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Monday, May 21, 2012

Blog for Sale

This blog is for sale.  This is your chance to acquire a proven pathway into the hearts and minds of University of Toledo students, staff, faculty and administrators.  More than 160 thousand visitors to this site can't be wrong.

To make an offer contact Bloggie's agent:

J. Henry Lievens, Esquire
Attorney at Law
734 279 2811 

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey,

The Jacobs administration would love to buy it, but then how are they going to pay for bonuses to useless administrators and people like Condoleeza Rice?

Anonymous said...

Bloggie

We can only hope your wanting to step aside is entirely voluntary and does not involve any undue behind the scenes pressure on you and/or the ASC blog.

In the essentially dogmatic, one party leftist groupthink Academy and our essentially one party and one media company town of Toledo (Dr. Evil and assorted wannabes and Mini Me’s) your blog has served as a very rare and valuable alternative venue for some real dissent and high minded intellectual discourse related to higher education and many other important issues – things generally disallowed and suppressed by the superficial and vacuous talking head drive-by media and partisan pseudo-academia.

It is heartening to know politics, market forces and special interests do not yet completely control free speech, freedom of information and free intellectual discourse.

It will be a sad day indeed if the ASC blog is completely shut down or taken over by biased partisan ideologues committed only to censorship and mind control.

Anonymous said...

To be clear, has this blog gotten 160,000 visitors or 160,000 hits? Those things are quite different.

Anonymous said...

"It is heartening to know politics, market forces and special interests do not yet completely control free speech, freedom of information and free intellectual discourse."

My esteemed colleague: Capitalism is just as detrimental to free speech as Communism. Neither system can tolerate agnostics, skeptics, and dissidents. One may pay you to be quiet while the other gives you a high party rank or sends you to the Gulag. Both system need uneducated masses to brainwash and exploit -- politically, ideologically, and economically.

Free intellectual discourse? Remember McCarthyism and the black listing? When the Communist implants were rounded up (which is what it was supposed to do) they got paranoid and started to invent enemies. Or just look at the new Texas Education system. There is a new vocabulary just for educators. Free discourse, my foot! They might as well be a different planet, not just a different nation.

Not everyone is a leftist in Academia, and not everyone challenging right-wingers is a leftist. We all need to educate students to look out for fear mongers and demagogues: these can grab power easily and lead us into new wars. Historical experience can support one thing: educated masses pose greater threat to communism while in so-called democracies media, video games, TV, movies, toys, etc. keep people isolated to the point people do not understand words like solidarity, and that is what political systems need -- a disunited front. That is why unions are perceived as threat to various power systems. Unions are not necessarily leftist. In Poland, they dragged the communist system to its end.

Anonymous said...

Bloggie - are you still there?

What do you suppose we are to make of the recent uncoiling of COIL and the latest of many re-reincarnations of the mercurial and ever-shape-shifting Zelig the Human Chameleon?

Is the Academic Anaconda merely readjusting administrative positions in order to get a better choke hold?

Anonymous said...

Esteemed Colleague reply (part 1 of 3),

Perhaps you are wise enough to understand that totalitarian oppression and blind fanaticism and idealism come in many, often benign and even well-meaning guises, from both the right and left ends of the political spectrum (as I do and as I have explicitly stated in numerous ways in numerous previous posts on this blog – see the classic work “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements” by Erich Hoffer, for an outstanding, cogent and concise exploration of these issues).

But the default presumption in academia (as well as in the mainstream media and entertainment and public sector government, non-profits, arts, humanities and popular culture) has for several decades now been essentially Marxist, Feminist, Postmodernist, Collectivist, Leftist and Liberal.

This tangled, convoluted and incoherent ideological Marxist Matrix informs the ideology and rhetoric of everyone from Obama and the Clintons to Michael Moore and Al Franken to the Occupy Movements – from the academic Arts and Humanities to the Social Sciences and beyond – even infiltrating the academic sciences and professional schools (Business, Law, Education, etc.)

Academic freedom, tenure, and the civil liberties delineated in the AAUP founding documents, the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights etc. were designed, drafted and ratified to protect free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

But in leftist fundamentalist Newspeak, Groupthink, Orwellian academia and mainstream media, entertainment, popular and political cult-ture – “freedom” means the freedom to speak only dogmatic leftist “truth”.

