Not that anyone who posts here would have any interest in such things, but for all you stoners and dope smoking retards on other channels, take note.

Quote:Medical Marijuana ‘University’ Expanding in Colorado
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
By Susan Jones


A cancer patient holds a roll of 'Medi-Juana' in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

(CNSNews.com) - The nation’s only state-approved medical marijuana school is about to open a new “campus” in Denver, Colorado.

Greenway University describes itself as the industry's leading medical marijuana education provider. It says it is committed to legitimizing the medical marijuana industry “through professionalism, technology and educational innovation.”

Greenway’s new 25,000-square-foot facility in Denver is scheduled to open on December 4, 2010. The building will house a “multitude of products and services for the medical marijuana industry,” including a physicians’ clinic, a media and production studio, an accountant, an attorney, and “medical marijuana banking services,” Greenway said in a news release.

"We will continue to seek and provide a space where students, patients and industry professionals can receive advanced professional skillsets while acquiring the essential business tools and services they need in order to participate in the medical marijuana industry," said Gus Escamilla, Greenway University founder and CEO.

“More and more professionals are beginning to appreciate the many career opportunities that this emerging industry has to offer,” the Greenway University Web site says.

Greenway says its courses and training programs are designed to provide up to date “compliance information” for everyone in the medical marijuana field. “Whether you want to open a medical marijuana center, cultivate a grow operation, become a patient or just be in compliance, Greenway University will provide you with all the tools you need in order to meet your educational and professional goals,” the Web sites says.

Courses include “successful cultivation/grow operations,” medical marijuana business fundamentals, and understanding the law pertaining to medical marijuana.

Greenway says it is positioned to expand its education programs across the U.S., as the more states legalize medical marijuana. “We are poised to offer advanced courses in every aspect of the industry from our industry leading certification programs, to advanced professional business services," Escamilla added.

Greenway University is approved and regulated by the Colorado Department of Higher Education. It says its staff members and faculty have consulted with and opened over 200 medical marijuana dispensaries throughout California.

“The experience and knowledge from a real world, market tested staff and faculty is invaluable in so many ways,” the Web site says.

Colorado is one of 15 states to legalize medical marijuana.

I always wondered why many supposed experts take exception to Harrison Middleton's educational model.
They provide accredited online doctorates for US$18.000, versus Union's 66.000 and seem a small, nice operation.
Of course I, too, was taken aback when I learnt that "all you have to do" is put together a study plan using 60 or whatever volumes in the great books collection that includes heavyweights from Plato to Einstein etc.
I mean...won't I be studying dr. Schweinberg's latest book where he puts the Zeno paradoxes in the perspective of hate in history, and concludes we shall stand up for Israel? Damn antisemites! They're everywhere!
Or prof. Gutierrez's latest articles about the cover-up of the ongoing genocide of the hispanic population in Idaho?
How can they be so outdated?! It received the gold medal at the LA RAZA STUDIES' congress.
And what about the meditations of Jamal Abdool Jackson? While bigots are quick to point out he was convicted for rape, arson and burglary, he's one of the finest minds in the black pride movements... They don't want him to remind us of the unbearable oppression people of color have to put up with...
After all, HMU may not be for me...
I want to stay abreast of the finest scholarship in the world.

Now this is some intersting shit here.

In 2004, the biggest assholes in the US Senate got together and put on this Stalinistic show trial to try to show how unaccredited Universities and Colleges are all so evil. There is over 100 pages of testimony here and most of it is repetative crap.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/sea...o=ED496044

Its really funny to hear people like Joe Lieberman talk down to us like we are all stupid. The sad thing is that Collins, Lieberman, Durbin and the rest of these fools are still serving (themselves) in the US Senate.

