Goretex and Top Hats

I am dying of lack of computer access.  Not only does my computer not work yet, but the one at my place of business has Explorer -100 or something like that, so all I can get from blogger is a message that "I" should upgrade "my" browser.  Which of course I do not have credentials to do.  And what am I doing blogging at work anyway?  Good question. 

I have striven to put some things on (gasp) paper, and my love affair with Moleskine journals has indeed grown...hopefully those scraps will end up here sometime in something legible.

Meantime I'm taking a break at my public library to let you know that something at work has really been p__ing me off. 

Liberals have more fun

As annoyed as I am by the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, I have a feeling they're having a lot more fun than I do, say, at a Tea Party rally with a bunch of old fogies like myself.

How to Do Thanksgiving With Your Sister

1). Get text from sister asking if you can bring walnuts and paper plates.

2.) Stop at Meijers to get paper plates and walnuts. Remember you're out of milk.Get milk and egg nog and cereal (it's on sale) and, of course, the walnuts and paper plates.

3.) When you arrive home, realize you can't find your phone. Anywhere.

Anarchocapitalism

My beliefs about politics and community are ever evolving.  I am never one to scold politicians--or anyone, for that matter, for changing their mind.  If John Kerry was for the war in Iraq and then against it, I give him the benefit of the doubt that he altered his view after getting more information, hopefully not from an opinion poll.  Of course, I like my politicians like I like my drinkers:  politics only on weekends and in moderation.  Or at least not a 12 pack of legislative actions a day.

Rich vs. Righteous

My pastor delivered, as usual, a mostly wonderful message on Proverbs last week, using Gone With the Wind as illustration (he's doing a series with a movies theme). Much of the lesson centered on the importance of prizing spiritual treasure over material treasure.  At one point, the pastor turned to us and said, "It comes down to this:  Would you rather be rich, or would you rather be righteous?"

Bohemian Therapy

Sometimes my practice of crisis intervention with families is informed by my own experiences, as you might expect of a mental health practitioner.  I was reminded of this earlier today when I heard Queen's  Bohemian Rhapsody on the way home from work. 

I come not to praise praise and worship songs

About a year ago, my pastor was preaching on legalism and, for lack of a better phrase, church snobbishness.

Corporate Grief

I just learned that Steve Jobs died on Wednesday.  A shame.  He did a lot to make our world what our world is today.  The good parts of the world today, that is.

I Don't Really Blog...

I'm still miffed about this.

A month ago, someone pointed out that my Facebook page indicated that I "know" French, and insisted after I didn't pass a "test" he gave me (translating a sentence involving a couple of different future tenses into French) that "Americans can't speak French" and "It always surprises me to see the difference between what people say they know and what they actually know." 

Calculus: The Original Series, or: The 12 Most Important Things in College I Learned in Math 112

Trying to get back into Calculus inevitably brought thoughts of my instructors at Michigan State. 


He gave me a D.  It broke my heart.  But I got a lot out of the experience anyway.  Here is a note I posted on facebook about it:

• I'm thinking about sending this to the professor who taught the above-mentioned class. It was in 1981. He is now approaching his mid-seventies, so I feel some urgency to send it, if I ultimately do. 
• I am not lying about the title or exaggerating it in any way.
• 12 through 9 may seem puzzling, but each of them are answers to the first question on one of the tests throughout the term (10 weeks; this was Michigan State in the eighties).
• 5 through 7 each, in some way, refers to the bar where he and four other guys played in a bluegrass band once a week.  
• These are not all direct quotes from the instructor; sometimes, they are paraphrased, or merely inferred.

The 12 Most Useful things about College, I learned in Calculus (in which I got a D)

Marx thruogh Brown to Conservatism part 3

By the time I was going door to door for Clinton for the 1992 election, I was doing brief psychotherapy at an agency in southwest Detroit, with kids and families…. very poor kids and families. And I’d started to think that, maybe the awful state of Detroit since the 60s was because of the increased entitlements it soaked up, not in spite of it.

