On Thursday

On this day, the birthday of Our Lady- many happy returns.

If only you knew how many times she had your back...

University students are spoiled and undeserving of what they demand? Well, colour me shocked:

Generation Y is stirring up trouble on Canadian university campuses.

No, they’re not demonstrating against war, fighting for equal rights or trying to reform university administration. Rather, they’re demanding better marks than they deserve, slighting professors and reading junk.

That’s the view of two professors who have written a book called Campus Confidential: 100 startling things you don’t know about Canadian universities. (James Lorimer & Co., 245 pages).

Not all of the 100 facts are startling, but there’s enough to hold the interest of anyone heading to university this year or helping their offspring make the leap.

“Every generation claims that the next one has been coddled and spoiled, but it really may be true this time,” writes Ken S. Coates, arts dean at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and Bill Morrison, history professor emeritus at the University of Northern B.C. in Prince George. “Something new and nasty is going on with university students these days, and there’s more trouble in store.”

The authors blame societal permissiveness, child-centred educational and parenting styles, overwhelming materialism, video games, sexualized media and the guilt of two-income families. 

It’s not all bad, the authors write, because these new students are also more assertive and more confident than previous generations and not intimidated by professors or any adults.

“But they also have a deep sense of entitlement,” the book says. “They often expect deadlines to be altered, want their explanations accepted without confirmation and try to insist that course requirements fit their availability to do work. Not all students fit this description, but the general student population has changed.”

The entitlement generation is killing the joy of teaching, they say, but students aren’t the only challenge for universities. There are also declining admission standards, combined with high-school grade inflation; interfering helicopter parents, who hover over their children; stiff competition for dwindling numbers of Canadian students and even tougher competition for international students; growing academic fraud; and confusion about the university mandate and weak leadership, the book says.

Students are just unprepared to live as productive adults, period. There is no love of learning, no impetus to succeed or to use one's hands for anything other than texting, the indulgence, the replacement of true academia with more stress on self-esteem building, the lowering of existing (or existed) educational standards to ridiculous levels and complete lack of awareness of self and others. I'd say those things sum up the problems we are now seeing.



Three and a half years after the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Americans unleashed nuclear hell on the Japanese and then there was peace. Ten years after the September 11th attacks, the Americans are fumbling about:

In common with, I think, most sane Americans—a category from which I’d exclude those in thrall to conspiracy theories—I recall 9/11 with two principal emotions: anger and shame.

The anger is a natural response to the fact that those attacks were a gross insult to my country. Insults make one angry. My anger was compounded by the thought of thousands of harmless middle-class New York office workers, the kind of people I have spent much of my working life among, suffering horrible deaths at savages’ hands.

The shame arises from thinking of the stupidities in which Americans had collectively indulged and that allowed the 9/11 terrorists to do what they did. As the 9/11 Commission report says, after cautioning against hindsight: “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.”

Should we commemorate an insult? Should we commemorate our failures?

When and how did we lose our ability to respond to things such as this?



This might give one a clue:

Former cabinet ministers in Jean Chretien's government, who served in the months following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, say Canadians may be too complacent about a potential attack in this country. 

In an interview with Postmedia News, former foreign affairs minister John Manley, who was charged with chairing the cabinet committee to devise anti-terrorism measures, said with the passage of time, too many Canadians have dropped their guard.

"There still tends to be a degree of complacency or naiveté on the part of Canadians that this is really not our problem. I think we continue to be a little bit too complacent," said Manley, who is now president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

"The primary role of government, before everything else, is to enable its people to live in a secure environment. But if you can't have the ability to walk safely or be secure in your home, then we may as well be living in the jungle."

Former justice minister Anne McLellan holds similar concerns.

"I think overall, Canadians think we are the good guys and, 'Who would want to hurt us? We are not like the United States'," she said.

"That psychological distancing, while I understand why people do it — to give themselves a sense of comfort or reassurance — is dangerous in the world in which we live."

