The Most Hated Man On The Internet

And he's a liberal! How appropriate!

"Wife Swap" had an interesting episode not too long ago. The Long family are a midwestern family from Missouri that enjoy their ATVs, paintball, and fast food. The Fowler-Stevens family enjoy their organic food, exercise, and education.

Like any episode of "Wife Swap," the two families had their disagreements. But when Gayla Long got together with Stephen Fowler, Fowler really showed how much of an intellectual snob he was, constantly berating the poor woman throughout the episode and showing himself to be a big, big bully.

Here's part one.



The rest of the episode can be found here.

You know, I kind of fall in-between worlds, myself. I'm from the East Coast, but I grew up in a more working class lifestyle. And although I have a bachelor's degree and am currently working on my Master's, I don't see myself as "superior" to anyone. This guy just proves that degrees don't prove your intellect.

Since the episode aired, Fowler and his wife (who came off a little bit better than he did, but not much) both apologized for his behavior towards Gayla, with his wife saying that he was going to go into therapy.

Top 10 Politically Correct Moments On College Campuses In 2008

The Young Americans Foundation has just released their top ten list of the most inane free speech moments on colleges campuses in the name of political correctness.

Number one will have you hanging your head in shame for our country.

Here's Your Debate Topic: Am I A Leech?

Everyone remembers the story from earlier this week on National Public Radio that I commented on regarding the two women who were featured in a story on how Ohioans are feeling the pinch on food shopping and finding jobs, and how the person doing the story chose the most inappropriate people to highlight this detail.

Well, on Newsbusters, I've gotten into a debate with someone calling themselves "amber" about my current status of unemployment. Their story focused more on the fact that the two women were on government assistance, so I commented more on that situation that I'm in regarding being on unemployment.

"amber" seems to get the impression that I am a "leech" because I am currently getting unemployment benefits. Before you go to the Newsbusters comments to see what she has written herself, let me get into more details about my situation.

-- I've been working since I was 16 years old. I've been fired from three jobs in my life -- once when I was 16 because I was stupid (who isn't at 16?), once because I took a job in a managerial position that I wasn't suited for, and more recently because I wasn't suited to that particular job
-- It didn't help that the management threw me into the job a couple of days after little training, and that the supervisors would get on my case about every single little mistake that I would make and make me MORE nervous, causing me to make bigger mistakes. But since I was 16, I've been more or less able to hold down a job until I've been able to move on to the next one.

-- Although I've been fired three times, this is the only time I've been on unemployment.

-- I am not suing my former employer, which this woman was under the impression I was doing. My claim was approved, so I started receiving my checks. What I am doing is challenging my former employer's claim that I was "willful" in the mistakes that I was making after my claim was approved, when it was really just bad memory and nervousness on my part that caused me to not do well at the job. They are claiming that they gave me 10 warnings in the month that I was there. I had the claims representative send me copies of the paperwork that they were given, and the "warnings" they were counting were the incident reports that were filled out in my own handwriting from beginning to end. I was not told that these would count as warnings when the procedures were explained to me. Plus, when I talked with the claims representative after getting the notice that they were appealing the decision, he said that I had a good chance at not getting it overturned because, from looking at their paperwork, it looked like they didn't even follow their own procedures in firing me.

-- In one comment, I had mentioned looking into food stamps. Unlike most people who go on food stamps, this would be a temporary thing until I found another job. So it would be a few months at the most. I am not planning on staying on them for the rest of my life -- once I got a job, the food stamps would end.

-- I am in grad school. This started before I was laid off. I had just started school and was in the Spring term when I got the news. My husband is also going to be starting school sometime after Christopher is born, going for his undergraduate degree. He is taking up my mother-in-law's offer to help him in going back so that he can find a more suitable position. He didn't ask her, she just offered one day when we were over at her house and he was talking about going back after I was done school. He's waiting until he got done with a few major projects around the house before he goes back because he knows they won't get done if he doesn't. This person is under the impression that I shouldn't be in school if I "can't afford it." Well, right now, I can't afford NOT to go to school if I want to get a better job.

-- We have never asked for a handout in our lives. Ever. Never ever.

