Stratospheric Dreams, Harsh Realities

Thanks to Michael Anissimov and Brian Wang for emailing information about the Strato Cruiser luxury dirigible seen above. The conceptual art at dezeen.com is magnificent.

The human imagination has limits, but we are nowhere close to reaching those limits. As human knowledge and technology expand, the human imagination will expand its own range. We will also learn how to become more intelligent, so as to be able to develop the many wonders that our imaginations and dreams reveal to us.

What are the harsh realities?

Our intelligence--our IQ combined with executive function and emotional/social intelligence--and our physical talents, need to be trained. Think of our intelligence as a mineral ore that needs refining. We need the best education--free of indoctrination--that is available. We need to be sure to provide a diversity of ideas--the only type of diversity that means anything in an educational context--to all of our children.

Sadly, our higher educactional system (and lower government educational systems) are failing us badly--even while educational costs are skyrocketing.

If our universities were providing a quality product, we might excuse their economic ineptness and tendency to pamper sinecured faculty and staff at the expense of parents and taxpayers. Unfortunately, universities have become indoctrination centers--particularly in the liberal arts and social sciences.

One of most perverse results of the massive indoctrination into a "monocultured multiculture" of focused entitlement, is the decade-long wave of "fake hate crimes" that have swept university campuses from George Washington University to Gonzaga to Boise State to Claremont to "Ole Miss" to too many campuses to list.

As law professor Glenn Reynolds stated: If hate crimes did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

And so they have--by the gross. Why? Consider the phenomenom of "Women's Studies Departments", "Ethnic Studies Departments", "Sexual Orientation Studies Departments" etc. What are students taught in these superfluous departments that prepare students for nothing except teaching in similar departments, or other forms of professional indoctrination? These backwater (but well-compensated) departments teach their students strong feelings of grievance, entitlement, and perpetual hostility toward "the man" that keeps them down.

In the absence of the hate crimes they are taught to expect, what can these fantasy-rich, deluded minds do but to re-create the atmosphere of hostility, hatred, and abuse that their professors immerse them in each day?

It is a matter of cause and effect. For those who continue to associate Al Sharpton with Tawana Brawley, this is not a new phenomenon. But it has become an endemic phenomenon, thanks to the near ubiquitous phenomenon of "gender, racial, sexual "grievances departments" on campuses. The Duke U. faculty group of 88 response to the lacrosse team rape allegations, and the media circus that followed every rumour and inuendo of the case until it finally collapsed in its own emptiness, is a peripheral example of what the "grievance philosophy" has wrought on campus and within society in general. Fake crimes against "the man", and overlooking/excusing real crimes by the "aggrieved."

Universities spend huge amounts of money on ideological indoctrination--a type of "holy crusade" felt by many sinecured monkeys of academia to be the raison d'etre of university education.

This is not what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had in mind.

It is an absurd and disgraceful joke by academia upon academia. It is stunting the growth of a better society, and subverting the stratospheric dreams of our imaginations.