I accidentally landed on this degreeinfo thread.
There is someone who pretends he busted hmu.edu advertising a fake doctorate or something, and he's a hot shot and will call DETC and have their license revoked or something.
Next page is DETC's site that's inaccurate and all he was babbling about no longer makes sense and HMU is correct.
So I give you 2 choices to describe the quality of degreeinfo experts...

with my MBA at Aspen University. Took me a whole 3.5 years due to family concerns and a lot of overtime at work, but finally it is done.

He's talking about poor third-world countries. Nothing like this could possibly be going on in the US, could it? In the US the government takes care of everyone, so we don't need entrepreneurs.

Quote:Schools that Serve
Marvin Olasky

Ten years ago James Tooley, a professor of education with a doctorate and a World Bank grant to study private schools in a dozen developing countries, took the standard path toward helping the poor: He flew first class and stayed at 5-star hotels.

But something happened in India as he visited private schools and colleges that cater to the privileged. At night, lying on 500-thread-count Egyptian-cotton sheets, he meditated about the "con" that he was now part of: Wealthy Indians enjoy foreign aid because they live in a poor country, the poor fall further behind, and the researchers live richly.

Then Tooley broke the rules. With guilt feelings and some spare time, he actually went into the slums instead of riding past them with his driver. He was surprised to see little handwritten signs announcing the existence of private schools: He thought private schools are for the rich. Guided through alleys and up narrow, dark, dirty staircases, he entered classrooms and found dedicated teachers and students.

Tooley found schools that survive not with government money or international bequests, but through $2-per-month fees paid by rickshaw pullers who scrimp and save to give their children a chance not to pull rickshaws. He went on to visit 50 Indian private schools in poor areas over the next 10 days. Did some foundation make them possible? No, these were for-profit schools created by poor but persevering entrepreneurs.

Tooley was astounded to see high motivation and better results than at the better-funded government schools. He then visited other private schools for the poor in cities and villages throughout India, Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya), and even China. In The Beautiful Tree (Cato, 2009), he describes how he regularly found government schools with better-paid but poorly motivated teachers, and private schools somehow surviving on very little income.

Why did Tooley slog through the mud when he could have hung out in hotel bars with other international researchers? I emailed him and asked. Tooley responded: "I was brought up as an evangelical Christian, baptized at 14, but lost my faith by 16. For the next thirty years I was a searcher. Age 46, I said a prayer again recommitting myself to Jesus. Ups and downs in the faith since then." No surprise: When someone goes beyond the call of duty, it's often because Someone else is calling him—and the path isn't always straight.

Throughout most of The Beautiful Tree Tooley shows rather than tells, but in the interest of space here I'll need to quote his summary: In poor countries "private education forms the majority of provision. In these areas parents have genuine choices of a number of competing private schools within easy reach and are sensitive to the price mechanism (schools close if demand is low, and new schools open to cater to expanded demand)."

Tooley's crucial conclusions: "In these genuine markets, educational entrepreneurs respond to parental needs and requirements. . . . Their quality is higher than that of government schools provided for the poor." And his findings are not merely anecdotal. Governmental officials showed little interest in his findings, but a Templeton Foundation grant allowed him to create research teams that tested 24,000 fourth-graders from a variety of schools in India, China, Nigeria, and Ghana. The result: Children in private schools scored 75 percent better than comparable students in government schools. You'd think this would excite other World Bank researchers—but like Darrow Miller, Hernando de Soto, and William Easterly (see "Don't be a Bepper," WORLD, Jan. 13, 2007), Tooley looks for bottom-up rather than top-down strategies, and that could put a lot of Big Economic Planners out of work.

The title of Tooley's book comes from his sense that parents don't need government officials to tell them what to do: A beautiful tree can grow without supervision from "development experts" who believe that poor children will be educated only if governments, with funding from rich nations, establish free, universal public schooling.

The better way: Poor parents pay teachers directly. Voucher plans "if done in the right way" can help, but that's a vital caveat, because it's easy to end up with good ideas killed via fraud and unintended market distortions. The essential strategy is this: If students don't learn, teachers don't eat.