Academia, academics, academic bureaucrats and administrators, students, pedagogy and curriculum now lack in large measure the essential ingredients necessary to form any cultured person, institution or society – namely personal and systematic moral and intellectual character and integrity.

The contagion of personal, intellectual and cultural decadence and degeneracy and ideological conformity has been intentionally spread by Marxist ideologues throughout our culture and institutions – infusing Marxist-Feminist-Postmodernist Political Correctness and Identity Politics from the sacred groves of Academe to the sacred precincts of our Church’s, Temples and Mosques, from Wall Street to Main Street, from Washington to London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, from TV Land to Hollywood, from the Public Sector to the Private Sector, in families, schools, businesses, communities, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, country clubs and fraternal organizations, non-profits, corporations, the military and on and on.

Following the playbooks of everyone from Hitler and Mussolini to Stalin and Mao to Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci, to Abbie Hoffman, Bill Ayers, Noam Chomsky and Saul Alinsky to the Obamas, Clintons, Jesse Jackson and Rahm Emmanuel and countless leftist agent provocateur individuals and organizations – the plan is to undermine Western, American, Capitalist, Judeo-Christian culture and society from within (since we have too many bombs and missiles for a frontal assault).

How?

Debase the social, cultural, spiritual and intellectual morals and ethics from the ground up and from the top down, undermine the family, monogamous marriage, pregnancy, the church, the quality, content, pedagogy and curriculum of schools and universities, the media, our healthcare (not systematic cultural and institutional proactive, preventative, common sense, simple, sustainable and economical diet, rest and exercise health and well-being protocols – but rather reactive, high tech industrial medical-pharmaceutical disease maintenance complex) and criminal justice systems (not personal responsibility but personal and cultural crime and degeneracy), the popular and elite culture, the economics and the legal tender currency (The Fed, corrupt Wall Street markets, going off the gold standard, bloated taxes and government, etc.).

Parts 2 and 3 follow

Anonymous said...

Esteemed Colleague part 2

…Intoxicate, delude, placate and coerce the hoi polloi with “beer and circus,” cultist propaganda, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-scientific academic and popular pseudo-intellectualism, idealist militant ideology, endless calls for more laws and funding for more “social justice” programs, materialism – labyrinthine and oppressive centralized government laws, taxes, regulations, jobs and subsidies – proliferation of addictive substances and behaviors – drugs, sex, rock and roll, rap, hip-hop “culture”, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, junk food, texting, sexting, cell phones, smart phones, Ipods, video games, television, sports, entertainment, amusements, pornography, gambling, casinos, prostitution, shopping, endless mindless talking, reality TV, exhibitionism, personal drama and endless distraction, thrill seeking, degenerate and/or agitprop art, literature, music, media and culture – all moderated and mediated by phalanxes of political, media and academic commissars, judges, attorneys, bureaucrats, politicians and financiers and a police state industrial-criminal-justice prison complex.

The results? A helpless, debased, debauched, dependent, ignorant, sick, obese, lazy, entitled, indoctrinated, addicted, immoral, populace ready to mindlessly serve Great Leader and The Matrix (or sit endlessly rotting in prisons, rehab clinics and welfare offices).

If the toxic, misguided personal, professional and/or socio-political dogmas and agendas of Marxist leftists are served – then the matter at hand, whatever it may be, is by definition true and good – no matter how patently false, morally repugnant or destructive to individuals or society these dogmas and agendas may actually be.

We are all “free” to support these dogmas and agendas, whether actively or passively – but to do otherwise, to openly and publicly question these dogmas and agendas means to be ruthlessly, ferociously and forever shunned and branded with the indelible Scarlet Letter(s) of Political Correctness: B for “Bigot,” N for “Nazi,” S for “Sexist,” R for “Racist” etc.

