What? You think that the company that admitted to reporting Saddam Hussein's propaganda as news for a decade would be above rigging a debate for their chosen candidate?
Oh, and a happy Thanksgiving to all.
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What? You think that the company that admitted to reporting Saddam Hussein's propaganda as news for a decade would be above rigging a debate for their chosen candidate?
Oh, and a happy Thanksgiving to all.
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I've been working on math with Connor (more on Steph's blog, where I have lessons as they come up), but am probably not going to be able to do that this week due to Lego League.
Speaking of which, the qualifying tournament for us is next Saturday. We have to finish the robot and programming this week, complete with finding out that our entire strategy is bunk: we can only use one robot, not one robot at a time. That means that our "one dropper, one pusher" plan is out, and since they were built on different platforms, we don't have time to adapt. We'll keep the pusher, which does more missions, and not finish the dropper (which is what Connor and Aidan were responsible for most of). We also have to do our presentation, which is a big deal and which we haven't completed the props for nor practiced yet. It's going to be a very, very busy week.
Not to mention Scouts, with which we are in the middle of Scouting for Food, where we collect canned goods for a local charity. We had a Halloween Hayride that went pretty well. Our November meeting will feature turkey bowling and other games, and should be a lot of fun.
But here's where the other plans get thrown out and life comes into it. I had worked out an arrangement for a contract in North Virginia. This would have been a significant money increase (enough to make up for working under my normal rates for the last 2 years, given time), and a lot of fun. More, it was with the Army, so it would have been helping out the military, a subject on which I'm quite passionate. Unfortunately, the contracting company I was working with utterly messed up when I could start, and the Army couldn't (or wouldn't) adjust its plans for when I could actually start, not even by two days. There's only so much I can do: as a contractor, my reputation for professionalism is half of my ability to make a living. (The rest is my skill set, technical and business both.) I was not going to leave my current client (much as I loathe going in to work by now) with so little notice, and without completing my currently-urgent assignments. So now I'm going to be leaving my job as of November 16, and I don't have a follow-on job. I have a bit of money in the bank, and don't expect to have a problem finding work, but it's annoying on many levels. Perhaps the worst of it is that our living arrangements are very uncertain now, with Christmas approaching. Where we'll be living in January, and whether I'll be traveling between now and then, are both quite up in the air.
Which, I need hardly say, wreaks havoc with the aforementioned activities.
Ah, well, we persevere, and thrive despite adversity.
I hope.
In the meantime, if you see a black, domestic long-hair cat in the Parkside Preserve neighborhood of Waterford, MI, let me know.
When we hadn't lived in Dallas for very long, and had just gotten our first apartment together, Stephanie and I would walk around our apartment complex at night for exercise. This young black tomcat would follow us, deigning to wrestle with us or let us pet him from time to time. Eventually, we took him in, and started posting ads for his owner. When the office staff told us he was a stray that everyone sorta kinda looked after, well, he was ours from then on.
That was 15 years ago, and Merlin was already a year or so old at that point, so it's possible his time was just up, and that he is simply dead. Merlin was a very old cat, and cats sometimes just find a place to hide and die alone when their time comes. I certainly hope that's not the case, and we'll keep looking. If he is dead, I will be — well, words fail me. Merlin was my first cat, ever. (I'm actually a dog person.) In fact, Merlin was also my first pet that was mine, rather than my father's.
Here, kitty kitty kitty.
UPDATE: After 5 days, we found our missing cat. He was at a house some 1000' away, but had gotten lost in the rain. The person who owns the house where Merlin had taken refuge (under their deck) saw our sign and called us, for which we are eternally grateful.
By the way, if you find a stray or strayed adult cat, giving it milk is a bad idea: cow milk is not (despite the popular image) actually good for cats. Though again, we are glad they at least fed Merlin something, because five days would be a long time to go without, and Merlin will hunt, but he's not used to depending on his hunting.
All right. That's it. It's not legal to shoot idiots in the street. It's arguably not even moral. So since these idiots insist on beclowning themselves in public, I propose that we follow suit. Here's the deal: if enough people (say, ten) are seriously interested in, and will commit to, showing up in Nashville, in front of the administration building, on July 2 at 4pm local time, in clown suits and carrying squirt guns, then I and my family will also show up, in clown suits and carrying squirt guns, and we will join together in soaking the front of the administration building.
The madness must stop! The idiots must be opposed! Those who insist on beclowning themselves must face the wrath of clowns!
Who's with me?
(Cross-posted at Eternity Road)
It's actually a part of a piece I've been thinking on for some time: why it is that non-IT staff produce far more projects that work for end users than IT staff can produce.
By the way, I'll be writing over at Eternity Road as well, per Fran Porretto's gracious invitation. I haven't figured out which stuff I do will go where, except that the political stuff will probably go over there, and the IT stuff will probably be here or cross-posted, depending on depth.
