2012 archive
Cannibal Capitalism 0
This dude should be on Wall Street, not on 7th Ave. He’s clearly got the bankster moves.
(snip)
Mbeh’s trademark application was filed without consent or knowledge of the infant’s famous parents. The application, which cost Mbeh $325, was filed by Patricia Elie, a Queens lawyer.
Wars and Rumors of War 1
“You furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the war.–Willam Randolph Hearst.
I’ll quote noz, who said, in a post on something else:
Peeing in the Wind, Reprise 0
At Psychology Today, Dr. Jack Shafer comments on the absurdity of the belief so dear to Americans, that wars are like John Wayne movies:
The easiest way to develop rationale is to place yourself above your enemy. I am better than he is; therefore, he deserves to die. In all military conflicts, the combatants demean their opponents, . . . .
Droning On 0
On the Media looks at the invasion of the skybots:
Follow the link to listen.
419 on ‘Roids 0
Don’t believe everything you read:
The offer turned out to be a so-called 419 scam on an epic scale. South African police say the credulous man arrived with his daughter only for both to be taken hostage in a township for four days.
Why persons will believe stuff they read on a computer when the wouldn’t believe the same stuff if it came in the mail continues to baffle me.
H/T to my brother for the link.
The Dog that Didn’t Huntsman 0
Flops with the Flipper.
QOTD 0
Daniel Boorstein, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.
Everybody Knows Pi R Round 0
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.
We Need Single Payer 0
The Denver Post talks with a Taiwanese immigrant who is aghast at the expense and inefficiency of the US health insurance industry. A nugget:
But he’s not going to get 24 times better health care, which he has discovered as well. “One day my daughter got sick. We sent her to hospital, and imagined this society has good hospitals and advanced technologies that exist to serve people. We waited from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. in emergency room. With this speed of service, I began to question my understanding of the word ’emergency.’?” He says that he looked it up, just to verify that “emergency” is the word for something that requires immediate action.
Read it.
Welfare (Cowboy) Cadillacs 0
Putting Ron Paul’s newsletters in the color mirror: A little word substitution makes the hate more noticeable, does it not?
Eyes Averted 0
At the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, MIT professor John Tirman wonders why dead civilians in far-away places with strange sounding names become nonentities in American wars. He identifies several factors, which I have extracted below.
Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims?
- A large role is played by what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls our “frontier myth”–by which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer
- The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture’s derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put foreigners at risk of violence.
- More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When our “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain it away as an aberration.
Follow the link for background on his reasoning and a fuller explanation of each one.
Rick Perry, Bail-Out Baby 0
Rick Perry, independent son of the West, continues his attempts to have the evul fedrul guvmint pull his chestnuts out of the fire. Having had his case thrown out of court once, he’s returning to the fedrul trough:
However, Gibney said Perry and the other candidates would like (sic; probably meant “likely”–ed.) have prevailed on their claim that a Virginia requirement that ballot petition circulators be Virginia residents violates the Constitution.
In a motion filed at 7 A.M. Sunday with the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Perry’s legal team argues that it would have been too speculative for them to file suit before Perry failed to make the 10,000 signature threshold last month. Perry asks that his name be place on the March 6 ballot or, at a minimum, that the printing of ballots be suspended until his lawsuit can be resolved.
It appears that, in Texas, the grapes are not only bigger, they are also more sour.
Afterthought:
I doubt the Virginia voting laws represent any kind of ideal. Remember that the place is currently run by Republicans, who are hostile to voting, and has a history, as do other Jim Crow states, of restricting suffrage.
Nevertheless, I must delight in watching Wild Wild Westman running to the Feds for help.
QOTD 0
Douglas Adams, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.
On Little Ricky and Fanaticism 2
Meghan Daum sees parallels between the Haredim of Israel, who have lately been in the news for tormenting school girls for not meeting their dress code, and Little Ricky. She muses about why the punditocracy continues to take Little Ricky seriously, then ascribes it to the mythic power in Republican circles of our own ultra-orthodox Christian sects.
In the U.S., we too often grant the noisiest, most threatening zealots too much power to set the agenda. We’re complicit in creating the illusion that religious fundamentalism is so rabid and so monolithic that we must appease it in order to keep it from turning against us.
Sincerity is not ipso facto a virtue, though some would have it so.
A sincere whack job is still a whack job.