I know first hand that this personal, professional, political and financial shunning, persecution, discrimination, suppression, oppression, slander, libel and gossip comes from all directions, in all forms and at all levels – formal and informal, official and unofficial, overt and covert, direct and indirect, external and internal (from within an organization, community, neighborhood, friends, colleagues or family), from both identified and unidentified sources – it involves persistent snubbing and shunning in public and in private – in one’s home and in the marketplace, public square or workplace – snubbing and shunning not only of one’s self, but of anyone associated with one’s self (the offending “heretic”) – spouse, children, family, friends, loved ones, colleagues.

In such a tacitly and often covertly toxic and oppressive “society,” is it any wonder most of us – in academia and elsewhere – elect to conform and rationalize if not actively enable and take advantage of leftist lunacy?

Part 3 follows

Anonymous said...

Esteemed Colleague part 3 - the last

For those who may still truly care about and understand things like truth, goodness, reality, fairness and personal and intellectual character and integrity, go to some of the following recommended resources.

(Note: If you ever begin seeing such people or ideas appearing on campus or in required academic programs and courses and readings for course syllabi – not to mention the mainstream media and popular culture – you will know there may still be hope):

Here is someone I never heard about or learned about in school and came to very late, who is nonetheless outstanding as an author on basic personal ethics, morals, integrity, common sense, Christian virtue, good habits and good living. He was once world famous and widely read, but is now, as far as I can tell, quite obscure.

He should nonetheless be read along with the likes of Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, Schopenhauer, Mill, Emerson, Thoreau, et al.

Samuel Smiles – (Character, etc.)

More recent and known:

Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (2012), by Dennis Prager (also see Prager’s other works and his website and radio talk show).
“The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas” and “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” both by Jonah Goldberg (also search Golberg’s online articles at National Review Online etc.)
The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House (2012) by former New York Times Editor In Chief, Ed Klein.
What’s so Great About America? By Dinesh D’Souza.
The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (2011), by David Mamet (yes, THAT David Mamet).
Intellectuals and Society; Economic Facts and Fallacies; Black Rednecks and White Liberals, all by Thomas Sowell.
Other important authors:
Patrick Buchanan (Death of the West, etc.)
Roger Kimball (Tenured Radicals, The New Criterion arts and culture journal, etc.)
David Horowitz (Frontpagemag.com, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party etc.)
Andrew Breitbart (Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, etc.)
Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, etc.)
Tammy Bruce – lesbian feminist and former National Organization for Women Leader (The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values, etc.)
Adam Carolla (In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: . . . And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy)
John Stossel – (No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed, etc.)
Keep reading from the above selections and follow-up online on Amazon and on related websites for similar authors and readings – and by listening to the radio talk shows broadcast by many of these authors until you finally “get it.”

Watch Fox News and Fox Business on TV.

Check out Bill O’Reilly. Listen and think with an open mind.

Then, once you finally see the light, try to do what you can in your personal and professional life to REALLY help save yourself, the ones you love and maybe even the world.

May you live long and prosper.

END

Anonymous said...

30% of Students With Loans Drop Out of College

Outstanding student loan debt $1 trillion

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1688896327001/30-of-students-with-loans-drop-out-of-college/

Anonymous said...

"What do you suppose we are to make of the recent uncoiling of COIL...?"

COIL has been a taxpayer-funded failure from which its dean (the hero of the "Thanks Ben" blog posting: http://ascforum.blogspot.com/2011/11/thanks-ben.html) greatly (i.e. financially) benefited -- he got a raise, and now he is on his way to future tax-payer funded failures as Vice-Provost.

Now if this is the business model that Jacobs, Inc. is promoting, UT is in more trouble than what we might have thought. What business or corporation rewards failures? Or do Lloydie, Goldie, and the BOT eff-ups really think that their empire is too big to fail? Maybe they'll get a bail-out money to feed their greed and stupdity. The feds will be alerted if they have not already been...

To be honest: it may not be so strange that the BOT godfathers with business backgrounds continue to watch and let their sidekicks -- two surgeons: Jacobs, Gold) run the show. Word has it that they will get rid of these two when they are no longer useful. But the real fun comes when authorities round up the rest of the BOT on various charges... So, do keep an eye out on Wikileaks or other sources for updates -- it is only a matter of time! Order shall return to UT.

Anonymous said...

bloggie, where (when) are you? Why so long in posting comments of the week? Tired of leading the revolution of academics who talk a lot but don't act?