Or, If your white and wealthy, do both. Then call your lawyer. Political Science Prof Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, on C-SPAN’s After Words with S.E. Cupp. Worth the time. If SE Cupp is a conservative then Edmund Burke is not. Reactionary is interesting. The reactionary mind is the accomplice of capitalism. Robin says as much…
Autism: The Next “Specialty” Credential?
Or, The Uses of Autism For your juxtaposing critical consideration–a business opportunity or a neurological disorder…or something yet known. From Shaky Ground by Adam Phillips in the London Review of Books (below in normal text) From Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics in Wired, 9/09 (below in bold text) Descriptions of mental illness depend on what a society regards as a desirable form of exchange. Behaviour is…
Girls Do Science!
Or, Learning Meaningless Utilities Today, via the local newspaper (Bloomington’s The Herald-Times), comes an illustration of the modern mind “on science.” My friend Monkeywrench is in my ear…slow down, find some common ground. It’s not easy, Wrench. We are given an incomplete presentation (as our apperceptions always are) and asked to believe in it as indicative of a wholeness or right mindedness, asked to believe…
What Can the Maths Tell Us?
Darwin, The Origin of Species It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been…
Bury These Nostaligias
Is there a better way to demonstrate the absolute vacuity of America and its “gifts” to the world than the Academy Awards? This morning I read a critique of the telecast on Salon by their movie critic Andrew O’Hehir. He said it stunk. This was not a surprise. When we applaud the “meta” career of the massively fraudulent James Franco as if it were one…
The Mind Trust’s “Opportunity” for Indianapolis Corporate Schools
As Bart Peterson and David Harris’ Mind Trust sells its “Opportunity School” agenda (PDF) to the City-County Council Community Affairs Committee this week, it is time to get one thing straight. The Mind Trust plan for Indianapolis Public Schools is not about improving education. Essentially, it is an elaborate (and $500,000 of it taxpayer funded) ploy to privatize the public schools, one which would give…
Desertification, or Living Nowhere
Here are things I cannot change that make me angry and perhaps you might share a similar list: War; anything that is war dressed up under other terms; fraud; exclusionary self-interest; that same interest commended and encouraged as something natural; profit calculated via actuarial risks. And so on. In other words, American culture, American economy, American foreign policy, American business. As a friend intimated…honey, not…
The Mind of the Archgod of the Earth
Yesterday, late, I posted the following as, “If Not Equality, then Broad’s Advantage,” and I wanted to start with it here because I just read it’s philosophical underpinnings in Lawrence (again, Women in Love). So, here’s the post followed by Lawrence as a kind of “incision” into the Broadian mind. Skip down to the asterisks for the Lawrence. Eli Broad, Billionaire Misanthropist, er, philanthropist (construction…
If Not Equality, then Broad’s Advantage
Eli Broad, Billionaire Gift Giver (Strings Attached) of the Broad Foundation, made a clear statement of what schools are for in 2008: Those of us who come from the world of business understand what is at risk if we do not dramatically improve our public schools. Our economy, our standard of living and our democracy could be jeopardized in a global economy in which education…
Factionalism and Common Cause
We are confused about how certain protections in the form of regulations may be considered good for one case but bad for another. We are further confused by an impulse that makes some of us feel that regulations can enhance freedom and others feel that regulations are de facto anathema to freedom. The first believes that a benevolent regulation will create a less conflicted and…