I heard an old comedy routine on the Bob and Tom Show this morning that didn’t blame women if they didn’t because “there’s this big, fat, sweaty guy on top of you.”

I guess women’s revenge is that they now write magazines like Maxim and Men’s Health. I do, however, appreciate a nice darned sock.

TOPEKA | Kansas colleges and universities must make their campuses weapon-free and conduct criminal background checks before hiring any full-time employee, the Board of Regents decided Wednesday.

The board unanimously approved the two policies at its monthly meeting.

The weapons policy calls for the schools to post no-weapons signs at the entrance to each building on campus and to include the policy in the student code of conduct and on housing contracts.

Kansas law allows concealed weapons, but colleges and universities can prohibit them on campus by posting signs. Without the sufficient signage, a person licensed to carry a concealed weapon cannot be prosecuted. Missouri law prohibits concealed firearms on college or university property.

The carrying of any weapons, concealed or otherwise, on State of Kansas property has always been and remains banned. Nothing about the Kansas concealed-carry law — SB 418 in the 2006 session, passed over the veto of the Vice-President of All Our Hearts — changes that. The line in bold is just simply false in this circumstance.

I wondered whether or not these signs were an empty, showy gesture. Now I know.

“We still have a robust staff of folks who have the resources to do their jobs,” he said. “Where we go in this digital age is that we have to get through these times and look at our structure.

“On the Internet, I can sum up our strategy in two words: Grow faster. That’s where a lot of people are finding us. What I’m really encouraged by is that we’re the McClatchy leader in readership growth and revenue growth online in the last year.”

Fannin said The Star — and many other media outlets — are in a process of reinventing themselves. “It’s challenging times for newspapers,” he said.

McClatchy is the nation’s third-largest newspaper company, with 30 daily newspapers, about 50 nondailies, and direct marketing and direct-mail operations.

The Star is the latest unit in the chain to make staff reductions, with many newspapers offering buyout deals to cut costs.

[link]

McClatchy’s stock has lost two-thirds of its value on this day last year, and posted a first-quarter loss. Their corporate credit rating is slightly better than that of a crack whore.¹ McClatchy owns not only the Star but the Wichita Eagle as well.

I hate to say this², but the era of the newspaper is over.

1. which I guess means they would have qualified for a $250,000 home loan two years ago.
2. actually, no, I don’t. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

And of course, fart stories:

In the childhood, I believe, everyone is thinking of making a fart bottle.
The fart bottle is a bottle filled with fart.

There was no exception for me.
I was always wondering if I could make the fabulous bottle.
I thought to myself “If I make the fart bottle,
I can make people smell my farts anytime. It’ so cool!”
It was the time when I was in the fourth grade.
In those days, the star sand was really popular in Japan.
The star sand is the sand each grain of which is star-shaped,
and was sold filled in a little bottle at that time.
My sister kept one, but she threw it away in her room
because she lost any interest of it.
I found it and put it in my pocket secretly.

The bottle was corked, and 4 cm height.
I exclaimed with joy “That’s it. That’s it.”
Immediately, I made up my mind to invent the fart bottle
that I had been longed for.
I picked the cork jar, throw the sand away,
farted into the empty bottle, and corked quickly.
This bottle was the marvelous one than I had expected.
I jumped with joy again and again.
I made one and smelled it repeatedly many times.
However, soon I came to think that
I wanted the others to taste this bottle,
and I managed to do it.
As I expected, everyone got disgusted,
and frowned, which delighted me.

I ate a cup of pinto beans for dinner. I might cut a Greatest Hits album later.

2. Dude: G. Gordon Liddy? He is still alive?

This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don’t want more production to increase supply. They want oil “independence” but they’ve declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?

Although I consider not listening to Robert Reich to be a virtue, Hillary — and everyone else who supports the federal gas tax moratorium/holiday/whatever they’re calling it — is wrong.

Anyway, just add them to the list of the millions in this country who don’t understand economics.

In it, “Darwinism” is depicted as being the cause of and impetus for the Holocaust. It’s been said that this is a form of Holocaust denial — as in ignorance or rejection of the real cause of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ crackpot racial theories, based on such scientific pursuits as the occult and Teutonic myth. True science, such as it could be said to exist at that time and in that place, was and remains only a tool, used in that case to perverted ends.

I wouldn’t go quite that far as to call it “denial” — “Holocaust revisionism” seems appropriate — but many of the points are valid.

I have not seen this film — and I don’t plan to, unless I can steal it or someone else pays my way — so I cannot comment fully on its content. I do know that the people who made it were dumb enough to publicly kick P.Z. Myers out of a first screening but allow in his traveling partner, one Richard Dawkins. If this movie is as I understand it, what it tells me is that the Dover decision put these “intelligent design” idiots down for the ten-count — they may be walking around, but there’s nothing behind the punches they’re throwing, if this is all they have left.

