Personal Musings category archive

Someone told me about something called “book.”

I intend to investigate this mystery.

Addendum:

I found one of those ebook thingees.

Republican Jesus spake, and, when he spake, he spakest in this manner:

Let them eat cake.

One of these days, I shall go on safari to photograph our most common wild life:

Plastic shopping bags in their natural habitat, shopping center parking lots.

Jason330 finds an analogy for “white privilege” that even a lamer gamer can understand.

Aside:

One characterization that I have settled on for white privilege as it has affected my white life is this: White folks (like me) define the norm; others (not-white folks) define the “diverse.”

You know you’re getting old when you see a car (much) less than half your age sporting “Antique” plates.

Anyone who pays attention knows that the “post racial society” ballyhoo following Mr. Obama’s election was, er, somewhat optimistic delusional.

The outpouring of bigotry, racism, and prejudice, both coded and decoded, from the racist far right and its fellow travelers, dupes, and symps in the Republican Party has exceeded anything since the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.

Optimists are hoping that this is American racial bigotry’s last gasp. Pessimists believe that hatred is always with us, though from time to time it chooses different targets; witness, for example the self-proclaimed Christians who have turned the God of Love into an Idol of Hate since the birth of Christianity.

George Davis muses on the place of the Trayvon Martin case in the “post racial” myth. A nugget:

America might be further along than most places in the world towards having a multi-cultural, multi-racial fusion culture. On the surface Americans of all races usually move among each other with little obvious, or even subtle, racial animosity. In America it is easy to maintain the illusion that we are post-racial, because it is not until you get down into the internal workings of America that you are likely to see any racism that matters very much.

And no place is America more brutally and stubbornly racist than the criminal justice system, which is one of the reasons that the Trayvon Martin case has stayed in public consciousness so long. It has the precise right ingredients for the media to get the American public to look into an area of our historical legacy that most post-racial Americans do not wish to look into.

Dick Destiny seems to have settled into a relationship with Facebook that is very similar to my own:

You’d guess I’m not a good match with Facebook. I have an account and while I post pointers to blog posts on it daily, it’s not good for much.

Facebook does not tell you how many people visit your profile daily. There’s a simple reason for it. If people actually knew how many times their hundreds of friends browser their posts — statistically speaking, not at all — users would desert en masse.

Facebook is a place for lickspittles — people who actually go to the pages of American businesses and hit the “like” button. It’s hard to imagine how lame that is but hundreds of thousands of my countrymen do it.

Follow the link for the rest.

As I told one of my kids the other day, if I did not use Facebook to pimp this blog, I’d have deleted all my data and closed my account long ago.

By the way, ever wondered what happens when you “like” something on Facebook?

You are the fly walking voluntarily into the parlor of the spider. Have it from this marketeer. (Be careful: like a true spider, once you land on her page, she rudely and selfishly won’t let you “Back” out of it; open it in a new tab or window, then close it when you are done.)

If I hear or see one more reference to that boat that sank a century ago, I shall scream.

I must be getting old.

I’m starting to get spammed by The Scooter Store.

Mary Schmich considers the positive side of cameras everywhere:

Shortly after my brother’s cancer flared up again, after a long time in hiding, I started texting him photos from my phone.

A Chicago sunset. Light rippling on the morning lake. The skyline swaggering. Wrigley Field on opening day.

(snip)

I don’t spell any of that out with the photos I send. All I type is an explanatory word or two, caption-style, and he usually texts me back something equally pithy, like “Pretty” or “I needed that.”

I had not thought about it in any depth, but I find myself doing the same thing. If it’s kittens or bunnies or funny license plates, they go to Susan; if it’s anything Virginia Tech, to my brother; and so on. (I used to send them to Facebook, but I decided a long time ago that Zuckerberg knows too much about me already and I was going to stop feeding his databases.)

It is an almost effortless, even lazy (in my case) way to stay in touch while keeping a personal touch.

If you are of the not not-white persuasion, consider, if you will, what it is like to know that, at any moment, there is a possibility, however slim, that someone might drive down your street and kill you, simply because you are not-white.

Until that thought no longer makes sense, America will continue to be stained by its original sin of chattel slavery and racism.

Aside:

Attempts to downplay racism as a factor in driving around and shooting random black folks because they happen to be not-white are, quite frankly, crap.

And everyone knows they are crap, including the downplayers.

Today I was at a meeting with two other persons, both of whom happen to be not-white.

Both of them grew up in the place we Southern Boys refer to as “up North” (for reasons not needing to be stated, their forebears fled the South generations ago).

The conversation turned to Trayvon Martin.

