new jersey is a dangerous place.

"so now i am off to the doctor to get my turbuculosis test checked and start the hepatitis b vaccine series."

"are you going somewhere?"

"princeton."

still angry.

this has been going on for several months, and i have not yet made a post about it because it is making me angry and i was hoping it would go away.

several republican governors and members of various legislative bodies have decided that cutting funding to education would be a good way to balance budgets in this not-quite-post-recession era.

i'm going to say this as simply as possible: cutting public education is anti-democracy.

i wish i could engage in wild conspiracy speculation, but part of me is cynical enough to think it really is just short-sightedness.

however. a democracy needs an educated public to function. that's all there is to it. if your unwashed masses can't think critically, read at more than a third grade level, and understand statistics, you don't have a functioning democracy. you might have an oligarchy, or a plutocracy, but you don't have a democracy.

while i'm ranting, education isn't job training either, so mr. president, you can shut the fuck up about needing to graduate more engineers. no one needs to do multinational corporations' job training for them. their job is to train workers. the job of education - primary, secondary, and tertiary - is to educate citizenry who are able to use the limits of their natural intelligence.

admittedly, the united states as a country is anti-intellectual, so everything that's going on fits right in and no one really cares. except me, apparently. and this is my soapbox, and what else is the internet for?

besides cats, of course. i have no objection to cats.