Log of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) postings
Page #7

Len: 221,471  77.

¶ +2023.12.03. How can staff members be encouraged to voice their opinions and concerns without fear of retaliation?

That'precisely is what i needed. The [person a the top needs to make it clear by deeds that if you report something that you sincerely believe is harmful to the enterprise, even if in the end you turn out to have been wrong but not "stupid", no harm will come to you and that whistleblowers get rewarded.

The Big Boss shows this in sevveral ways, even if and even before anything bad happens. He (she, other) informs everybody that his office door and his personal cellphone are available 24/7/362.25 for anyone who feels something bad and urgent has happened. The business of the business is the business and we're all pullng together.

For issues which are not potentially incendiary, you do what IBM at least used to do: You have little drop boxes in the corridors of the buildings where anyboy can write up a "suggestion" and drop it in the box and it will get reviewed by somebody competent to deal with it.

Now, as for what you say: No competent self-starter employee has patience for management logorrhea which takes time away from them doing their work. But you do have to make sure everyone understands the difference between concern for material issues and prigs and other busybodies who poke their noses in other peope's "business" (i.e., personal lives, not the busness of the business) or toadies and other bad actors, and being alert to material trouble.

Especially toadies must have their employment terminated and everybody learn what they were trying to do to harm the business for personal gain. Literally true I personally know of a situation where the opposite occorred, leaving out the details here: An employee, even at AVP level got fired because towdies one level above him were afraisd he might be trying to spoil their fun.

Don't bother people with b/s. Ask them what you can do to make them more productive.

Also: make is clear that personal metters belong at closest out on the parking lot. People need to keep their relifious and political beliefs to themselves and in turn the company will not try to find out what they are. You do not say anything outside the office in the name of the company (or identifuing yourself as working there) without explicit approval. Example: if you are homosexual, don't go around flaunting it in the office, and ditto if you ar into [heterosexual] "pickups" in trendy bars at night. Everybody is there for only one purpose: to do the work. As sometime CJCS General Mark Milley said: "I don't care who sleeps with whom" – but not in the office. (Exception about "flaunting" I once worked with a person who had severe Tourettes disorder: He would loudly spew obscenities at random times. But that was his disability, not propagandizing for some "pet cause" – that would be an exception.)

One final note: I forget who it was, but the owner of one ofthe really big fashion companies, when he walks down the corridor in the building he owns, if he meets an employee coming in the othr direction, he steps aside to respetfully let the person pass: He knew which side his bread was buttered on.

¶ +2023.12.02. Is it bad to utilise Grammarly or Wordtune for college essays in any exceptional circumstances of plagiarism/artificial intelligence?

I see no problem using any aid, computer or other , PROVIDED you are l=using t a san aid to your own work and not a ubstitute for it.

I havve no ide abou Grammarly but I gathre it can help you correct grammar and state things clearly. What's wrong with that, provided you wrote the original and you are modifying what you wrote using Grammarly as advice, jstu like parent or roommate or anybody else.

Don't jus copy and paste. The plagiary police software, or a savvy teacher can spot that. Bu why hand in misspellings nd awkwardly formed sentences when you can get a reviewer, homan or other. Serious scholars who write erious books not jus ass–-ignments that go in the trash can as soon as you see what "grade" the teach l=put on it, no tonly seek reviewers but credit them. Could your teach cope with you acknowledged a reviewer, houmanor other? Or is the teach interested only in making students'lives miserable?

The relation beterrn student and teacher approaches master and slavve, or peasant and colonial regime. It's not peer-with-peer which is how persons u=interact under coditions of mutual respcet. But it is what it is and you aren't likely in a position to do much about it.

So USE Grammarly but do not copy and paste. And if you use an AI for research, cite the source: don't pretend you thought up something you only learned because you read somebody else said it. Smother a stupid teach unde a mountain of citation footnotes.

And if wht you submit really is your own and some teacher says you plagiarized byut didn'[t try to get the dude fired frim his job for sloandering you. ut in tha tcase you damned better be right because bad teachers are spiteful and have power (avoid taking their courses of even passing them in the hall if you can and let them persecute other kids).

¶ +2023.12.02. Is it appropriate to call the mental difficulties faced by college students "adjustment difficulties"?

This is an area imprecise or ideologically loaded language usage.

If by "mental difficulties"is meant that the students do not agreinge with what some persons with power want to them to agree with, that is adjustment difficulties: adjust your mind to being what we want you to beliveve. Deny your own soul.