The clencher for me was when I was treating a 14 year old for school refusal. She was different than other kids with that problem; usually, there is some underlying depression and anxiety or a messy dynamic with the parent or parents. But not with her. She just plain thought school was stupid -- which it is; but she didn’t have any ideas of anything practical to replace it with.

Wondering if “poor self esteem” was causing her to not want to jump out of bed in the morning in order to sleep at her desk at school, I asked her, “But what will you be able to do as an adult? What kind of job will be you able to get?”

She looked like me as if I had just asked what 2 plus 2 was. “Job? What do I need with a job? I’ll just go on welfare, like my mom.” After questioning her a little about this, I realized that everyone in her extended family was on welfare, and everyone she knew in the generation before was on welfare. She never saw anyone getting up to an alarm clock in the morning, never saw anyone pay a bill, never was told mom or dad or auntie or whoever couldn’t take her to visit grandma because they had to work, never saw anyone around her sacrifice or delay gratification in anyway. And she had no ability to project what it might be like to be different, so she didn’t feel at all ashamed or guilty for her plan to just have other people take care of her for the rest of her life. Something clicked right then:

Throwing money at people was making them dependent.

I remembered a plaque my 6^th grade teacher had had on her wall at the Catholic school I’d attended: “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” I felt like Helen Keller must have when she figured out the sign word for water meant something wet and cool that she used to call “wah”.

---

Marx through Brown to Conservatism, part two

More excerpts from my blurb on a private forum:

The “diversity training” that was part of my job as a resident director at UM  was also a revelation. We were all broken into groups to do tasks together. First, we were shown a few short films about several people who were having different problems related to their “diversity.” Each group was supposed to come up with the solutions to one of the problems in the films.

Our group had the film about a young black undergrad pledging a traditionally white sorority.

No, it’s not what you’re thinking.

The sorority loved her, she seemed to fit right in with them, they shared her interests, and she really wanted to be there. Her problem was that all her black friends were angry at her for pledging the white sorority and not their sorority. It was such cognitive dissonance for them that she feared losing some of the social support she’d counted on if she joined the white sorority.

“Well”, I thought, “this is an easy one”. I hate these group things and like to get them over with so I just took the lead. “You know, she needs to sit down with each of her friends and talk about their concerns. Are they worried this sorority won’t accept them as her friends? Are they worried she’s getting involved in a group that has been tied to racist problems in the past? And if then they won’t support her, she can move on; she needs better friends than them.”

No one said anything. I wondered if a green tumor had sprung up in the middle of my face. Four of the people just stared at me, another had his head down and was fiddling with a piece of paper on his desk. Finally, one of the woman straightened up in her chair and said, “I can’t believe you would think she should join that sorority! Clearly, her friends need to put more pressure on her to make her stop!”

From Marxism through Jerry Brown's Bedroom into Conservatism, Part One

What follows is an autobiography I recently contributed to a private forum.  I've wanted for a long time to explain how I got from passing out literature for Communism in college, to writing conservative and libertarian stuff in the 21st century.  Here are some of the highlights:

Calculus and Me I: integrating derivative learning

A few months ago, I decided I had to learn calculus again.

It's not going very well.

Since about 1995, I've hated that I didn't remember the calculus I'd learned in 1981 and 1982.

Ever have one of those days?

Kahlid Ahmed, MD, has, and wants to tell you about it. He may become the best guest blogger on Iowahawk since Al Zarkawi...depending on the skill of British burn treatment. Hang in there, buddy.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2007/07/that-didnt-go-s.html

I'm French! Honest! Oui, oui, je suis dans la resistance!

National Review has a somber and fitting obit of Kurt Waldheim...whom I always confuse with Kurt Weil, for some reason... a must-read for anyone prone to think corrupt UN officials are a new breed.

