Arkansas Votes to Roll Back Gun Law Reforms, Passes Others

1. I cannot say this strongly enough:

   FUCK higher education. They are what’s wrong with this country.

   STOP PAYING THEM. Stop sending your kids there. Kids are not helped when they’re indoctrinated in the kind of horseshit that these schools teach, and then leave college with $100,000 in debt.

   You want to change this country to something decent? Send the universities to hell where they belong.

   If a kid can’t get a job after 12 years of school, then there’s something wrong with the school. Stop paying for it. The #1 component of property taxes? Public schools. The biggest lobbying unions? Public schools. It doesn’t work. And now the universities have launched a defacto war against the bill of rights — they prohibit freedom of expression, they despise freedom of religion, they accuse/try/convict alleged sexual assaulters with no due process, no right to jury trial, etc…

   It is time to pull the plug on universities. It’s long past time to pull the plug on the decrepit K-12 public “education” system. Pull your kids out. Teach ’em your own damn self. And if they say they want to go to a university “to find themselves”, kick ’em in the ass until your toes pop out of their mouths, and then make ’em start their own damn business, like America is supposed to be. Y’ain’t supposed to have “a job” working for someone else, work for your own damn self, just like every Indian and Korean immigrant to this country does. Don’t resent the immigrant for owning every gas station and small store; they’re just doing what the American Dream told ’em was possible.

   Universities have to go. Period.

   • This. And I’m a teacher 🙂

   • So you would be willing to fly on an airplane designed by someone that graduated from high school without an engineering education?

     Though I agree that University isn’t for everyone, it is still important for many fields. No high school is going to prepare you for career involving advanced math and sciences. Because even the most aggressive only get you to pre-calc, basic levels of chemistry, and biology by the end of high school.

     • All that “STEM” stuff is fundamentally trade education (I’m a BS Engineering). Even in “Engineering” schools the worthless BS types totally the place.

       • But STEM isn’t taught in trade schools it is taught in Universities. Because engineers need to know more than how to bash numbers together to get the result that they want. They need to know how to present ideas, some knowledge of economics, etc etc.

         And even if you stuck with only the core classes it still makes sense to combine colleges. So instead of having a physics professor or two hired by the Engineering College, they form a cooperative university and the students from the College of Engineering can attend physics classes at the College of Natural Sciences.

       • “All that “STEM” stuff is fundamentally trade education…”

         Trade education is fundamentally a hands-on internship.

         That is perfectly appropriate for skilled trades like masonry, auto repair, etc.

         It’s not appropriate when someone must fully understand the theory behind the design before it’s built, especially when lack of that knowledge can have lethal results, like the aeronautical engineering PPGMD mentioned.

         Internships are fine for operating an aircraft, but not for the design of one I wold trust flying on…

       • Do you think that people learn how to produce stuff in a school?

         I don’t think you are an engineer, and are also confusing correlation with causation.

         If there was a school that consistently did a good job of turning people into competent individuals in whatever field, then GPAs would not matter.

         All college is is proof that you have
         A: managed to obtain a passing grade in every course necessary for the major track.
         B: Succeeded in obtaining a marginally better grade than most of your competitors.

         That’s it, that’s all.

     • Only precalc? Not in my experience.

       STEM is honestly the only valid purpose for higher education. Liberal arts are worse than pointless.

       The entire public education system needs to be gutted and replaced with something that is actually accountable to families. The current system is a complete failure; I dealt with it for years growing up.

       • The highest I’ve seen regularly offered at a high school is pre-calc, and that is only for the top level students taught in cooperation with the local community college. Most students are lucky to get beyond basic algebra, which is why the math section of the SAT is written for students with at most geometry and intermediate algebra.

         Heck I went to a University where a vast majority of the students were required to take Calculus to get a degree, and yet they still had several non-credit beginning algebra classes that were always full.

       • The public high school I went to did and still does (I was talking with a friend’s 17 year old son this weekend about it) offer multiple math classes beyond pre-cal. The first two years worth of college (about 60 credit hours out of 120 for a degree) were basically covering the same material as the last two years of high school if you didn’t take any AP classes. If you took AP classes, that probably added at least another half semester worth of hours, and, if you took and passed the tests, gave you credit for about 21 of the 60 previously mentioned credits.

         Now, on the other hand, college class mates from neighboring school districts clearly hadn’t even been exposed to college freshman level math in Texas, which was junior high school level math in Texas. Texas had a state wide curriculum for high schools in my day (it probably still does).

         Texas had (and still has) a statewide university system with the “same” classes at every university in the state. There is even a universal numbering system. (When I was in school, A&M refused to follow the numbering system for some reason).