Or to put it in less alliterative terms, social services can deal with a bunch of stinking vagrants, but they can't handle an obnoxious asshole like Gregg DesElms.

His "expertise" wasn't welcome? He boasts of being "one of the nation's foremost experts on massage parlors." Too bad they weren't chasing hookers instead of winos, then some of that "expertise" might have come in handy.

Quote:Pair protest city of Vallejo's 'aggressive rush' to uproot homeless, clear out encampments
By Sarah Rohrs / Times-Herald
Posted: 09/25/2010 01:01:16 AM PDT

Claiming the displaced will have nowhere to go and no one to help them, two homeless advocates are publicly protesting the city's plan to clear out five homeless encampments in Vallejo this fall.

Advocates Doug Darling and Gregg DesElms say they were ousted from a city-led group of social service providers after objecting to what they say is an unnecessary and "aggressive" rush to clean up the camps.

"We want to try to stop what's going on," Darling said. "We don't have a problem with eviction as long as it is orchestrated properly. The issue is lack of services.

"If we are going to force these people out, we need to find places for them to go," Darling said.

Meanwhile, DesElms of Napa said the city's code enforcement division and its chief Nimat Shakoor-Grantham should relinquish control to other agencies and individuals with a less adversarial relationship with the homeless.

City staff last month pledged to take a more "humane" approach to relocating homeless people from White Slough, Wilson Avenue, the vacant Mervyns and Bill Lang Pontiac Cadillac dealership buildings, and along the railroad tracks near Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.

In prior homeless encampment sweeps, people were forced out without anywhere to go, something the city wants to avoid, staff have said.

In an upcoming cleanup effort, Shakoor-Grantham says the city will have shelter for homeless people to go to before any camp evictions.

But Darling said the city is not living up to its commitment and that "forced evictions" are in the works without any effort to see that homeless people are treated fairly, humanely and with dignity. He said services aren't available and more time is needed to find them.

Shakoor-Grantham and Housing and Community Development Manager Melinda Nestlerode said shelter is being sought.

"It's my understanding that we are going to have identified all the beds prior to the relocation," Nestlerode said.

In dealing with the homeless encampments, the city is working on two tracts, she said.

The short-term plan is to clean up the camps and place homeless people in shelter beds this fall before the winter rainy season, Shakoor-Grantham said.

Meanwhile, a long-term strategy involves working with social service agencies on a more comprehensive relocation plan that would combine shelter, comprehensive medical services, transportation and other items, Shakoor-Grantham said.

This latter effort also involves working with agencies on developing more homeless shelters in Vallejo, a big need, Nestlerode said.

While the city was planning to clean up the camps on Oct. 4, that date has been pushed back for a few weeks to consult with Department of Fish and Game regarding camps in sloughs and marshes, Shakoor-Grantham said.

Prior to the evictions, code enforcement officers will visit the camps, talk to homeless people and assess their housing, medical and social needs, Shakoor-Grantham said.

Shakoor-Grantham said she disagrees the city is working too fast and without disregard to homeless people.

Staff members are working with Christian Help Center, Mission Solano, churches and other agencies to find up to 80 shelter beds and assure social services are in place, Shakoor-Grantham said.

But Darling said the kinds of beds and services needed are simply unavailable.

Darling said once he began asking questions about that issue, he was shut out of the group and the process.

Shakoor-Grantham said she no longer included Darling in an e-mail distribution list because he distributed an e-mail saying he could no longer support the city's actions.

DesElms said he believed he was part of the process and that his expertise and desire to help was welcome.

However, Shakoor-Grantham said DesElms continuously disagreed with the city's aims and intentions and that his manner in meetings was often disruptive.

Both Darling and DesElms said they will continue to help the homeless. This weekend they will pass out "Warning" fliers in homeless encampments about the upcoming evictions.

The fliers Darling and DesElms will distribute advise homeless people they are under no obligation to answer questions, or provide any personal and confidential information to city staff.