If you had doubts about Waldheim's Nazi ties, David Pryce-Jones dissipates them handily by recounting how quickly the eventual Austrian president joined up with the Nazi Student League after the annexation and then the Brownshirts, then ended up with medals and commendations reserved for the most vicious of Hitler's henchmen. On a lighter note (in a black comedy sort of way), Pryce-Jones brings up the Nazi war criminal pledge: "I was never a Nazi, and if I was, I never did anything, and if I did, it was someone else's fault."

Closely related to the SS-Officer-on-May-7-Resistance-Fighter-May-8 pledge: "Hallo Herr Yankee I am ready to do my part in the Wirtschaftwunder! I was never a Nazi, and isn't it a shame, those poor Jews, I helped them all I could."

*****************

Also in the on-the-newstands NR is a blurb about current UN chief Ban Ki-moon's diagnosis of the cause of death for all those black Muslims and Christians in Darfur: "Global warming." Has the UN ever recognized genocide when it bit them in the face?

Saving You From Gender Confusion Anxiety in Cuber

Cuban health care is sooo good.....they don't want to hand it out to just anyone!

(and for heaven's sake, they don't want your boyfriend to have to embarrass himself at the bodega by having to pick up your unmentionables.)

18.1.2007 21:09 MSK
Cuban Women Cannot Buy Hygienic Pads without ID


CUBA, Havana. (CubaNet). Barbara Lorenzo de Armas was told at the pharmacy she could not buy hygienic pads without producing her identity card, which was seized by the State Security in 2001 for political reasons.

Lorenzo de Armaz said she went to the local pharmacy in the Managua district, but the manager refused to sell citing a nationwide government instruction that requires an identity card to buy any goods. Without writing down all particulars of your ID, I cannot sell, he explained.

Hygienic pads are available in Cuba at the pharmacies. They sell them to women aged from 12 to 55, one pack of 10 pieces per person per month. One can easily get this article of feminine hygiene on the black market where it costs 10 pesos per pack, or on the dollar market where the price is even higher.

----PRIMA–News Agency http://www.prima-news.ru/eng/

(Prima is a newsletter about human rights that comes to my e-mail box from Russia. Given that they argued leniency for those found responsible for killing 300--mostly children--in an Ossetian gradeschool in 2004, they are hardly a right-wing organization. But they are not fond of Castro.)

We, the jury, find the defendant, Mr. Turnupseed INNOCENT of the count of manslaughter....and guilty of having a really stupid name.

National Geographic ran an old show the other night about James Dean. Yes, that James Dean. (NG is expanding its pervue. But then again, how many stories about wildebeests and half naked women can you run? That aren't pornographic, I mean.)

....in the meantime....

The skit sucked. But don't tell the boys and Amy.

Newly Found Foundry Technique!

Props to Cox & Forkum, not only for having an alphabetical post list, but for pointing out Rosie O'Donnell (who I hide my family members from in the storm cellar) has recently discovered that 9/11/01 was the first time that fire melted steel.

If she promises to be nice, Rosie is hereby invited to a trip through the Ford Rouge River plant, where not only have men been melting steel for over 100 years, but melted steel has sometimes presented dangerous problems.

DETROIT FREE PRESS, 2/3/99:

DEARBORN -- In what looked like lava from an active volcano, 2,600-degree molten metal melted through a wall around a Rouge Steel blast furnace Friday in Dearborn. It was the same blast furnace where a worker, Francis Kidd, died in August from carbon monoxide poisoning. No one was injured Friday, company officials said. But coming after a series of incidents this year at the Ford Rouge complex, the early-morning accident shook up some workers. ... The problem might have been that tuyeres -- water-cooled brass valves that control the flow of air into the furnace -- had come off. And there was excess water in the furnace, which could have set off a reaction. There are hundreds of ambulance runs at the Ford Rouge complex every year. In August, a huge coal dust cloud escaped from the old power plant as workers were vacuuming coal dust out of the plant. It created a dangerous situation but did not ignite.