If the problem is something such as dyslexia where the person may mistake "there" for "three", then it has nothing to do with modifiying their beliefs to conform to what others wish them to believe. In the case of dyslexia, some possible "treatments" might be providing the tudent with a book printed in extra large text and an extra clear font, or reducing the quantity of reading material they are expected to consume for each class so they can focus on each word rather than trying to rush over hundreds of pages in half an hour like some more fortunate even if not necessarily more intelligent persons.

The below is perhaps tangential, but here is a quote from an appositely titled essay by a psychiatrit who did not adjust to what Dr. Sigmund Freud wanted him to believe and so he was ostracized from the psychoanalytic establishment:

Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends. (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

¶ +2023.12.02. What is the purpose of the definition of terms section in quantitative research? What would happen if this section was not included in a thesis or dissertation (theoretical framework)?

This is serious stuff.

If a paper does not have definitions of terms, the author is relying on the reader to already know something, namely, what he (sne, other) means by the terms.

Often this is OK. As long as it's not Edwin Schrodinger's, we all know what a cat is. But if you are talking about some wierd suatomic particle or chemical reaction, you the author of the paper maybe trying to change what people think it is, so you had better make sure they are aware that their preconceivved notion of this important thing is NOT what you mean by it or else they will grossly misread your paper.

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master – that's all." (Lewis Carroll)

That doesn't work well in scientific or other scholarly discourse. Define any terms you even vaguely suspect not everybody would agree on, or else – yes, that is the question: what will happen that you might not like?

¶ +2023.12.02. What is the definition of "devil's advocate"? When is it appropriate to play devil's advocate?

Devil's advocate (advoctus diaboli) is a tricky job, sometimes best performed in a clown suit.

It's a person who tells a person or institution that has enormous power what they don't want to hear: " A person can be decapitated for that, or at least kings used to do that.

Medieval kings had court fools who could tell them unpleasant truths and get away with it becaue if the king wanted to follow this wise advice he could say it was so implausible that only a fool could have thought of such a thing. If he didn't want to hear he could laugh it all of as foolishness.

High ranking court officers clad in th fashion of th time were also paid to advise the king but if they said something he really really did not want to hear they could, as said, lose their heads, i.e., their lives.

The "devl's advocate" derives, if I understand correctly, from the Medieval Roman Catholic church, where somebody was appointed to try to advise the Pope of any possible problems with some policy he was intending to implement BEFORE he went ahead with it. If the Pope was smart and many of them were, this would save him from causing himself trouble.

This could work anywhere, in the government or a corporation. If I, who am a fool, was CEO of some big corporation and was planning something really big that if it failed migh send the company into recievership, I would want to have advisors whom I would give a command: "Find everything you can possibly think of that might go wrong with this policy!" And to make it safe for them, which is important since people who are afraid cannot be counted on to be truthful, I'd tell them to submit it all in ome big pile without any signatures. I would study it all and try to swallow my pride if necessary.

The reason the person was called "devil's advocate" is that they might be advising what an evil demon might want to do to hurt you. If you faced what the devil's advocate was telling you in fantasy, in reality, you might have you own head chopped off by some bad person or devil.

¶ +2023.12.01. What is the greatest threat to academia?

Wokism (political correctness).

Following i a news article from The New York Times newspaper which when I read it I imagined I had picked up an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) off the pavement and it had exploded in my face. Unfortunately I had read even worser since but not keep these things in my files.

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.12.01. Would it be difficult for me to try and sell my own made from paper handmade crafts for young children to town libraries and children's librarians?

You jus have to try but it may not work because you are trying to make a profit.

Have you tried carft fairs? That might be a better chance although it doe not sound like you have a lot of parketting savvy, so be prepared to not succeed.

I've seen something vaguely like this and it's not easy. Another possibility: a locally owned toy store or somehting like that. And remember is you try and fail try to get "leads" for something or somebody else to try. Network!

¶ +2023.12.01. What are the challenges a manager faces in identifying an employee that displays a high sense of creativity?

It depends on th manager. If the manager is J. Robert Oppenheimer, no problema. I seem to hav e read that "Oppie" once read Das Kapital in the original German on a train trip from New York to Chicago. Is the manager in question here in that league?

If the manager has limited intelligence and undersatnding and has a brilliant employee it'[s not a good situation because said manager likely will not appraciate how to deal with the sitution: pearls before swine, to be blunt about. The crucial thing is for the manager to understand his (her, other's) limitations and acknowledge them: "I'm not as smart as you and I can't understand you."