The advocates and Shakoor-Grantham are encouraging homeless people to attend "Project Homeless Connect" in which a wide array of social service and government agencies will be on hand to help them.

Demand for online courses currently exceeds capacity. Yet for-profits, the leaders in online education, are under attack by the government and their socialist news media lackeys. As acceptance of online learning continues to increase, will the statists in government try to kill and/or co-opt this burgeoning industry as it has so many others?

Quote: Speeding Toward a Slowdown?
November 16, 2010

Online college enrollments grew by 21 percent to 5.6 million last fall, the biggest percentage increase in several years, according to a report scheduled to be released today by the Sloan Consortium and the Babson Survey Research Group.

At the same time, the authors say online growth might begin to slow down in the near future, as the biggest drivers of enrollment growth face budget challenges and stricter recruitment oversight from the federal government.

Nearly one million more students took an online course in fall 2009 than in the previous year, according to the new survey, which drew responses from 2,583 academic leaders at both nonprofit and for-profit institutions across the country. That is the biggest numerical increase in the eight-year history of the report, and the largest proportional increase (21.1 percent) since 2005. Online enrollments have grown at more than nine times the rate of general enrollment since 2002. Almost a third of all college students in the country take at least one course online.

The conventional wisdom has been that the economic crisis has spurred at least some of that growth, as adults looking to increase their job prospects have gone back to school for a new degree. Three-quarters of the institutions surveyed said the recession drove interest in their online programs. In the year since Sloan administered its survey, there has been more talk of online enrollment growth as a strategy for making up for shrinking state allocations at public university systems — especially in places like California, where some think a massive online expansion could lift the state university system out of financial ruin, and Minnesota, where possible Republican presidential challenger Gov. Tim Pawlenty has made the idea of less-expensive online public higher education one of his talking points.

But Jeffrey Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and co-author of the new Sloan survey, says that shrinking state allocations could actually stall the growth of online programs. The survey shows that 62 percent of public institutions saw their budgets take a hit in fall 2009 (a proportion almost twice as both nonprofit and for-profit privates). Since public institutions enroll 60 percent of all online students, the fact that state systems might not have the resources to continue building out their online education infrastructure could have a chilling effect on online growth in general, says Seaman. (The Campus Computing Project last week released results from a more limited survey, wherein nearly two-thirds of public institutions said student demand for online courses exceeded their capacity to provide those courses. Seaman notes the consistency of that sample with his own findings.)

Another sector that has driven online growth has been for-profit higher education, and this sector, too, could see enrollment growth slow down in the near future. For-profit colleges make up 27 percent of all online enrollments, and are “the leader among institutions in including online in their strategic plans,” according to the Sloan report. In contrast to the publics, about half of the for-profit institutions saw their budgets increase as a direct result of the economic downturn.

But two keys to the rapid growth of for-profit institutions have been their aggressive recruiting tactics and ability to accept federal financial aid, says Seaman, factors that could be limited by new federal regulations and publicity over abuses in light of a damning report from the Government Accountability Office earlier this year.

Given that the economic crisis has left more students needing financial aid to enroll in college, he says, the new rules could be a drag on online enrollment growth at big for-profits such as the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Ashford University, which enroll more than half a million online students between them. “There has been a clear focus on the for-profit sector,” notes the Sloan report, citing a Congressional press release asserting that for-profits enroll 11 percent of all students and 43 percent of all loan defaulters.

As for quality, mainstream acceptance of online education continued its steady upward trend, with two-thirds of academic administrators agreeing that it is “at least as good” as face-to-face — with public universities and for-profit institutions agreeing, unsurprisingly, at higher rates than private nonprofits.

A more surprising finding was that when asked about the quality of education at for-profit colleges versus nonprofits, 30 percent of top academic administrators at for-profit institutions said they thought the quality of education at for-profits was inferior to that of nonprofits.