Wonder why so many of the news articles you read, or steam over, are lacking essential information or perspective? Wonder no longer. Knowledge and experience of the subject is only a “plus.” Would the AP advertise for a sports reporter for whom knowledge and experience with baseball, basketball, football, soccer, hockey, tennis, and so forth is only a “plus,” rather than essential and primary?So, why should the AP believe that knowledge and experience of intelligence, or medicine, or any other important and technical subject only requires a “plus”?
Maybe because the reporter was schooled in a system where subject matter expertise is not required for a teacher of a hard subject, but the ability to "[d]emonstrate[] an understanding and acceptance of diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, special needs and religious groups" is?
OK, some of those might be obscure if you don't share my musical tastes, so let's try some current pop songs and some very, very well-known songs of the past. List two:
The second list:
I read a book some years ago, by an Australian author whose name I have sadly forgotten (along with the title), about why wars start. In order to know why war breaks out, he posited, one must know why peace breaks out. If we cannot know why peace comes, how can we understand why war comes? His conclusion, after much evidentiary exploration, was that war occurs because of a conflict of needs coupled with a difference of opinion on the consequences of war. If Iran, today, believed that taking 15 British sailors hostage would result in the immediate destruction of their Navy and ports, and possibly the nuclear destruction of Iran in toto, the odds of their capturing those sailors would be nil. On the other hand, if you think the enemy will refuse to fight, or lose if they do, you would be more likely to take action, as Iran has done (apparently with a correct reading of the situation).
So the questions as I see them, from a standpoint of disintegration of the polis in response to a progressive collapse of the civic religion over the last 130 years, is whether one or more of the four significant American subgroups will decide that they will fight at any cost, and whether the others will give way.
Digression: Those four groups, by the way, are the progressives/radical Leftists/Left-wing statists, the evangelicals, the originalists (not just libertarians, but small government conservatives and similar groups as well), and the institutional statists. The originalists held sway through the end of the Civil War, but Reconstruction brought the puritanical progressives into prominence. They gained power until they had it all, well into the FDR years. After that, the natural power seekers and hangers on (the institutional statists) took over, and have been in charge since. The evangelicals formed as a bloc under the social pressures following the 1960s and the capture of many institutions by the progressives with institutional statists in support, and began by the 1990s to wield significant influence with their insistence that moral rigidity and conformance was the answer to the problems caused by the moral ambiguity of the institutional statists and the moral decrepitude (by that time) of the progressives.
Anyway, I think it's clear by now that the unchallenged power of the institutional statists is at an end: the progressives have taken over the Democratic Party, and have made serious inroads into the far-right of the Republican Party (not evangelicals by and large, but puritanical moralists combined with reactionary megalomaniacs — the Buchananites, for example) in the last decade. The reasons they were able to do this are numerous, and irrelevant to this discussion, but I would think that a serious look at how teachers are trained, and what they believe, in connection with educational outcomes from primary and secondary educational institutions, would be a good place to start. Nonetheless, there has been a power shift among the elite towards the progressives. The progressives are not yet in unchallenged charge, but clearly they aim to be, and they might even succeed, at least for a time.
It is also clear that the progressives as a whole, from the anthropogenic global warming zealots and the netroots and the professional protesters to the abortion-by-decree absolutists and the health-care-free-for-all absolutists and the communist absolutists, have defined the enemy (anyone who shares their cultural roots, but not their contempt for their cultural roots), have defined their endpoint (total control of society), and have decided that destroying the entire system that created and enriched them (in order to take control of the aftermath and guide us to a brighter tomorrow) is their moral duty. They are willing to fight, and so far that has taken every form except widespread violence in support of their causes. Note the word "widespread:" there has been a great deal of localized and targeted violence. If the progressives decide to escalate into mob violence the way the brownshirts did (not out of the question, though only really likely if they suffer a really large political marginalization without also being reduced in numbers), would the other groups resist?
The institutional statists would not: they are heavily invested in the State and its corollaries (and thus themselves, of course) as all-powerful bringer of all wants and desires, but they are no more prepared to tolerate large-scale violence than they were during the riots of the 1960s that taught the progressives to fight in the first place. Indeed, a fairly large faction of the institutional statists, the center of the Democratic party in its political and media forms, actively applaud the progressives because they see the progressives as ultimately enriching their own (the institutional statists' own) power, while not being able to actually wield the power they wrest from the other institutional statists and the originalists.
The evangelicals might be willing to fight, but likely not. Despite their antithetical position to the progressives, and despite progressive propaganda about theocrats and so on, the reality is that the evangelicals are moral absolutists, but not very committed to violent means of imposing those moral absolutes. They think we should all agree with them, but they aren't willing to force the issue the way the progressives seem close to.
The originalists would fight, tooth and nail, and are well armed to boot. But the reality is that 5% of the population that cares cannot beat even 30% of the population that cares, and has State power on its side, with the rest of the populace not actively engaged (except rhetorically).
Therefore, the odds of civil war as our polis breaks down are small. The odds of repression, tyranny and decline, sadly, are quite a bit higher.