The Mystery of Why Tuition at Public Colleges has Gone From $1000/yr to $21,000+/yr

Like the private prison industry, the predatory, for profit, private trade/college school is a growth industry funded by public money while the traditional, state-funded, 2- and 4-year higher education venues are being starved of  funding.  Why, we may ask, is the government funneling profits to schools whose credits may not be transferable to accredited institutions?   [...]

Mike Wallace Interviews Aldous Huxley

Prognosticator of the Future Here is an interview of Aldous Huxley by Mike Wallace in 1958.  This interview is as topical today as it was in the 1950s.  You will find predictions of how television and advertising will affect politics.  You will see how easily a country can devolve into a dictatorship (the USSR) and [...]

Unintended Consequences of Student Loans

 I’m totally in sympathy with Ellen.  Once upon a time education was factored into the cost of growing an economy and built into the economy by supporting public education.  At some point the cost of growing the economy  began to be “unbundled” in the name of saving taxes.  Some of these costs could be unbundled, [...]

Drugs, Athletics, College Students, and Body Dysmorphic Disorder

Stimulants vs Steroids  Many college students over the last 50 years (at the very  least) have resorted to one or another stimulant to increase their wakefulness while studying for tests.  There is little argument that these substances increase alertness.  The military uses amphetamine-like substances for long flights and other missions where alertness is critical.   [...]

When Big Brother Knows Everything

One of the more interesting science-fiction books I read as a youth.  At least I thought it was science fiction.  These days it is more descriptive of the world we live in.  Even the privacy of my thoughts is threatened by MRIs that can map activities such as sexual excitation or mendacious thought.  Carlos Nineteen [...]

Can Society Endure the New Indentured Servitude of Student Debt?

Ok, I’m not seriously in college anymore.  I haven’t smoked any weed in ages, I can barely remember the last time I woke up and wondered how the person next to me in bed and naked, got there.  My last connection to psychedelics was an homage to Augustus Stanley Owsley, III at his death. … I [...]

Question: Is Free Will Free?

I’ve read Scientific American for over xx years.  Long enough to remember when it was a hard read for a 13 year old.  SciAm has become a lot more accessible over the years and so it should.  I also remember when the news was news  - and not an entertainment profit center.   Back on [...]

Open Courseware: Democratizing Education

For the last few weeks I’ve been looking for a topic for my 500th online post in machimon.wordpress.com.  I think I’ve found a subject of sufficient gravity and scope:  Education.  While some see education as a profit- making enterprise, others see knowledge as  the common heritage of humanity, and as such, the monetization of knowledge [...]

Body Modification: The Crucification of Sebastian Horsley (film)

Body Modification   I have occasionally been curious about body modification.  This undoubtedly comes from my own experience with body modification in the 1960s.  To be sure this has become a far more sophisticated art since I pierced my left earlobe at a gathering of the tribe in the mid-1960s.      My only anesthetic [...]

Education in the Late, Great, State of California

Many believe the USA is the promised land, which it may have been at one time (if you discount slavery, segregation, union busting, the depression, almost continual war, and ever increasing surveillance, among other things).  Times change, people die (and with them their memories of the immediacy of hunger, dead relatives, and poverty).  Knowledge, one [...]