Just Stuff

Just Stuff

There is so much about the current POTUS which makes me want to vomit that I have to back off the political tirades for a bit since I’ve done pretty much nothing but that for some time, soooo….

        I’m really getting over those "sideboard" advertisements that you can’t get rid of unless you “Upgrade to Premium.”  In case you’re wondering, in my case this is primarily an on-line Bridge Game and Microsoft Solitaire games. Apparently, a significant number of persons  play on-line electronic slots, because these make up a large portion of the unwanted interruptions that one has to sit through prior to playing the game one wishes. Playing real slots is a fool’s errand in and of itself, but electronically, on-line? Really?

          The Bridge game ads run in “sidebar" panels the entire time I’m playing. Two in particular are worthy of note simply because….., well, you decide why. 

        One is an advertisement for auto insurance. Not unusual, I suppose, but the two spokespersons they are apparently paying to do the ads are Tonya Harding and Johnny Manziel. Take heart! In the event that you either fail miserably or get caught cheating at your chosen endeavor, there is still some company desperate enough to hire you.

        Another which has no audio, is a picture of what appears to be a raw egg in a small glass. The scrolling text gives the good news: “Top surgeon says do this to empty your bowls every morning!” I refuse to click and read further. As is the case in far too many of these ads, the topic is one which would rightfully be dealt with, if at all, by an internist or nutritionist. The words “top surgeon” are gratuitous and are typical of the genre, which essentially uses catch phrases and words with scientific appeal to gain readers’ attention and prime them for the usually non-science scam to follow.

         There is also a long and growing list of the “Top surgeon says ‘Remove this food from your diet’” advertisements. Again, the word “surgeon” to get your attention, and then an advertisement completely unrelated to any surgical process. Doctors Phil (not even a credentialed psychologist at present) and Oz are prime examples of the whores currently working this street corner. Of course, we of my generation were treated to “doctors” (who weren’t) in white labs coats shilling for cigarette manufacturers.

        A recent addition to the sidebar school of adverts is the discredited former Faux News talking head, Bill O’Reilly. He has apparently become a financial guru and wants to share his new-found knowledge with all of us….. at a price, of course. One hopes his creds in that field are more legit than his claims to have been an “historian”. This enduring lie grew from the attempts to lend credibility to his ghost written “Killing…whomever”) series of books.

         O’Reilly’s pseudo-credibility is the manufactured result of his having taught 2 years of high school with English out of field as part of that. After two years he left that career to become a professional dissembler. A BA in history and teaching a couple of years of high school is not a substitute for legitimate creds as an “historian”. The extent of Bill O’Reilly’s formal professional credit is a bachelor’s degree in history. Period. I will acknowledge that he did choose wisely, in having selecting Martin Dugard to write most of the “Killing of …” books to which O’Reilly proudly affixes his name in very large print. Apparently, Mr. Dugard, well paid, is content.  

        Another side-bar advertising annoyance is the spate of “for profit” post-secondary schools offering degrees with, what seems to be approaching, zero effort on the part of the student. 

        During the Obama administration, amid burgeoning numbers of both unrecoverable college debt and questionable for-profit colleges, the administration, via the DOE, acted. This decision was fueled by complaints that for-profit colleges lured students with misleading promises, then saddle them with debts they can’t pay back despite their newly granted degrees. Its tool was the Education Department’s long-debated “gainful employment” rule, which required colleges to track their graduates’ performance in the workforce and eventually would cut off funding for career training programs that fall short. Students who attended for-profit colleges filed more than 98 percent of the requests for student loan forgiveness alleging fraud.

        The rule — upheld by a court ruling and going into effect in 2015, aimed to trigger the closure of 1,400 programs that together enrolled an estimated 840,000 students. Ninety-nine percent of those students attended “for-profits.”  Lest one might think this was ill advised, there were such frauds as a Three-Year Doctor of Divinity degree (it usually takes at least seven. and more usually eight, years!). Other scams included hugely inflated employability claims and non-existent actual job placement and high-pressure loan “selling” often at far above market interest rates.

        Another scam is claims of accreditation by mythical organizations with lofty sounding titles. One of the worst was Corinthian, a giant conglomerate of the for-profit college industry. Corinthian, by choice and intent, marketed both vocational and post-secondary programs to single mothers at or below the poverty line. Of course, advice on loan availability was Job One at Corinthian. At the time of is demise, Corinthian was under investigation by various federal agencies, the Department of Education, and 20 different state attorneys general.  Then it said it could not operate for more than a few days without an influx of cash and shut down, stranding students where they were. An uncovering of in-house Corinthian directives and documents revealed a corporate philosophy aimed at specifically targeting “isolated” and “impatient” individuals with “low self-esteem”.

        Sadly, in the first months of the Trump administration, the completely unqualified and enemy of public education, Betsy  Devos, gutted two Obama-era regulations: one that cut off funding to programs that performed poorly, and one that made it easier for students defrauded by a for-profit school to wipe out their loans. She then in a final slap at educational equity, appointed Julian Schmoke Jr., a former for-profit college administrator, to police fraud in the higher education industry. This is analogous to hiring Wile E. Coyote to baby-sit your Roadrunner.

        And that, kids, is about all I can stomach for today.