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I graduated from a state university with a BA and from a different state university with a PhD. After that, I did a postdoc at an elite private university and served as faculty for 37 years at a different private university. My daughter got her BA from a public university and her JD from an elite private university. So I’ve seen both public and private higher ed from the inside. My impression, both from personal experience and from reading the data is that the tuition premium charged by private colleges and universities is not repaid in post-graduation earnings. Today, the reputational branding of elite colleges and universities is being questioned. “ Regardless of whether one sees these developments as an overdue correction or as a scramble to minimize the damage being wrought by the Trump administration, this much is clearly true: The proclamations of a handful of wealthy, hyperselective universities tell us almost nothing about the state of American higher education writ large. ...

  It needs to be understood that--as Reich points out--Fascism is not a 20th Century invention. With the institution of slavery, the glorification of conquest and the subjugation of women, the Fascist or Dominator State already appears in history. All the early agricultural/monarchist systems contained the full body of Fascist theory and practice; Hitler and Mussolini merely revived this system after it had appeared to be in eclipse due to industrialism and democracy.   ~Robert Anton Wilson

The point of terrorism isn’t military victory or conquest. It’s fear. And bin Laden certainly achieved his goal on 9/11. The US invasion and military occupation of Iraq and the current US war against Iran are the direct consequences of 9/11, as are DHS, ICE and the mass deportations. Indeed, the Trump GOP has embraced bin Laden objective and uses fear as its primary tool. A true patriot would reject al Qaida terrorism and seek to unite Americans around the things that have historically strengthened our country—democracy, diversity and tolerance. Otherwise, bin Laden continues to win.

So the choice we face in the next generation is not capitalism versus communism, or the end of history versus the return of history, but the politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes versus the erosion of society by the politics of fear.   ~Tony Judt  

"In offices across the military and in the intelligence community, there have been recent quiet discussions about cutting the number of people and facilities typically stationed in the Middle East if the Trump administration succeeds in ending the Iran conflict, six sources say.     "If those cuts happen, it would mark another shift in how the US national security apparatus treats a region that successive presidents have sought to leave behind." "If" is doing all the work in that sentence. I'll bet on a TACO. <a href=" h  https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/08/politics/us-military-intelligence-bases-troops-middle-east " >US to pull troops out of the ME? </a>

Much has been made of the fact that being vaccinated does prevent you from catching COVID. Of course, that was never the claim; the claim was that vaccination would keep you out of the ED and the morgue, a claim that enjoys abundant support. Less well appreciated is that vaccination also protects from Long COVID. “. . . long COVID  may be underdiagnosed . Millions of Americans  are thought to be suffering  but not receiving  appropriate clinical care . Furthermore, even now, well after the acute phase of the COVID pandemic has passed, an estimated  30,000 Americans  are newly diagnosed with long COVID each year. But this is far fewer than expected,  based on 2023 data . Thus, long COVID appears to have become a hidden cause of disease and disability. “When research suggests that as many as  one in six patients  with COVID-19 may develop post-acute sequelae but those statistics are inconsistent with what doctors are reporting, many start to de...

The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War. They have performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny percentage of NATO military budgets and zero losses from NATO members. Ukrainians are making a war in the Pacific much less likely by demonstrating to China that offensive operations are harder than they seem. They have made nuclear war less likely by demonstrating that nuclear blackmail need not work. Ukraine is also fighting to restore its grain exports to Africa and Asia, where millions of people have been put at risk by Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian economy. Last but not least, Ukrainians are demonstrating that a democracy can defend itself. ~Timothy Snyder