Higher Education, the GOP doesn't have much use for it

TPP has read several articles that say the majority of GnOPe voters do not think higher education is a good value or a worthwhile undertaking.  No wonder higher education does so poorly in GnOPe run states.  Democratic voters still thing higher education is worth while.  Thinking about this while weeding and watering the garden resulted the conclusion that this difference is based on very different value systems and expected outcomes.  At present the simple-minded thinking of today's GnOPe only uses one scale to measure everything, and the unit is money.  The more money you have the smarter you are, so naturally T-rump thinks he's pretty smart, certainly smarter than you because he's richer than you.  And he's certainly smarter than us dumb-ass college professors who try to tell POTUS that we actually know something even if it doesn't neatly fit into conservative ideology, a sure sign it's true.  Damn, teaching that fake knowledge again!  TPP understands people's concerns, education if quite an investment now that the student or their parents are expected to pay rather than being state supported for the good of all.  A young fellow wanted to know if it would be worth it to study botany when it came to the salary bottom-line.  TPP did not choose botany because he thought he'd get wealthy, but because he liked it and some lucky people made a living with botany.  And as annoying as some of the common curriculum requirements were (they can be way more flexible and still work people), knowing about literature, and music, and art turn out to be good things. So that's the 2nd big difference, higher education is not training you to do a job, they are educating you to appreciate your culture and your world, and to generally have a more fulfilling life.  When the "2 guys and a truck" were hired to move some heavy furniture for us, these strong backs nonetheless appreciated our art collection.  The whole school of business thing has made people think that higher education is about career training, and while it's a great idea to keep careers in mind, I wanted to tell this young fellow, "Kid, your values are screwed up."  And should you venture into philosophy and other areas that teach you to think, why then you become a truly dangerous person, someone who easily sees through the simple-minded thinking of modern conservatives, someone who knows ideology is no way to govern, and yet they keep trying, and it keeps failing because money actually doesn't trickle down, and if the government didn't waste so much money on the military and their toys, it would easily have enough money for health, and education, and the environment.  Hopefully enough education will survive this era that our culture can recover from these disastrous policies.

Brrrrr! Send wine, winter clothing, and money.

This is a bit of an appeal as this is the season when need is felt the greatest: the end of the semester and the start of winter.  How many r's have to follow the B to indicate -7 C? And the wind chill factor makes it feel much colder.  This is our real first blast of winter, and it will serve to convince any still confused plants that it is indeed time to drop your leaves, if deciduous.  The lily pond has its first shell of ice except where the bubbler is keeping the water open; of yes, the leaf net was removed just in time.  But our tree pruners have yet to return and finish the job they started several weeks ago. Are arborists difficult guys to pin down where you are?  Ours all seem to be extremely busy, free spirits who show up magically long after you think they've forgotten you exist. Of course, if they want to get paid.....
This time of year can weigh heavy on a botanist.  Revised manuscript is just about done, except even before it was ready to return to my colleague, the discussion had been revised again.  Mrs. Phactor wants a Christmas tree set up (after it has been thawed!).  A mouse continues to thwart all trapping attempts, and the kitty girls have not managed to get this one although it has tempted fate several times. They get nothing but a little exercise. One quite lethal trap has not been used because it must be placed where kitty paws cannot get at it.
Sadly one of the best herbarium interns ever is graduating, and looking for something meaningful to do. If anyone needs an intern or a horticulturalist, contact The Phactor in the comments with the necessary info. She has a twin, but they do not come as a set.  The gap between college and a job that can keep you alive is a tough transition that TPP has helped many students bridge, but while they represent cheap willing labor at this stage, even that small amount of money is so hard to come by.  You could double my herbarium budget and not have to give a cent. But seriously if someone is well off, TPP needs a patron of botany. You have no idea how much value and experience can be squeezed out of a few thousand dollars.  Do you see how much money they spend on people who can kick, throw, hit, or bounce a ball?  Research money for doing field work has just about disappeared as the prairie and rain forest continue to disappear too.  Clearly government is not going to support science, especially that liberal, greenie, unimportant ecology and systematics, of plants no less.  More on this to come.

Money, the root of all evil

Here you go, a nice cartoon. Don't know how many of you are familiar with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but it is often very funny, and very on target, like this one about money. However TPP is a bit skeptical about there being trace amounts of ethics in all human dealings. As evidence a number of Lincolnland politicians are offered.  When TPP first found this cartoon, just the name was hilarious because it reminded him of a childhood where Saturday mornings were spent (wasted - parental translation) watching non-stop cartoons on TV and fighting with sibs about what cartoon to watch.  Of course the primary sponsors of these kids' cartoons were breakfast cereals (remember Quisp and Quake?), and to help fix that memory, Saturday morning was the only time your Mother let you have one of those sugary cereals as a breakfast treat (but we did have to eat in the kitchen).

Never Enough Time or Money

The Phactor routinely gets asked to identify plant specimens, and in doing so our herbarium collection is used for comparison and to verify identifications. But a colleague dragged in a specimen that demonstrated a gaping deficiency in our collection of plant specimens. For certain local habitats, particularly dry hilltops and ridges, as well as priaries, no new collections have been made in over 100 years! What a shock to pull out a folder and only find one representative specimen, and that now mislabeled because of some major taxonomic research that has realigned a group of genera and their species! It was hardly any help at all. In an era when climate change may well be affecting the biology of organisms, altering their flowering period and even geographic ranges, the magnitude of this deficiency is apparent. And even the Phactor is to blame having collected way more tropical plants than those from the local flora. The solution is to get busy collecting, and then you run into the dredded T & M problem, time and money. Collecting isn't rocket science, so perhaps volunteers could be inlisted, up to the point where a species name has to be afixed. What a terrible situation, but nothing a couple more botanists couldn't fix.