     • The problem with that argument is so many people are involved with complex applied technologies in industry that you can’t simply say college is the one and only way that these things are created and developed. The universities do produce STEM degrees, but they also produce a lot of garbage that masquerades as higher education. Social justice studies and white privilege courses as well as complete and utter abandonment of ethics versus activism are also being taught at these same places and I don’t want these snowflakes involved in my safety when on aircraft, or in public transportation of any sort. The kids in college nowdays are not being taught how to make anything, but their heads are crammed full of liberal BS which is not even worth the cost of a cup of coffee. We are in a really bad situation because the liberal social justice activists have taken over in higher learning across the nation and many of our current college grads can’t tell you what happened in 1066, or 1941, or who the combatants were in the Revolutionary war. They are much more concerned with how wealthy corporatist white people have been keeping all the minority populations locked in poverty (which is provably false, but that is what they are taught to believe).

       A college education is no indicator of skill or ability and the propaganda that it is has hurt many promising individuals careers because society has been conditioned to think the only way a person can succeed in this world is to get that degree.

       Many notable people have become historically significant and had no degree. Thomas Edison is a good example, Henry Ford is another, and the list of people who have contributed to the sciences and the arts who had no university education is extremely long. The point is until the latter part of the 19th century through the 20th century, many of the key technologies our current level of industry has developed came from the minds, muscle and sweat of people who held no degrees – just a drive to seek knowledge and develop their own ideas to the fullest extent that the technology of the time would allow. The modern world’s emphasis on college education began in the mid 20th century, and back then you had to have a very good grasp of fundamental skills like reading, writing and mathematics to even be accepted to a university. That we see people graduating with bachelors degrees who can’t write at a junior high school level should be very troubling to the education system. Instead of that, our modern higher education system has indoctrinated the minds of young adults with liberal politics and all sorts of social engineering and social justice buzzwords to the point that actual academic achievement has taken a back seat to attending protests of things these people don’t agree with to the point of physically violent rioting over who is presenting a talk or it’s content.

       Higher education is a perversion of it’s former self nowdays, and these institutions lust for riches drives the costs of getting a degree to ridiculously unaffordable levels to the point that some students will never be able to pay off their debt, and all the while the student loans that were taken over by the federal government under the last administration has locked these poor people into what amounts to indentured servitude for life. This situation is going to collapse under it’s own weight just like the Affordable (laughable) Care Act is doing now.

       Thinking people simply cannot accept your argument anymore. It isn’t a reflection of the nature of the world we live in today.

   • This is the real problem. Someone is angry at the higher education’s lobbying efforts and that they succeeded in influencing the senate and house members to vote a way that you don’t like. The NRA does this for us to influence House and Senate members to vote the way we want. The issue is not holding the senators and congress people to account for their votes. Calling and writing them to get your input and then if they still vote against good bills, call and write some more and then work to vote them out of office and support another candidate. It doesn’t matter if a lobbying group has a trillion dollars and offers the senators or congress persons all of it to vote a certain way. If the senator or congress person is voted out of office they have no more power. It is not the NRA money that makes the real difference it is voting by the membership and those they influence to also vote similarly that is the real power. Targeting the wrong group is wasted energy. You are never going to get rid of higher education nor should they be.

     • I don’t think anyone really wants to get rid of higher education, but it needs to be de-politicized and reformed to be of any value, and the costs of fees and tuition for all students need to come down to a level where it is affordable and not a mortgage level debt. If you spend 20 years working off your student loan debt like many now will have to do, you will be lucky if you get to work another 20 to be able to retire with income stability. Most of these people in college now are never going to be free from a debt to the government which is protected from bankruptcy thanks to the efforts of the former president. The democrats are once again slaveholders in America, and they didn’t have to buy or sell them in the public market. They just tell them in high school they have to go to college and that Uncle Sam will loan them all the money they need to get that degree. Did you ever wonder why student loans are requiring repayment upon graduation? This is a matter of government control over people who would otherwise be free.

       Perhaps education isn’t the proper terminology to use here, it is more like indoctrination, and with a healthy dose of intimidation and forced labor for life.

   • TexTed: I can’t disagree with you a bit but this is ALL ABOUT “F”ing FOOTBALL which has nothing to do with higher education.
     P.S. I have a Bachelors, a Masters & a doctorate of some kind or the other and I teach

   • Agreed.

   • Meh. There’s nothing wrong with higher education in and of itself. It’s incredibly useful in a lot of ways.

     That said, it does have a lot of problems these days brought on by the fact that it’s been taken over by the far Lefty type of professor who don’t educate but rather indoctrinate.

     However, this isn’t limited to higher education. It’s the same problem we have with primary and secondary education in most of the country these days too. Maybe most people here aren’t in the right age bracket, but I’m CONSTANTLY amazed by the stuff my cousins (who are in high school) tell me. Unbelievable amounts of absolute horseshit. When I ask where they got such crazy notions I’m informed that these ideas are what pass for “high school education” these days.

