We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
She points out the (rather obvious) practical and economic advantages of committed relationships. I can't imagine handling all of the complexities of life without a partner.
A colleague who teaches in the humanities at the state college where I work also teaches at a nearby private college. In the colleague’s description, the private college is perpetually in the grip of a panic over the prospect of a drop in enrollment. The college’s administration has therefore instituted an unwritten but implacable policy the upshot of which is that the student is always right, no matter how absurd his complaint, and the consequence of which is that instructors must never tax students beyond an infantile minimum of scholarly exertion. Among the consequences of the consequence are that students refuse to undertake out-of-class reading assignments, fail quizzes related to those assignments, and then lodge complaints with chairs and deans against the instructor.
JFK drove the nail in the coffin of mens' hats. Trouble is, hats are a good way to stay warm in winter. They say that, if your head and feet are warm, you're warm.
Unless you are bald or wear a crew-cut, hats give you hat hair and you look like a dork when you take it off.
It's a dilemma: comfort vs. vanity.
Do you guys wear hats when it's cold? If so, what hat?
I have a few interesting days in NYC this week. I am happy to report that, thus far, the new commie mayor has had no negative impact on this liveliest and most bustling of places. It's a jolt of vitality every time. I felt the same way as a kid.
As Cardinal Newman warned, knowledge really is an end in itself. I fill no gap in the department, because there is no shimmering and comprehensive surface of knowledge in which any gaps might appear. Like everyone else in English, I am an extra, and the offloading of an extra is never reported or experienced as a loss.
I feel the loss, keenly, of my self-image. For 24 years I have been an English professor. Come the spring, what will I be?
My colleagues will barely notice that I am gone, but what they have yet to grasp is that the rest of the university will barely notice when they too are gone, or at least severely reduced in numbers — within the decade, I’d say.
"Science has become an international bully." I doubt that I will change my mind about this being the best essay of 2014, by Yale's computer scientist David Gelernter: The Closing of the Scientific Mind.
It's about subjectivity, mainly - being human, and a defense of Nagel in part. The essay is so rich and deadly-serious that it cannot really be taken in in one reading, and it is difficult to select a representative quote so I'll post a random one:
The dominant, mainstream view of mind nowadays among philosophers and many scientists is computationalism, also known as cognitivism. This view is inspired by the idea that minds are to brains as software is to computers. “Think of the brain,” writes Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in his influential 1991 Consciousness Explained, “as a computer.” In some ways this is an apt analogy. In others, it is crazy. At any rate, it is one of the intellectual milestones of modern times.
How did this “master analogy” become so influential?
Well, because we derive our metaphors from the world around us. Freud's first metapsychology was modeled on the steam engine. The essay deserves study. Take a Ritalin and dig into it.
Another:
Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature—an especially annoying one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.
Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity...
Maldacena’s model provides more support than ever for the claim that, when it comes to cosmic ingredients, entanglement is more fundamental than space and time. Time, it turns out, is not present at the most basic layer of reality; it springs from fundamental seeds. But while emerging physics suggests time is an illusion, the forces that conjure it remain at large. “My intuition is that it will take more than just a re-working of quantum physics, it will require a breakthrough that will come totally out of left field,” Seiberg says. “Only time will tell what that revolution will be.”
This was my high chair when I was a kid, used for all of my younger sibs too. My parents had gotten it from their grandparents and kept on using it, and I have no idea how old it is. It has survived many generations of use.
Maybe somebody like Sipp can date it.
It's one of the many items I retrieved from my parents' house. One cool thing about it is that you can climb up it to get into it.
Could this be manufactured today as child furniture? I doubt it. Too dangerous, vulnerable to lawsuits, etc. However, this fine thing will have a long future unless the Feds arrive to charge me with child endangerment.
If a dopey kid falls out of this chair and cracks its head open, it's just Darwinian, isn't it?
Nobody will save your stainless steel and plastic high chairs for posterity, but I think this one has a long future somewhere in the Bird Dog family.
Homeschooling terrifies the Left because the Left is at its core totalitarian, seeking to bring political discipline to every aspect of life — and control of education is essential to that project. The public school is in miniature what the Left believes the world should look like: Everybody arranged in orderly rows and moving about on an orderly schedule punctuated by bells, being taught about diversity and climate change by nice union ladies who also lead them to their federally subsidized lunches. If you can say “no” to that, you can say no to any part of the Left’s vision. Homeschooling is an existential threat to the privileged position of the institutional Left. The schools are the factory in which it manufactures its future clients. [See also Kyle Smith in Saturday's New York Post: "US education model creates assembly-line workers" -- Ed]
"Arms off the table; Sit up straight; Don't talk with food in your mouth; Don't pick your teeth; Don't touch your face or your hair; Don't start before others; You're not a pig at the trough - converse and eat slowly; Don't slurp your soup; Ask people about themselves and don't talk about yourself; Look people in the eye and give a firm handshake; Don't bring up religion or politics, etc., etc." I have it all memorized.
Word to the wise: Please don't tell me about your kids. I only asked out of politeness, not interest. Tell me jokes and lies, be entertaining, and tell me something interesting.
It's funny, but also sad. We forget how relatively poor people were in America during and after the war. People tried to stretch things, and tried to make inexpensive food appealing. Nobody was eating steak or roast chicken for supper the way middle class people do now.
Truman campaigned on a chicken in every pot. Now you can get a delicious fat rotisserie chicken at Costco for $4.99 and $3.99 when it's on special.
Where Life Has Meaning: Poor, Religious Countries - Research indicates that lack of religion is a key reason why
people in wealthy countries don't feel a sense of purpose.
T&A, with guns: (video) 
JFK drove the nail in the coffin of mens' hats. Trouble is, hats are a good way to stay warm in winter. They say that, if your head and feet are warm, you're warm.
Breathtaking Pool 
This was my high chair when I was a kid, used for all of my younger sibs too. My parents had gotten it from their grandparents and kept on using it, and I have no idea how old it is. It has survived many generations of use.
An 