left, denying them an education just because they happen to agree with the professor, then we have a path forward.   
The way to think of this comes from John Stuart Mill, who argued that we should regard our overall approach to education as collision with error. He wrote:
[The] peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. 
So, the absence, in many departments, of dissenting voices is harmful. Not so much harmful to those who would agree with the dissenting voice, but those who are denied the chance to collide with error.   
It's as if we asked students to play chess, but only taught them one-move openings. They think that pawn to king four is a better move than pawn to king's rook four, but that’s simply a matter of faith. 
Conservative students, by contrast, actually learn to play chess. They study the whole game, not just the first move. They learn countermoves, they consider the advantages of different approaches. They search out empirical arguments, and they read articles and white papers.  
Mill summarizes the difference brilliantly:  
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. …if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. (Emphasis added). 
What happens when a leftist student confronts arguments he or she disagrees with? After all, they sometimes hear views that contradict their own. The problem is that they have always been rewarded for facile rejoinders, the equivalent of one-move chess games.  
There is a ceremony that goes with this, something one of my colleagues calls "The Women's Studies Nod." When someone makes a ridiculously extreme, empirically unfounded but ideologically correct argument, everyone else must nod vigorously.  
Not just a, "Yes, that's correct," nod, but "Yes, you are correct, you are one of us, we are one spirit and one great collective shared mind" nod. 
What if someone withholds the Nod?   
Since the children of the left have never actually had to play a full chess game of argument, they need a response. Their responses are two: "You are an idiot; no one important believes that," or "You are evil; no good person could possibly believe that." 
At this point, leftist faculty teach the left students several different moves. Let's consider a few.  
Suppose I claim that rent control is a primary reason why there is such a shortage of affordable housing in New York and San Francisco. Here are the responses I have gotten from students:
1.  Micro-aggression!
2.  Check your privilege! (If they had a mic, they'd drop it, because this is supposed to be so devastating).
3.  You must take money from the Koch Foundation.
4.  Economists don't understand the real world.  
5.  Prices don't measure values. Values are about people. You don't care about people. 
Not one of those responses actually responds to, or even tries to understand, the argument that rent controls harm the populations that politicians claim they want to help.   
The point is that if you cared about poor people, actually cared about consequences for poor people, you would oppose rent controls. But that's not how the logic of the left works. Instead of caring about the poor, they want to be seen as caring about the poor.   
Our colleagues on the left could choose to educate their liberal students, but since education requires "collision with error," that is no longer possible. That’s because the faculty on the left were themselves educated by neglect, never confronting counterarguments, in a now self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance and ideological bigotry. 
We honor and remember Milton Friedman here today. What might Professor Friedman have thought of the problem that I raise? He would probably have said that the answer is competition and empowering consumers to make their own best choices.   
The problem is that education is a difficult arena for this argument, because students don't know what they don't know, and so it's hard for them to know what they should want to know. 
Nonetheless, our best hope lies in competition. A consumer-driven revolution in education will change, and in some ways has already changed, the dominance of the left in the academy. 
Education is a consumer-driven business, in spite of what college faculty think. No other industry blames failure on its customers. Not even General Motors claimed that car-buyers were too stupid to appreciate their genius.   
That is what many traditional colleges have been doing: Our students fail, we don't. Students, however, are coming to see through that. Many of them, perhaps especially those on the left, recognize that they are being patronized rather than educated.  
They want more. They want to hear the best arguments from the other side. It's more interesting to play against the first team. A young person's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never shrinks back to its original dimension. 
Lots of people on the left actually care about education. We have friends we don't recognize. The issue is not ideology, but commitment to education. 
I shudder when I see people on our side who want to solve the problem of political correctness simply by reversing the polarity. Conservatives who don't understand liberal arguments are just as brain dead as the worst graduates being produced by our most craven Departments of Indignation Studies.   
Education requires collision with error. If our side makes arguments respectfully, intellectually, insisting on balance first in our own classrooms, then we can change education in this country. 

The Sheik: Help Me Stay Rich Colorado

I love supporting Jihad... NOT. Stop importing and let them choke on their oil soaked sand...


What Obama Said About Taking Vacations in 2008 Almost Made the Internet ...

Grow balls or go golfing... Oh, sorry, how about right after you do your 401st fundraiser?  After Martha's Vineyard... OK.



Yea - it's getting bad...

http://www.catholic.org/news/international/middle_east/story.php?id=56510

Pope Francis has joined with Christians facing genocide in Iraq and Syria, calling upon the world to make an armed response to the Islamic State. He has asked the world to "stop these crimes" and called for the use of "a professional, well-equipped army."
Pope Francis has sent a personal emissary to Iraq and is calling for the entire world to act to stop the genocide in Iraq.
Pope Francis has sent a personal emissary to Iraq and is calling for the entire world to act to stop the genocide in Iraq.

 Highlights

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
8/11/2014 (3 hours ago)
Published in Middle East

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - You know a situation is bad when a pope calls for an armed response. Pope Francis, widely appreciated as a practical and realistic man, is not just calling for a cease-fire or negotiations. Instead, he is inviting an armed response to the terrorism of the Islamic State. 

Such a call is virtually unprecedented for a pontiff in modern times, but our age is an extraordinary one and the Islamic State has no interest in a bargaining table. Instead, the Islamic State is bent on genocide and barbarism, ruthlessly exterminating anyone who opposes them. 

Join our list now to follow these developments and help those in need.
 

On Sunday, Pope Francis said he held "dismay and disbelief" over what is happening in Iraq. He called the Islamic State fighters terrorists and said there was a need for "a professional, well-equipped army."  "The situation is going from bad to worse," he warned.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis was not the only cleric calling for swift and decisive action to end the genocide in Iraq. The Episcopal Vicar of Iraq, Canon Andrew White, managed to visit the town of Qaraqosh under cover and personally assess the situation in that community following Islamic State capture. 