     The educational system is screwed up from top to bottom. It’s not just higher education.

     • Yes it’s screwed up top to bottom, but it all because of the top. The left took over higher education, who are teach the teachers, which led to all their BS filter down. Flip side attacking the top will resolve the situation since the fixes too will filter down.

       • That depends on how you define “The Top”.

         What you want to attack are Schools of Education. I could write you two pages on how screwed up those places are but as my dad told the radicals back in the 1960’s: “If you want to change the world for the better then burn down Schools of Education”.

         They are, quite literally, the source of the problem. They’re the first thing the Left took over starting in the 1940’s and they did that for a reason.

   • The problem within higher education isn’t so much with the hard science courses, although some clown professors can be found “teaching,” them, but rather within the areas outside those disciplines. Majors such as English, Sociology, Psychology, and many others, including all the junky, made-up, politically charged majors are where you find the real loonies. English used the be a respectable major, and still is in many colleges. If one is not hard-science directed, then I recommend the Great Books Colleges such as St. John’s and St. Thomas Aquinas. Many students with four-year degrees are attending them to get a real college education.

   • The real problem isn’t the higher education system. It’s a problem, but not the problem.

     The real problem is all the HR departments that have convinced us that you need a bachelor’s degree to perform just about every job in the modern economy.

     My sisters are both nurses in the same hospital in related departments. One sister graduated with an associate’s degree and the other with a bachelor’s degree. The one with the associate’s degree had to go back to school for the liberal arts portion of the bachelor’s degree, so she could advance and get a new job at another hospital if she ever quit. That is purely because of HR rules and has nothing to do with actual qualifications for the job.

   • Socialist indoctrination, that’s all it is, Professors ramming their progressive left wing agenda down your throats. It’s a big expensive scam that doesn’t prepare people for the real world. They end up being useless, helpless victims with no critical thinking skills. Waste of money.

   • When California made free college education available to any state resident, they started a “slippery-slope” process that has promoted a college “degree” as the be-all and end-all of the educational process. The DEGREE—Not an education!

     And one of the most distressing things I see is the promotion of “A Degree” as a legitimate goal; to the detriment of practical education. Where are the shop classes? Where are the automotive classes? Where are the classes that will train the electricians, plumbers, mechanics and welders and associated INFRASTRUCTURE MAINTENANCE people that will keep society going?

     No, we are instead promoting “Degrees” in history, languages, pottery, history, philosophy, logic, and maybe the “underwater-basketweaving” at the EXPENSE of training in the Sciences, and practical education.

     I would bet it is difficult to find a High School Shop Class or Home Economics class just about anywhere in the U.S. today—though I hope I am mistaken—instead young persons are graduating High School with Associate Degrees! (Not to make any detrimental assessment of their individual achievements—I would have tried this option had it been available).

     But who are going to be able to fix, maintain and repair all the things that we want in a future existence? I have a “knowledge-base” that include welding, photography, music, math, mechanical engineering, auto mechanics, electronics (digital and older), computers, programming, plumbing, hunting & fishing, climbing, outdoor survival skills, microscopy, design engineering, geology and trade show display set-up.
     Where is this (admittedly eclectic skill-set) going to be duplicated in the future?

     Most likely it will not—which means the ability to PERFORM some basic maintenance functions will be lost.

2. … oh, and while I’m at it — get off my lawn.

   (by the way, the above rant inspired by the article’s line “The higher education lobby has held enormous power in the legislature for the last 100 years.”)

   • It’s a misnomer to call these socialist indoctrination institutions ‘higher learning’. They are doing just the opposite, dumbing the kids down. If you want a real job without a mountain of debt go to a 2 year tech school to learn a trade. If you are good at what you do you will suffer from ‘over employment’ & live a better life than those with those B(ull) S(hit) degrees that don’t mean a damn.

     • Those guys with Bull Shit degrees designed every component of the computer or device that you typed that response. They designed the fiber optic cables that carried the data from your house or cell tower to the TTAG server. They designed the protocol that allowed the data to get to the TTAG server. They designed the software that allowed TTAG’s servers to efficiently serve up the content to you. etc etc

       There is a place for tech schools, and other jobs that don’t require four year degrees. But much of the advancements that you over everyone else relies on today was made possible by people with BS, MS, and Phds. And sometimes even a BA or MA contribute too.

       • Okay, let’s set something straight.

         The mechanism of technical learning is unimportant. Probably seventy percent of what I’ve learned while getting an engineering degree is professionally useless, and a competent entry-level engineer could be turned out with two years’ learning starting in their senior year of high school. Most learning is on-the-job anyways, outside of the serious egghead stuff.

         Public education: the more you go, the less you know!

       • I fundamentally disagree. Do I use any of the Java that my university taught me in my work? No, but that isn’t the point Java is simply the tool used to teach you the fundamentals. The same with the two semesters of computer engineering classes, we were required to take, I learned stuff that were the building blocks for future learning. It is no different than any other degree.