Seaman told Inside Higher Ed that despite the temptation to read that response as a validation of the criticisms regularly heaped on for-profits, the answer is still somewhat ambiguous: the respondents were not necessary confessing that their own institutions provided a second-class education — only that nonprofits are better on balance. Even for-profit institutions that are confident in their own offerings might recognize that they share a classification with some “clunkers,” says Seaman.

Quote:True Story: Barack Obama Had a Transvestite Indonesian Nanny

A New York Times report on President Obama's return to a "nation that knew him as Barry" includes this...interesting tidbit:

Quote:[Obama's] nanny was an openly gay man who, in keeping with Indonesia’s relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality, carried on an affair with a local butcher, longtime residents said. The nanny later joined a group of transvestites called Fantastic Dolls, who, like the many transvestites who remain fixtures of Jakarta’s streetscape, entertained people by dancing and playing volleyball.

Frankly, I'm stunned we didn't hear anything about the "Fantastic Dolls" during the 2008 election cycle.  Whatever one's thoughts may be about President Obama's job performance, he has certainly lived an extraordinarily unusual and exotic life.  The entire piece is a fun read.  A few more entertaining nuggets:

Quote:Though he lived in that neighborhood for only two years, Mr. Obama left a lasting impression because of his outgoing and sometimes rowdy personality.  “Barry was so naughty that my father even scolded him one time,” said Sonni Gondokusumo, 49, a former neighbor and classmate.

...

Mr. Obama’s mother taught English to the neighborhood women, including his wife, Djumiati. While the residents regarded Mr. Obama’s mother as a “free spirit,” Barry, who was chubby, was referred to as the “boy who runs like a duck,” said Mrs. Satjakoesoemah, 69.

The Times also reveals that Obama's childhood school in Indonesia was a Catholic school at the time, complete with church services.  Although most of Obama's classmates were Muslim, the school did not include an Islamic prayer room.  A Mosque was built on the site of the school in 2002, according to the report.

Quote:One time, recalled the elder son, Slamet Januadi, now 52, Mr. Obama asked a group of boys whether they wanted to grow up to be president, a soldier or a businessman. A president would own nothing while a soldier would possess weapons and a businessmen would have money, the young Obama explained.

Mr. Januadi and his younger brother, both of whom later joined the Indonesian military, said they wanted to become soldiers. Another boy, a future banker, said he would become a businessman.

“Then Barry said he would become president and order the soldier to guard him and the businessman to use his money to build him something,” Mr. Januadi said. “We told him, ‘You cheated. You didn’t give us those details.’ ”

Apparently the disgrace, shame, mortification, dishonor, degradation and humiliation of being publicly identified as the offspring of violence-prone Marxist stalker George Gollin (George D. Gollin, George Dana Gollin) and inept conflict of interest officer Melanie “Mutant Pork” Loots was more than even gay studies major Cordelia Loots-Gollin could bear.  

It has changed its name on its Facebook page from Cordelia Loots-Gollin to Cordelia Afalafala.  

Perhaps it was a tribute to its third-most favorite food, “a falafel,” which in a rare moment of civility it decided sounded better than either of its first two choices (“spring roll” and “chocolate vagina”).  

“Afalafala” apparently also is a Carolinian word meaning “encourage.”  Carolinian is a language spoken in the Northern Mariana Islands (Saipan, Tinian).  Depending on your source, somewhere from 3450 to 5700 people are said to speak it, which pretty much guarantees that nobody gets the joke.

Or it could be that, in honor of obsequious Gollin colleague Goose Sainz, it just meant “Alfalfa” but it didn’t have 15 people handy to look up the correct spelling for it in a dictionary.  

Personally I think “Cordelia Chocolate-Vagina” would have been a better choice.  It has the inherent prurience that befits the progeny of two incompetent leftist idiots, plus it provides the necessary hyphenation that marks a true slave of fashion.  Let’s all ulalate for Afalafala!