1. Yeah. Yeah, I do.

If indeed the Jeremiah Wright thing is over, I’ll be glad. It was an issue, a relatively minor one — I went to a church as a teenager where intolerant statements were sometimes made, and I turned out okay. It’s fair to ask why he joined the church in the first place, but again that’s a minor issue as well.

What about Obama’s “connection” — some might say “working relationship” — with Weatherman terrorist William Ayers.

Now that we’re all finished with Jeremiah Wright, I’d like to see some questions asked about that.

Of course, we won’t — the full court press on his behalf has already started, and will be like a tidal wave between now and June; possibly after then.

Bob Beatty, associate professor of political science at Washburn University, said Roberts must be considered the front-runner, given the GOP’s dominance in voter registration.

Beatty said critical numbers in the general election would be 41 and 26.

“Roberts has been in Washington 41 years and Slattery for 26 years,” Beatty said. “It’s a battle of which person who spent a lot of time in Washington is an agent of change.”

Slattery, who lost the 1994 gubernatorial race to Republican Bill Graves, said he was running again for public office because the U.S. Senate was “simply not getting the job done.”

Slattery, if you’re not aware, has been… a lobbyist in the time since he was… a Congressman. For six terms.

We are all idiots.

There have been a lot of related articles and blog posts published recently that seem to suggest that there is an ongoing re-examination of the default educational experience, which is to graduate high school and then go off to a four-year college or university.

Now, if I had it to do over again, I’d still go to college, because it would be one of the few places where I could study math¹ . The university I went to — which is not peculiar in this regard — required me to take in addition to my mathematics courses several other courses in the name of a “broad education”, some of which were interesting, and some of which were a complete waste of my time.

To say that college is not for everyone is not an elitist argument. Rather, it is a recognition that many people feel the same way about “academic” studies such as what I did. They have very specific interests; or, alternately, they are in tough financial straits and cannot dally with a semester studying the plays of David Mamet and emo poetry (to name two things that made me want to grab the ancient desk-chair combo and use it to force my way out the room), which they could not possibly give a crap about. There are some people who feel the same way about path integrals and the Axiom of Choice.

Ben Boychuk (our pal Joel’s partner on RedBlueAmerica, the “red” to Joel’s “blue”) writes:

Truth is, many of the reasons given for going to college are bad reasons. Henrie discusses them at length. Getting the “college experience?” As I recall, that’s a euphemism for keg parties and cheap hook-ups. Meeting new and diverse people? A year of travel is cheaper and arguably more rewarding. Learning useful skills for the job market? Nope, not a good reason, either. “If the primary end of higher education were merely the acquisition of the skills necessary for success in our particular economic system,” Henrie queries, “then would we not better occupy the years of early adulthood in some form of technical school?” Yes… but there is a long-standing stigma surrounding vocational education that will be tough to overcome. It needs to be overcome, however, if colleges and universities are going to preserve their unique mission to pursue scientific research and cultivate the liberal arts. They don’t call it “higher learning” for nothing.

I’ve got to be careful where I tread here, but I’ll just say that the attitude should be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at a university and leave it at that. That has always existed and probably always will. However, I don’t know that this analysis is quite right. Rather, it seems that the university is trying to be all things to all people. Certainly the universities are still driving forces in scientific research, and the liberal arts plod on as they ever have. Colleges and universities have also become giant bureaucracies unto themselves, as well as places where young people — some of whom haven’t the slightest interest in² science, liberal arts, or research — go to socialize and “find themselves”. I’m not so sure that is helpful to the university, and I’m certain it’s not helpful to the millions of people who subsidize them with their tax dollars.

Speaking of which, does it bother you that a cottage industry has been set up to warehouse your “excess” student loan money — the part of your loan/grant that doesn’t get eaten up by tuition and books?

This is going to become a theme in the coming days (and already is over at Bill’s – we’ll get to that later), but education, like other goods and services, obey the laws of supply and demand. Let’s assume that the supply of higher education has held steady over the last several years, and then let’s (artificially) increase the demand for that education. What happens to its price? Of course, it goes up, making it a prime target for demagoguery, meaning more money is poured into it, and so on.

More importantly, what happens to its value to the holder? What does it really mean? And are other things, like technical school education, or community college, necessarily less valuable - or are they just different?

UPDATE [04/30]: Stumbled across this — America’s most overrated product: the bachelor’s degree?

1. but I would take a more applied focus, so I would have been in the actuarial field by 26 instead of — if I’m lucky — 32. That’s a difference of about $200,000 in income.
2. or aptitude for.