His words are chilling. "Today, Qaraqosh stands 90 per cent empty, desecrated by the gunmen of the fanatical Islamic State terror group now in control. The majority of the town's 50,000 people have fled, fearing that, like other Christians in this region, they will be massacred.

"The militants, in a further act of sacrilege, have established their administrative posts in the abandoned churches."

Canon White reported that one woman had her finger hacked off after she could not remove her wedding ring fast enough. A caretaker of one of White's parish churches in the community said his youngest son, aged five, was hacked in half as he watched. 

A child, just five years old, hacked in half alive, before his father. The boy happened to be named Andrew, after the vicar himself. 

The atrocities are real. The genocide is real. That the press barely reports on them is absolutely baffling. However, even the most religious, peace-loving figures are recognizing that this is not a usual evil. Normally, conflicts arise because of ancient grievances and they can be talked over and hashed out. Warring factions tire of burying their sons and eventually dialogue and other pressures forces peace. 

However, the Islamic State has recruited fighters from most of the world's nations and more arrive every day. They are motivated by an aggressive, rabid interpretation of Islamic scriptures. Most notably, they are consumed with bloodlust and willing to commit and publicize every atrocity. This attracts sadistic men from across the Islamic world to their cause who commit even more atrocities. 

Watch U.S. forces dispatch justice to Islamic State terrorists. [Video, redirects.]

These men don't have to be told what to do. They murder on their own accord, for pleasure. 

Where is the rest of the world? Where are the UN resolutions? Where are the condemnations from the world's Islamic countries? Saudi Arabia? Where's the edict or the fatwa? Why isn't the world combining forces against these terrorists?

This is the purest form of evil the planet has seen in generations. They cannot be reasoned with. As all Christians do have a recognized right to self-defense in the face of an existential threat, the time has come for all Catholics to join with Pope Francis and the Christians of Iraq and Syria in 'Prayer and Action' with the intent of ridding the world of the evil of the Islamic State.

MM and Bone Health

http://breakthroughs.cityofhope.org/multiple-myeloma-bone-health

Multiple myeloma and bone health: What patients need to know

August 6, 2014 | by 
Although multiple myeloma is classified as a blood cancer, patients with this disease often experience bone-related symptoms, too. This includes bone pain, frequent fractures and spots of low bone density or bone damage that show up during a skeletal scan.
X-Ray image of hip
Multiple myeloma may be a blood cancer, but it also commonly affects the skeletal system — leading to bone loss, pain (most commonly in the lower back and hip) and an increased risk of fractures.
Here, Amrita Krishnan, M.D., director of City of Hope's MultipleMyeloma Program, answers questions about this cancer's connection to bone health and what patients and their care team can do about it.
How does multiple myeloma affect bone health?
In a normal body, bones are constantly being maintained by two types of cells: osteoblasts that create new bone matter and osteoclasts that break it down and reabsorb it. Myelomacells can disrupt this balance in two ways, by interfering withosteoblasts' bone-building ability while overstimulatingosteoclasts' breakdown processes. The result is overall bone loss.
How does this impact the patient?
It depends on how advanced the disease is. Patients diagnosed in earlier stages may notice bone pain, most commonly in the pelvis and lower back. For patients with more advanced disease, their bones can fracture easily and frequently — sometimes even with simple activities such as light lifting and walking.
Are these effects permanent?
Because the myeloma cells are causing the bone loss, the bones should be able to self-repair once the cancer is treated. However, depending on severity and duration of the fractures, some of these breakages may not heal properly and would require medical intervention.
What can myeloma patients and survivors do to build or maintain healthy bones? 
Photo of Amrita Krishnan
Amrita Krishnan, M.D., director of City of Hope's multiple myeloma program, says that myeloma-relatedbone conditions can be treated through several means, but only after careful discussion with one's doctor.
The most important thing they can do is to check in with their health care team regularly so that their bones can be carefully monitored and interventions, if needed, can be done in a timely and appropriate manner.
This is especially crucial for multiple myeloma patients because their bone conditions put them in a catch-22. For example, while weight-bearing exercises are normally effective for strengthening bones, for myeloma patients these exercises also can actually increase fracture risk due to their already-weakened bones.
Likewise, patients should avoid taking calcium and vitamin D supplements on their own because myeloma-linked bone loss may also elevate blood calcium levels, a potentially problematic condition that can be exacerbated with further supplementation. Thus, performing physical activities and taking supplements should only be done after a health evaluation and discussion with a physician.
In addition to a carefully planned exercise and supplement regimen, doctors may also prescribe a class of drugs called bisphosphonates, which are also used to treat osteoporosis and other bone loss conditions, to help rebuild bones in multiple myeloma patients and survivors.
What research is being done on myeloma and bone health?
Studies have shown that long-term bisphosphonate use may increase risk for other conditions, such as bone loss in the jaw and thigh bone fractures. Thus, we are looking into finding the ideal dose and duration ofbiphosphonates to prescribe to maximize its benefit and minimize the side effect risk and severity. We are also conducting clinical trials investigating other bone building agents that may be more effective or do not have the side effects associated with bisphonsphonates.
Do you have a question for Amrita Krishnan about multiple myeloma and bone health? If so, post below.
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Learn more about multiple myeloma research and treatment at City of Hope. 
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Learn more about becoming a patient at City of Hope by visiting us online or by calling 800-826-HOPE (4673). City of Hope staff will explain what's required for a consult at City of Hope and help you determine, before you come in, whether or not your insurance will pay for the appointment.

Is California Back?





When I was recently polled and asked the question "Are we going in the right direction?" I had to laugh and say 'NO!"



jc