I take at an arm's length what ANY Liberal would say about anything at all but there is an element of truth therein. Canadians still won't wrap around their heads the fact that Sikh extremists in this country killed three hundred and twenty-nine people and that eighteen Islamists wanted to kill the prime minister. Read these barely literate comments and wonder why we haven't been hit as hard as we have:

"The only reason we need to fear any of this is because of war mongering idiots who comited to stupid false flag causes!"

"Complacent my ass, all you hear is how bad Muslims are how they are all Terrorists. Stupid, Stupid, just Stupid."

"Since America has decide to add an additional holiday to the many, let me be the first to say, Happy 911 Day.

Just in time for Christmas, No, I mean 911.

Sheeple, Wake up America, it is time to wake up, poor America has been sleeping for the past 10 years, do you recognize your America today. All because of a small group of EVIL DOERS.

They, these EVIL DOERS, they were successful, they brought down those towers, they destroyed your economy, they even were able to evict many of you from your homes, they took away your jobs. They, the EVIL DOERS won on that day, known as 911.

Your bank accounts are drained, your IRA sucks, no more stock portfolio, all of this occurred due to the EVIL DOERS.

The axis of EVIL did this to you and you know their faces, BUSH, CHENEY, RICE.

All the while your government has tried to blame that rag-tag group of misfits called the Al Qaeda. The question is, What are YOU going to do about these EVIL DOERS?

It is dangerous to be an enemy of America. It is even more dangerous to be a friend of the US, you never know when America will turn on you.

Why do you think there is a Homeland of Insecurity, you have probably seen their catchy slogan, "Keeping America safe from Freedom and Democracy for nearly 10 years."

"The Canadian government put its citizens at risk for supporting Israel's illegal settlements on Palestinian lands."

There are times when there are just no words to summarise the immense idiocy of some people.


Indeed.



Is South Korea suffering from a Sarah Palin Syndrome?

Park Geun-hye, daughter of the founder of modern-day South Korea, has been bumped off the top place in opinion polls of potential candidates for president for the first time in three years.


Park received 40.7 percent of support as a potential presidential candidate, trailing software developer Ahn Cheol-soo with 41.5 percent, a poll of 500 respondents by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper showed on Thursday.

Analysts said the surge by Ahn, a pioneering computer software developer who has never held elected office, reflected deep public distrust of the political establishment and exposed Park's vulnerability to a challenge from the left.

"It's safe to say Park's runway victory is now hardly a certainty," said political analyst Yu Chang-seon.

"What's ahead is Park having to go through fierce competition and we shouldn't rule out Ahn's candidacy."

I might be inclined to understand how voters old enough to remember the Seventies might feel about anything related to Park Chung-Hee but younger voters will not feel the same way. She has liberal and fiscally conservative  (from a Korean perspective) leanings and an apparently a strong rating, despite losing to Lee Myun-Bak. However, this poll seems to suggest that a possible candidate with no political experience could easily bump off one who does. The left certainly seems to have quite the sway in national politics, which is dangerous on the peninsula.



Or is the South Korean electorate reluctant to let a woman ascend to the highest office of the land?



Discuss.


South Korea doesn't screw around:

A South Korean appellate court has upheld a life sentence imposed on a Somali pirate for hijacking a ship and shooting its captain.

Five Somali pirates were captured during a raid on a hijacked South Korean-operated cargo ship in the Arabian Sea in January. The South Korean military operation killed eight pirates. During the raid the ship's South Korean captain was shot and wounded by a pirate.

A district court in the South Korean city of Busan subsequently sentenced one pirate to life in prison and four other pirates to between 13 and 15 years behind bars.

On Thursday the Busan High Court upheld most of the district court's ruling, though it reduced one pirate's sentence by three years.

Both the pirates and prosecutors have one week to appeal.

And now, Star Wars for the ages.