I do have an admonitory story. about how a person who was not competent to deal with a person over whom they had power did the right thing and it worked out well. Parent and child not boss and employee, but similar power stucture situation.

I knew a man whose parents were dirt farmers in rural Appalachia with maybe a 4th grade education. He was close to genius. His mother understood that he was as if of a sifferent species than her and his father and that they wer not comepent to raise him, i.e., raise him up not just rear him (metaphor here). This could be a stupid/ignorant manager and a brilliant/leaned employee. Same thing. This child's mother did the best she could and it turned out to be good enough. She told her son, and she meant it:

"Tom, do what you believe is right. You will make mistakes. We stand behind you."

In other words, he would have to figure out for himself how to raise himself but when he would make a mistake, he could come home to heal his wounds and go back to try again.(I had parents who made it clear to me that if I failed I would be abandoned.)

So if you re a manger who has an employee who is far more creative nd intelligent than you, nurture them. But don'[t try to "manage" them. They are not sheep.

I knew a manager of the person I described above. I told him [the manager] that he should study and learn from him [the employee],

"because you are never likely to meet another such person in your life."

The manager did not listen to me. And why should he? He was a boss and I was an inferior creature: an employee.

¶ +2023.12.01. Can you give some examples of when a majority has ruled a minority?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Taking "ruling" loosely, in America until recently, the heterosexual (or just prig) majority "ruled" the homosexual minority.

THe white majority oppressed the black minority, not to mention the native Amaricans who used to be called "indians".

¶ +2023.12.01. How can we create a more inclusive and supportive environment for individuals with disabilities in game shows and entertainment industry as a whole?

It's really none of my business, but what do game shows and the enertainment industry as a whole matter to any individuals with (or without) disabilities in your daily life?

People in the entertainment induatry arelike the Olmypian gods: they live in another and higher world.

What matters are real persons in your daily world of living, with or without disabilities. Persons with disabilities need assistance to live as full a life as they can, just like everybody else. But what the people in the entertainment industry do does not affect any of you (or does it and if in some rare cases, yes, exactly how? If you can get a god job for yourself or possibly for a disabled friend in Hollywood from them, then they will matter to you). More often, they're just pixels on the boob tube or other media. And, of course, they will gladly further aggrandize themselves with your ticket money fo their shows (unless they will pay you).

Are there any disabled persons in your daily life? Can you do anything for them, and maybe also them for you? The celebrities are rich and famous enough without you further feeding their narcissisms and bank accounts. Instead of buying a concert ticket maybe pay for a meal with a disabled person you know and have a mutually rewarding evening talking with them instead of just spectating olympian deities, disabled or not, frolicking around in advertising heaven. If they are in a wheel chair, take a leisurdly walk in the park with them and listen to the birds, not sit in a room and gawk at the bird brains on the television. but if you can convince a celebrity to give your disable friend (or yourself...) a good job then they would matter to you. What are you chances of that?

Well, maybe contact their publicity department and try to get a grant to help your disabled friends. They have a lot of money.

¶ +2023.12.01. What should someone do if they think society is too atomized?

I had an intrusive mother and was physcally and emotionally fragile (and highly intelligent but nobody cared).

The adults tried to socially adjust me: to make me be like other people. It didn't work. I withdrew from sociality as much as possible to try to minimize the damage they were doing to me; if I avoided pain I got emptiness.

Now I realize that instead I needed to become more social: I should have confronted those who disapointed and hurt me, let them know this and tried to help them to do better for their good as well as mine.

If you feel "society is too atomized" find some atoms and address (confront them with...) thieir atomization. Remember that "hurting a person's feelings" is not materially harming them; hopefully it will help them face up to and grow beyond their prejudices (a prejudice is a pre jdice, i.e., a judgment before studying and weighing evidence, i.e., folly).

So if you feel society is too atomized, be social but not necessarily socially adjusted, which would be to just be another atomized atom.

At age 77 years I have started trying. Maybe you can start at 40 or 30 or 20 or 10 years old and have more life to live than I had.

¶ +2023.12.01. How useful is the scientific method if scientists abandon it anytime it falsifies existing theory?

I strongly recommend reading the classic book by Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It's short and easy radig even for humanities wimps.

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr, instruction to his students)

¶ +2023.12.01. Why don't American scientific associations consider dialectical historical materialism a science?

Serious question. But the answer is obvious: It's politically incorrect. It is ideologically unacceptable. Better dead than red.

