I am on a webinar with the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is about Gen Z, and higher ed, and what they want, need, deserve. And, well, no Gen Z people on the call.

This guy talking, a VP at Purdue, worked in Big Pharma for 10 years and he is proud of that. And he says, the price of student data is the price of a pizza. These are smoke and mirrors folk. Scary:

“But why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures? How did such a simplistic view of the relationship between health and the economy emerge, one which makes a mockery of decades of (Left-leaning) social science research showing just how closely wealth and health outcomes are connected? Why did the Left ignore the massive increase in inequalities, the attack on the poor, on poor countries, on women and children, the cruel treatment of the elderly, and the huge increase in wealth for the richest individuals and corporations resulting from these policies?”
Toby Green & Thomas Fazi (The Left’s Covid Failure)

And, another facet, the brown shirt syndrome, Vaccine Youth Brown Shirts — Pathetic:

About one-third of Millennials and Gen Zers have cut ties with friends, family members or acquaintances who will not get the COVID-19 vaccine.

This is according to a survey from Axios and The Harris Poll. They surveyed 1,334 U.S. adults in August 2021 and categorized them by generation.

The survey results show:

• 33% of Millennials say they have cuts ties with somebody in their life over not getting vaccinated against COVID-19
• 30% of Gen Zers, 9% of Gen Xers and 7% of Baby Boomers say the same

“It’s the new cultural dividing line,” John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, told Axios. “Three in 10 Gen Zers, and even more millennials, have ghosted friends who would not get vaccinated.”

Out of those four generations, Millennials are most likely to have young children who are not eligible for the vaccine — it’s not available to anyone under 12 years old. This could be a contributing factor to the generation’s concern for the virus as they worry about their unvaccinated children.

Oh, higher education is conservative, as Noam Chomsky states (see below). The rapid growth of billionaires’ wealth and inequality across the nation grew particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic. As millions of Americans lost their jobs and struggled to have adequate food during the crisis, America’s 722 billionaires saw their profits soar by some $1.2 trillion from January 2020 through April of this year. It’s actually much much more as we end 2021. Are there pitchforks? Are there people crashing their gated parties? Christ no!

These people “running” the show are corrupted, Zoomers, and they talk about recruiting people off campus, out of state, out of country, to be faculty. Get rid of dirty on campus faculty, those of us who can get together and organize for democracy, for freedoms and those of us who can organize against the oligarch. Amazing, how atomized the world is, and these people are the enemy. Debt debt debt.

These people are bizarre. Talking about bringing pets to Zoom class lessons. Talking about dressing down for the screen as faculty to relate to the Z’s.. These people are Eichmann’s. John Steppling, here:

Throughout the pandemic and certainly forefronted in the propaganda of the ‘Great Reset’, is the idea of saving — rescuing or protecting. Save the planet, save your grandmother, save the future. Protect the planet, protect nature, protect grandma. There is a quality of messianism running through the marketing, and I sometimes wonder if its even intentional. For the climate marketing, it’s clear they have pushed something akin to an evangelical tone, in a mash up with New Age bromides and cliches. But even the pandemic has taken on a tone I last heard on charismatic christian preachers.

Now, I was struck how often when you read descriptions of the Nazis you hear the word technician. The emphasis is always on precision and a near Euclidean code of duty. Agamben’s observation that the pandemic is now a religion certainly seems correct. And the authoritarian subjects of the affluent white bourgeoisie, those of the new OCPD (Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder) variant of anal-sadism, are eager to join in this new crusade, a planetary exercise in white saviourism. And yet, millions of people around the world are protesting. My sense is these are mostly working class people, those hit hardest by this new religion. I think they fear for their children (shit, I fear for my children). And then Africa, a continent barley vaccinated at all, whose population has near unanimously rejected the entire narrative.

So the question is really in what way the engagement with screens, with social media, and with electronic media has contributed to the weakening of an already weak ego, a ‘small ego’, and in turn this weak ego has intensified this divorce from our bodies, and a reliance on an ever stricter super-ego. Or, perhaps more, that this screen habituation has reinforced a societal encouragement to think instrumentally, to mimic those symptoms found in OCDP, and perhaps that mimic of symptom becomes actual symptom. For what is illness, exactly, in a society so aggressively irrational and manipulative. What one has seen over twenty years is the the manufacturing of the anal character, and the simultaneous evisceration of any counter culture. (The Happiest Place on Earth)

These people are so-so happy about ordering groceries via apps, using apps to pay bills, it’s all app app app. The Great Reset is already in full-force. And these people are happy about it, and now, happy about AI, on weekends the youth can get FAQ’s answered, all those student experiences to $150K a year administrators have concocted. These people are empty. College admissions honcho, campus experience VP’s, retention experts, marketers, institutional research dudes, these folk, are vapid. I am writing this while listening to them, again, with no Gen Z on the line. No alternative view, and all of them are nodding nodding nodding in agreement.