         A lot of it may seem useless but it is building blocks that you use to propel yourself forward. And I would seriously be suspect of any school that pushes out engineers in two years. Between physics, calc, and chemistry you have at least two years of learning before you even get into engineering specific subjects. Or in my case computer science.

       • SP: you wrote “Probably seventy percent of what I’ve learned while getting an engineering degree is professionally useless, and a competent entry-level engineer could be turned out with two years’ learning starting in their senior year of high school.”

         I don’t doubt your 70% number, but I question whether that would be the same 70% as someone who’s not doing your exact job. The problem is the college – and the student for that matter – don’t know precisely what they’ll wind up doing. So they try to provide enough coverage of fundamentals that you can more readily pick up what you need as you go.

         At least, that’s what I’ve found to be the case over my career so far. Recently I’ve been needing to use, for the first time since I graduated over a decade ago, some stuff about fiber optics. Last year it was high voltage power supplies – same thing, hadn’t seen that stuff since school. But I’m sure glad – now – I took it back then, since I have a foundation to build on when I need it. Dusty, granted, but there.

       • As I said earlier, at least 50% of what I “learned” in college, I actually learned in high school. And then there were all the things I took that were useless to just about everyone that were required. Art appreciation class (several options, all useless to me), literature classes (one was required, I took several as electives because they were fun and easy), philosophy, PE (it was only one hour instead of the usual 3), two lab sciences (I could have taken classes that were offered by my high school, only one of which I took, but I was focused on keeping my grades up for law school admission).

         Additionally, my entire major and minor were useless except as a paperwork requirement to get into grad school or meet an HR departments college degree requirement.

         Even a STEM degree is largely useless. About half of such a degree will be liberal arts stuff. Some of which is actually useful, but should have already been learned in middle school.

   • The “sway” in this particular instance is the SEC, which holds a $40 million dollar club payable to universities from revenues from televised sports events such as football and basket ball. the SEC essentially threatened to pull that funding from Arkansas universities unless it got its way.

     • Well, that’d be a good start. Pulling $40 million from the universities might make a dent. Now let’s find a way to pull the rest of their funding.

       The only thing universities do successfully, is college athletics — that’s a very successful business model. Built, of course, upon the time-tested Democrat principle of slavery. Earn hundreds of millions of dollars off these kids’ efforts, but don’t dare give ’em a dime or even a free hamburger. Give ’em free “education” of course, teaching them that the system is biased towards the 1% and the 99% will all lose out — meanwhile conveniently ignoring telling them that only 1% of the college athletes will ever achieve their dream of playing in the pros. But the university pockets tens of millions of dollars from their efforts. The hypocrisy is stunning – and downright evil.

       Bernie wants “free college for everyone”? Yes, I bet he does. Although, I do have to say — if someone HAS to go to college, “free” is about what it’s worth.

     • Is the SEC a nonprofit organization?
       If yes, yank its nonprofit status for political shenanigans, and contemplate charging higher-ups.

3. “The higher education lobby has held enormous power in the [Arkansas] legislature for the last 100 years.”

   Which is pretty funny, in an ironic sort of way, since Arkansas is one of the least educated states in the whole damn Union.

   • When they say “higher education”, mentally substitute “minor league sports”, it’ll make more sense.

   • Actually, it makes perfect sense when you consider that what happens in most colleges and universities today can’t be called “education” in even the loosest sense of the word.

4. This isn’t about higher education. It is about the sports programs that have turned into a negative for both higher education and American freedom.

5. Lets see if I can clear the air since the entire “discussion” is as usual on political issues gone off the rails.

   The senators that voted for the bill are the people that screwed you. Why are you focusing your attention,energy and as such taking your attention and energy away from them? You get raped and yet you are more angry at the person who sent the rapist than at the rapist. ( I am intentionally using rape to be shocking since normal verbiage doesn’t work with people in blind rage commenting)

   Moms Demand Action,ACLU,BLM etc are all groups that work to get congress people to vote a certain way. The NRA, SAF,CCRTBA etc work to do the same thing just for gun owners not against them. This will not change by bitching at them or what they stand for. It also has ZERO EFFECT ON THE LAW THAT RESTRICTS GUN RIGHTS!!!!!!!!!!!

   Your calls,letters,emails and especially vote and who you influence to vote do. The congress people are whores and will vote the way they paid (in votes to stay in office) so focus on influencing them or vote them out of office. It takes the power from the lobbyists and puts it in the peoples hands. Focus on the rapists. Crying that the taxi driver drove them to your house, the locksmith open your door and your dog didn’t bark at them doesn’t change the fact they raped you and will do it again and again why you get a new dog, change your locks and get the taxi driver fired.

   Look over there it is a shiny new toy. See distracted again.

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