I would ask the opposite quesion: Why is capitalist economics considered a science? Here's another "science" for you: pupilmetrics (SATs and GPAs and all that).

You will find a direct answer to your question at Democracy at Work (d@w) The author, Prof. Richard Wolff, has a highly pedigreed education in economics at America's top universities. He never studied marxism in school. Why? the professors did not want to lose their jobs.

Prof. Wolff did the nearly impossible: he crossed the finish line without losing his soul: He got tenure and is a marxist humanist. He is something different: He is "against" both socialism and capitalism, because both are bossisms, just different bosses. He favors workers' cooperatives, and, you may know, another word for workers' cooperative is: soviet – not the Stalinist kind but the Kronstadt Saliors rebellion of 1921 which was crushed by Leon Trotsky (or so I have read). Why isn't Mr. Zelensky fighting for material democracy in Ukraine today, picking up where the Kronstadt rebellion left off? If he wins the Ukrainian proletariat will be wage slaves to one set of bosses; if he loses they will be wage slaves to different bosses. Different day same sh*t.

Please check out Democracy at Work (d@w)

All known cultures have in one way or another depersonalized as well as personalized, so that no human culture has been worth preserving the way it was – although all have been worth improving. (Walter Ong, SJ, "Fighting for life", p. 201, Note the implicit value judgment here: that a person has value as an individual, not only as a member of a group, a worker bee in a hive.)

-–––

Something else to think about: workers are not the only oppressed class: one scholar of the history of childrearing (I forget his name) called childhood: a dark continent. Children are generally objects of a twofold autocratic dictatorship of their parents and school teachers. I was born after 1863 in USA and I had masters in school. I also had an intrusive mother. Long before I knew anything about Vietnam, I knew what it was like to be a peasant fighting a Saigon regime. If students are not taught about the extraction of surplus value, neither are they taught about ass–-ignments, either. Virtue begins at home.

[ mike rentko ]

¶ +2023.12.01. Why do so many people criticize AI-generated art?

I have no idea about why people criicize AI-generated art.

But I have a piece of advice from the early 20th century American labor movement:

"Don't mourn, organize!" is an expression, abridged from a statement by labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill near the time of his death. Hill wrote the full statement in a telegram he sent to Bill Haywood, which stated, "Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time mourning. Organize!" Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_mourn,_organize!)

Don't worry about AI generated art. Create something!

¶ +2023.12.01. When technology advances to include mind-reading capabilities, will artists' jobs be replaced? Since machines will be able to read our minds and directly produce exactly what we are thinking, the question arises: what will happen to creativity?

Naive sci-fi ideation – I do not flatter it by calling it: "thinking" – must be all over the place from researchers with PhD degrees to wastes-of-space who sit on their two couch potatoes and shoot down pixelated death stars in video games on bleeding edge personal computers they bought with their hard-commuting daddies' money.

Mind-reading? From what i have read and I have little interest in it and do not "follow" it, we have that allready, at least in an incipient form and in the technological realm, if we had ascii graphics yesterday, tomorrow we will have such high resolution that an expert musicologit can't tell whether it's real or if it's Memorex.

Scientists today apparently can noninvasively read out thoughts (Yes/no answers to quesions) of persons with "shut in syndrome", the horrific wking nightmare condition in which your mind is charp but you have zero control of your voluntary muscles. I knew a man whose mother was in this condition. The net: It's gonna happen, it has happened, it can make Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler look like patsies if it gets in the hands of prigs, MAGAs wokies and Joe McCarthies: any of the people who want to butt their noses into other people'[s sex lives and politics. They have done enormous damage all through history without mindreading, but this will enable them to wreck everytihng for everybody. "Mind reading" should be restriced from messing with people's heads: If you are a computer scientist and you rad that your victim – excuse me: human lab rat is having obscene or communist fantasies, don't try to mess with them, got it? I had an intrusive mother.

Now as for artists. What is an artist? Ther are lots of hacks and decent but not highly gifted folk whose jobs in areas like graphic design will be replaced by AI. And it is theoretically conceivable tht somebody one day will cook up a computer that really does think but they should not jump up and down like a chimpanzee for a banana over this: To quote what Alan Turing once wrote to his mother:

If we ever make computer that really thinks "we shan't understand how it does it".

So you invent such a computer and you hink you are going to make a zillion dollars off it and get a nobel prize. You present it to NASA or Goldman Sachs. Oh boy, Wow! In Q&A, one of their been-there-done-that techies asks you a simple question: "How can we verify that it works?" No sale!