They have no direct experience of Jim Crow. Not having lived it, they don’t really get it.

For some fool reason, they expect to be treated like real live human beings wherever they may happen to be. They didn’t get the message that the color of one’s skin changes everything.

I am damned glad that they didn’t get that message, and I damn that message.

That messages destroys good and celebrates evil.

I must stop now, for all I have left is profanity.

Some years ago, the fashion amongst management consultants was to prattle on about “corporate culture.” That fashion, or at least the terminology, has likely changed–management consulting is the damndest profession for putting old wine in new bottles (while doubling the price) that I’ve ever seen–but the concept is valid: organizations do have cultures.

At Philly dot com, Rod Napier considers corporate culture, pederasty, and prelates:

Two iconic Pennsylvania figures, Joe Paterno and Anthony Bevilacqua, passed away this year. Both the longtime Penn State football coach and the former archbishop of Philadelphia had remarkable careers of public service and achievement that ended in scandal – scandals that will forever shadow their legacies. Both men saw themselves as close to God, but both were also treated as gods by those around them. And that may have had more to do with the scandals than has so far been appreciated.

(snip)

The cultures of their respective organizations – cultures they tolerated, if not outright fostered or even demanded – probably tended to discourage the people around them from plainly stating the most unpleasant truths at hand. The most likely scenario is that these men never heard the completely unvarnished truth, because they created or tolerated cultures that did not encourage people to tell them difficult truths.

He certainly has part of the story.

The other part is that, despite evidence before them, “leaders” in these situations usually don’t want to know the truth. They convince themselves that, as long as the cash, converts, and bowl bids roll in, they convince themselves that everything is just hunky-dory, much like the spouse who refuses to notice the affair that is the buzz of the town.

Mr. Napier may explain some of their behavior, but explanation is not excuse.

If you feel like you have continually to prove to others that God is on your side, He probably isn’t.

Is this a dog or the lead guitarist for Z. Z. Top?

The prosecution rests.

Television, the power of babble.

Once upon a time, I thought it shock rhetoric to gain publicity; but, as I watch the antics over birth control and women’s health care from the old white men who run the Republican Party and the Catholic Church, I begin to muse that the thought of being in the presence lady parts which are not under their direct, dictatorial control does, indeed, induce in those old white men some sort of visceral Freudian terror, which compels them to seek control said lady parts.

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The surest sign of being a Hollywood has-been is an appearance in a Super Bowl half-time show.

(Philadelphia–ed.) Prosecutors are calling the Archdiocese of Philadelphia an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a clergy-abuse case – and say the Catholic church fed predators a steady supply of children.

Penn State on an international scale: Protecting insiders outweighed all other considerations.

There’s a kerfuffle on the left coast about whether Algebra II should be required for high school graduation:

(The Palo Alto math faculty’s) counterpush against raising graduation standards to include Algebra II has angered educators and parents who believe schools, including districts like Palo Alto with strong college-going cultures, are failing poor and minority students by expecting too little of them.

The parents point to startling statistics: In the Palo Alto and Gunn high schools’ 2011 class of seniors, only 15 percent of African-Americans and 40 percent of Latinos completed the prerequisites for the University of California and California State University with a C or better. That compares with 79.5 percent districtwide meeting those so-called A-G requirements.

When I went to school, the “tracking” system was popular. My little high school had academic and general tracks. “Academic” students got the languages, almost all math courses, and all the sciences. If they took shop or typing, it was usually a one year elective; “general students” got less in the way of languages and sciences and more in the way of shop, secretarial skills (typing and shorthand), and how to be a housewife home ec.

Tracking has gone out of fashion; too often, it seemed subject to misuse (the Wikipedia article gives a fairly even-handed description of the objections to it).

I got the whole math deal: two algebras, geometry, trig, and pre-calc (we did not have a calculus class). Algebra I, geometry, and trig were pieces of cake. My mother was my Algebra II teacher; I remember that class for other reasons.

But the pre-calc, well, the stuff wasn’t making any sense to me. When it came to proving that one equals zero, I could do it by rote, but I didn’t see it (to my daughter the math teacher, it’s as obvious as a shark in a swimming pool; she must have gotten the math gene from her mother).

I’m inclined to think the math faculty is on to something. I suspect that Algebra II is not for everybody.

I do know this: since I graduated from high school over four decades ago, I have used Algebra I skills (solve for one variable) precisely five times–that’s more than once per decade!–and Algebra II skills never.

Afterthought:

And don’t tell me Algebra taught me logic. Geometry and Boolean Algebra, maybe. Algebra taught me that X is horizontal and Y is vertical.