-- The house we bought we had budgeted out very carefully before we decided to get it. Again, this was when I had a job, and I thought it would be relatively secure. We have not asked for assistance on helping us with the mortgage, we've just decided to make a few cuts such as cable TV. We got a great deal on it -- it's a 100 year old house that was foreclosed on. For now, we can make the payments -- I still get refunds from school on my financial aid when I am in school, plus my husband is still receiving payments on the mobile home that he sold before we moved. But that isn't going to be forever, either, and we are going to find a way to manage.

-- Unemployment is not "welfare." When you are employed, you put money into the system. So this is money you have earned over time. This is only for 27 weeks out of the year (although here in New Hampshire, since the economy is so bad, the governor signed a bill allowing people to file for a temporary extension on unemployment benefits by 13 weeks), and in that time you have to be looking for a job. Unlike welfare, it is designed to be temporary.

-- The only reason I am not actively looking for a job right now is because I am waiting until after Christopher's born and my self-imposed maternity leave is done. No one is going to hire a woman who's as pregnant as I am right now. But once I am able to work again, I will be out there looking for a job.

-- Hubby still has a job.

So you tell me -- am I a leech?

Update on Teacher Suing Her Students

You may remember this story that I posted last week regarding the teacher at Dartmouth College who was going to sue her students and members of the facility because she felt she was working in a hostile working environment because the students dared to challenge her in class (Oh, the horror!).

Well, there have been a couple of updates.

1) The professor has withdrawn her idea of a potential lawsuit, and is instead going to include the incidents in a book she is writing about her experiences in teaching. Apparently the students weren't overly concerned about the lawsuit, with one being quoted as saying, “If Venkatesan followed through with her lawsuit the same way she followed through with grading our papers, no one would have had anything to worry about.”

2) The students in her Winter term class will have the option of keeping their grades as is or of taking a pass/fail approach to the grading. For those who aren't familiar with this concept in a college class, there are certain college classes where you don't get a normal letter grade, but instead are given a P for passing the class, or F for failing. When I was in college it applied mostly to credits where a grade wouldn't be worthwhile such as working in the film library for a certain number of hours a week. Anyway, the administration noticed that there was an inconsistency with her grading between her Fall and Winter classes after examining her grading system.

I think making it up to the students who took her class that term was the fairest thing the administration could do. It wasn't their fault that their professor was a nut job.

Pro-Life Exhibit Destroyed By Thugs

(h/t Michelle Malkin)

A group called Pointers for Life had put up 4,000 crosses on a section of lawn at the University of Wisconson-Stevens this week to symbolize the victims of abortion -- the unborn babies. By the next day, a good portion of the crosses were taken out of the ground.

One of those who participated in the removal of crosses from the display was student senator Roderick King, seen here in this rather insightful video spouting his "free speech for me, but not for thee" philosophy with a campus officer and some members of Pointers for Life and College Republicans.



Indeed.

Dartmouth College Fosters A Hostile Environment

Because the students dared to question their professor in class.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Further background in the student paper The Dartmouth can be found here, here, here and here.

I was always afraid of this happening with any of my professors when I was in college because of my conservative Christian leanings, even though my film professors assured me otherwise. Maybe I was more afraid of my fellow students than the professors.

Dartmouth College Finds Cannon

It was buried underneath the football stadium.

HANOVER, N.H. -- In his 17 years on the police force here, Hanover Police Officer Rick Paulsen has never worked a case like this.

Paulen's quietly pursued a story he initially dismissed as "folklore" that came to light while he was working a Dartmouth College home football game last fall.

A spectator approached, a man from Norwich, Vt. who he has known for years.

"He mentioned there's a cannon buried under Memorial Stadium," Paulsen recalled, laughing. "I said, yeah right. What cannon?"

The spectator said he was passing along a confession from a Dartmouth graduate whose only caveat was anonymity. While a student in the early 1960s, the man revealed he had stolen a cannon and ammunition carriage from the Vermont Veterans Home in Bennington, Vt., and transported it back to Dartmouth as a college prank.

Now at the end of his life, the man wanted the secret off his conscience. He explained what he had taken and where officials would find it. Paulsen said he does not know the man's name.

"It'd be totally cool if the cannon was still buried under the stadium," Paulsen said. "The urban legend, for this town, would be pretty neat."

Turned out, after a call to the Veterans Home in Vermont, that some older pictures before the renovation showed that there was, indeed, a cannon at that location at one point. Further investigating by geology students showed that they did find something that resembled what was missing underneath the stadium, and they are going to wait for the ground to thaw before digging it up.

Pretty neat story.