Steppling cites James Baldwin, and it is really about the Black Person scarring the crap out of White People, and now replace, “Covid-19” with “Black people”:

“White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness…{ } They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history.” —James Baldwin (Esquire interview, 1979)

Steppling does make a strong point about how a subculture is missing, and has been missing, for years. Decades. “Without a sub culture, informal meetings, collective creative projects, and gatherings, people can no longer discuss things. Social media is the anti-sub culture. It is not even a pretend replacement, but an antagonist.”

And I will almost end with Alison McDowell:

To my way of thinking, there are two types of people in the world. Those who believe natural things of earth, water, and sky have spirit and those who don’t. Those who embrace animism, and those who consider it silly, or perhaps even profane. Everything I’ve learned since the biosurveillance state has rolled out, especially with regards to bioengineering, particle physics and frequency, tells me we are living in a universe of sacred energetics where dynamic communication beyond anything that we can imagine is happening all the time. Onto that network, the authentic cosmic dance, molecular engineers desire to place a counterfeit web. It is our task, for those who take it up, to bear witness, to speak the truth, to put positive affirmations into the world, and to listen for the songs of life sung by the brooks, breezes, birds, and cicadas.

They never asked permission to use their thunderbolts on us.

We cannot give consent.

Our DNA is a fractal antenna signaling the universe.

Life isn’t a computation.

Life isn’t an electrical engineering schematic.

Life isn’t a data dashboard.

Pi used in equations is an inadequate substitute for that which eternally unfolds.

Nature is (mostly) curves. (h/t Sofia Smallstorm)

Chomsky, and this is in 1973:

One Man’s View

Noam Chomsky interviewed by an anonymous interviewer

Business Today, May, 1973, pp. 13-15

QUESTION: By their very nature, it often seems that the faculty assume a liberal or radical or critical view of the society.

CHOMSKY: I don’t agree. I think the faculty is a very conservative group. That is, it is considered liberal within the spectrum of American opinion, but American opinion on the whole has shifted so far to the right as compared with, say, Western Europe, that by the general standards of the Western European democracies, the faculties in American universities are really quite conservative.

QUESTION: Then, do you think faculty are failing in a role that they might play of supplying a liberal thrust in society — one of positive criticism?

CHOMSKY: Well, I don’t care what kind of opinions people have. I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure — the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don’t believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society. And this is not merely a matter of opinion; I think this is easily demonstrable.

QUESTION: Is it possible within the society as it is now constructed to let the faculty have a more free role?

CHOMSKY: I don’t think that anyone is stopping the faculty from doing it. Because of their profound conservatism, the faculty in the ideological subjects such as history, political science and so on, find ways to avoid studying basic issues about the nature and exercise of power in our society. Or if they do study them, they do it in a perverse and confusing fashion. In fact, the very nature of academic specialization contributes to that. For example, consider the study of political economy — there’s a specialization of fields which makes it very difficult to investigate the central topics in the structure of American society within some academic department.

I think the most striking example of this that I know of is the study of foreign policy. There was a recent survey that appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. The author investigated two hundred major works in what he called the respectable literature on international affairs and foreign relations, and he discovered that more than 95% of them make no mention whatsoever of the relationship between corporations and foreign policy, and that less than 5% give the subject passing mention. Now of course it’s obvious to any 10th grader that that’s a central issue. And the fact that academic scholarship so systematically avoids what is a central issue is just a very dramatic indication of the ideological controls under which it operates.

QUESTION: From what I’ve read myself, that article itself seems pretty conservative in its considerations.

CHOMSKY: You see, what’s striking to me is two things. First of all, the fact that he was able to unearth it; namely, that within the mainstream, everybody avoids this topic like poison. And secondly, his own attitude toward that fact. That is, having noticed that there’s a mass of literature that avoids the central issue. I think there’s a periphery that touches the real issue. It never occurred to him that maybe its the periphery that’s the respectable literature, and the mass — that’s the literature of advocacy. He himself is so caught up in the ideological structure of the society that he can’t see what his own data suggests to him.

Chomsky states it here, again, the conservativism of universities, but his lockdown mentality, his bizarre belief in the science of technology and the science of the overlords and Pfizer and Big Pharma, and this absurd narrative of the left, the fascism of mandates, the hate of the unvaccinated (Chomsky stated that the unvaccinated should be locked up!), all of it, it is a sad commentary on this fellow who is, or has been for decades, shielded from many of the realities of us who do research and who open our eyes to the convergence of the entire game here, and he discounts the power of The Net to colonize people, and he discounts a lot, and Lowkey is not going to push back, that is for sure. However, have at it!