Posts Tagged ‘near-death experiences’
Friday Off to ICFA Links!
* So you want to loot a public institution: CUNY edition.
The higher tuition rates have not provided students with greater access to full-time faculty. In 1975, the last year that CUNY offered a free education, there were 11,500 full-time faculty members teaching 250,000 students. Today enrollment is at an all-time high of about 274,000 students. Meanwhile, there are only 7,500 full-time faculty employed at CUNY, according to testimony given by CUNY Chancellor James Milliken to the state Assembly earlier this year. CUNY relies on poorly paid, part-time adjunct faculty to teach the majority of its classes.
* …UC edition. What a stunning, sickening photo.
* Here’s the Internal Memo from Starbucks’ Disastrous Race-Relations Push.
* Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life.
* Freddie deBoer vs. soft censorship on the academic job market and soft research in rhet-comp programs.
For while social constructivism, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, theory, and abstract notions of the digital dominate our scholarly journals, the truth is that in most places the study of writing is the study of the research paper, the argumentative essay, the resume. This isn’t a contradiction with what I’ve said before; my argument is that writing scholars mostly research subjects that have little to do with the actual day-to-day reality of teaching students to express themselves in prose. But the teaching of writing is undertaken not by tenure-track academics who have a research responsibility but, dominantly, by adjuncts, graduate students, visiting professors, and permanent non-tenure track faculty. It’s these people that I most fear we fail, because they frequently are at permanent risk, risk that amplifies greatly if they don’t do the kind of traditional pedagogy they are expected to by their institutions. When they need guidance for how to better teach library research, or how to help students in basic writing courses use paragraphs, or what research shows about whether peer review is helpful or not, where can they turn? To a degree, not to rhetoric and composition journals, or at the very least, not to our flagship journals, which I will again say simply do not publish that sort of thing regularly anymore.
* Towards teaching-oriented tenure.
* The latest scenes from the Scott Walker Miracle.
* Three-hundred-twenty-five staff members — including those with tenure — are being offered “go away” packages by University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Chancellor James Schmidt. That’s a third of the people who work there.
* Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?
* Survey: The State of Adjunct Professors.
* Great moments in not understanding what satire is. The kicker:
Asked whether he posted any of the photos, the frat member said “No, no, absolutely not. I’m a good guy.”
* Paul F. Tompkins announces a new podcast.
* 8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man.
* Australian man’s dream was to go to UNC, but he went to wrong school for four years. I love that the closer of this thing is the man singling out the English department for praise. Go Spartans!
* Now offering my services as a consultant to prevent this sort of thing from happening. $1000/hour.
* The Science of Near-Death Experiences.
* Woman abandoned as baby in Macon in 1915 dies at age 100. Bringing new meaning to the phrase “never live it down.”
* The preferential option for the poor: Catholic Cathedral Installed Water System That Drenches Homeless People To Keep Them Away.
* Another tremendous issue of Demon from Jason Shiga.
* What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test?
* The past isn’t even past: Britons still live in Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdoms, Oxford University finds.
* And this just seems like a background joke from the set designers that we somehow accidentally noticed: Obamas may be buying ‘Magnum, P.I.’ home in Hawaii.
Saturday Night Link Fever (No Cure)
Linkdumps from earlier in the week, Tuesday, Tuesday Night, Thursday, and Friday. There’s also one or six more worth seeing.
* More from the Reddit wars from Jezebel, Chad, Aaron, and Lili.
* Middle Earth: pretty much all dudes.
* What is happening is a dramatic policy shift whereby the rights and entitlements the US working class has fought for and come to expect are now declared to be, for the foreseeable future, unreachable and unjustified. To put it in media terms, it is “the end of the American dream,” signifying the historic severance of US capital from the US working class, in the sense that US capitalism is becoming completely de-territorialized and is now refusing any commitment to the reproduction of the US workforce.
* A bit out of their jurisdiction, don’t you think? It’s True: The FBI Urged Martin Luther King to Commit Suicide.
* $134,078.44 lien for unpaid hospital bills filed against unarmed man shot by police while fleeing gunman. In a movie called America 2012, it’d be a little too on-the-nose.
* ZeFrank recaps the vice-presidential debate. Bonus Get Your War On.
* Poll panickers relax: Obama is crushing it in Ohio, and Ohio is basically the whole game this year.
PPP’s newest Ohio poll finds Barack Obama leading 51-46, a 5 point lead not too different from our last poll two weeks ago when he led 49-45.
The key finding on this poll may be how the early voters are breaking out. 19% of people say they’ve already cast their ballots and they report having voted for Obama by a 76-24 margin. Romney has a 51-45 advantage with those who haven’t voted yet, but the numbers make it clear that he already has a lot of ground to make up in the final three weeks before the election.
Need more? Fluke, almost certainly incorrect poll puts Obama up in Arizona!
* Okay, go ahead and panic a little: Romney Debate Gains Show Staying Power. For what it’s worth Obama spiked a bit upward on the 538 graphs today.
* Of course there are still those who think the worse, the better.
Why Romney? Because his transparency as a Neanderthal may, just may, bring people into the streets, while under Obama passivity and false consciousness appear almost irreversible.
Elsewhere on the Web, the affirmative case for Obama has more or less reduced to pure spite.
Do these folks really want their bigoted in-laws and racist YouTube commenters to have the satisfaction of having been right all along? Because that’s what they’ll take away from this.
* ‘Million Muppet March’ Planned. I’ll allow it, but know you’re on a tight leash.
* Side Effects of Global Warming You’re Not Worried About Enough Yet.
* Agent Coulson will return for S.H.I.E.L.D. Then why didn’t Joss use my awesome final shot for The Avengers?
* Isn’t-it-pretty-to-think-so-filter: Why near-death experiences don’t constitute proof of an afterlife.
* And just in case you’re still out there in the cold: Presenting SmartSocks+: the smartest socks in the world.
Dying to Have an NDE
In the comments Ryan directs me to this piece in Viceland about both the experience of dying and near-death experience.
Next, you’ll experience what I think is the real moment of death. There are sensations of being surrounded by gentle beings and white light within which are figures that exude comfort, relief, warmth, release, and liberation.
Meeting dead people is a singular experience. I once met an acquaintance of many years who had died about a year prior. He looked casually at me and said, “Oh, no use talking to you yet. You aren’t staying.” I recall saying, “Shit, I hope the others know that,” meaning my hardworking rescue team, slaving away on my body somewhere else. I got the distinct impression that my friend was a guardian of some sort, not of me or of people, but of the realm his bulk (yes, there is an impression of substance) was maddeningly obscuring the view of. On another occasion, I saw a very dear friend who had died in a horrific car crash in which she had burned to death. This had happened some three years before. She did not notice me at first, so I called to her, “Hey, Donna, what are you waiting for?” She looked up without any surprise at seeing me and said, “My son.”
At that time this child, my godson, was a healthy little boy. Sadly, Max died in a house fire about a year after this encounter. I am always comforted that his mother told me she was waiting for him and that they are with each other now.
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Gerry Canavan 