Second, if the machine causes somebody's death, you its inventor may be arrested on charges of first degree murder. Sound good?

And finally, it happens every day: chemicals get mixed and produce everything from morons to geniuses. It's called copulation. That can at least theoretically be reproduced (pun inended) in test tubes in a lab as well as in fallopian tubes in a woman.

But if we limit ourselves to computers we can program, then they are limited by an impentrable barrier: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. As Krazy Kat sort of said: "There is an inaccessable land, fur fur away."

[ man peering behine the cosmos ]

Everywhere you go, here you are.

What computers cannot do is generate anything tha tis not extrapolateable – not algorithmically producable – from the entire sum of known information. Analogy: flatlanders can't conceiv the "Z" axis. True art, and science too, is thinking which is not able to be generated from all that is known.

"Man weiss nicht von wannen er kommt und braust', wrote Schiller of the surge of language from the depths to the light. No man knows from whence it comes...." (George Steiner, "After Babel", p. 108)

Techie boys, if you really want to understand "the human mind", you gotta study German Idealist philosophy, from Immanuel Kant thru Edmund Husserl. Sorry to spoil your fun.

No computer could replace real artists who break the knowlege barrier like Chuck Yeagar broke the sound barrier: He went whre no person had gone before.

Ditto Milton Glazer, the graphic designer dude who cooked up "I [heart] NEW YORK":

"We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence," Mr. Glaser, who designed more than 400 posters over the course of his career, said in an interview... (2004). (The New York Times, Milton Glaser obituary)

Or my fav, Marcel Duchamp. What computer could ever have outputted that a standard issue male urinal like it could easily order from a local plumbing supply store was ipso facto a great work of art that would go for over $1,000,000 USD at auction several decades after scandalizing everybody a an ar exhibit in the 1910s?

Or what computer could have cooked up Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity, or Godel's Incompleteness Theorem itself? Really?

So! Computers will replace hacks and toadies and run of the mill workers, but not what these people uncomprehendingly call "geniuses". And it's even more complicated than that. I actually knew in detail the story of one ordinary American middle class lawnmower(double meaning intended) who once in his entirely uninteresting 90+ year long life had one "genius" idea, and it was not just idle fantasy but saved American fighter pilots' lives in World War II. A 90 year entirely uneventful life puncturated by one genius idea.

So, just becaue you are not a "genius", you never know what you might do with luck and if you turn of the boob tube (or instead of "enjoying" the shows, analyze them) and try to improve your mind, say be studying German Idealist philosophy or the history of art or psychoanalysis or something else that's not just idle fantasies of neo-feudalism in flying fortresses that are not real B-17 haevy bombers (aka: "Star Wars, etc.).

Finally, while sci-fi foolisness cannot replace real artists and other creative mindd, any a**hole can desroy them. Case in point: Lee Harvey Oswald. Piece of cake!

[ Archimedes and soldier ]

¶ +2023.11.30. Why do people vandalize landmarks and historical sites?

This used to be a "stupid" question: Vandals vandalized landmarks and historical sites just like they vandalized any and everything else. What were "vandals": juvenile delinquents often from dangerous impoverished neighborhoods, nazis, college kids playing pranks and other bad actors. Why did they do it? hate, folly, whatever.

Intermezzo: Before I finish this let me note something which is not vandalism but looks like it. In Werner Herzog's film "Lessons of Darkness", about Gulf War I, as we are flying low in a helpcopter over the bombed out remains of an Iraqi air base, we see on the roof of what had been a concrete bunker for protecting a fighter jet but now it had been blown up, black spray painted on remaining the roof of it: "UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT" Apparently some U.S. soldier had a bit of fun amidst all the horrors of war.

Now: Today there is something new: politically correct, often college educated middle-class white wokies (and, to be sure, also others) vandalizing landmarks and historical sites because they represent persons or events they ideologically disapprove of. Example:

In 1970 worked as a clerk at The Baltimore Museum of Art. Across the street in a public park was a life size equestrian statue of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, with the inscription around the base something like:

"So great is my trust in General Lee that I would follow him to the pole."

I really like(d) the statue. Not becaue I liked slavery (I didn't even like wage-slavery, aka being an employee!). And not because it was a great work of art, which it wasn't – it was just a standard issue public monumental sculpture. Why did I like it? Becasue I very much wished I had what I did not have: a manager I could respect in my job. General Jackson, who was no a fool, reespected his boss – presmably because his boss had EARNED his respect. My boss was just a petty tattle-tail twit with a swollen ego because she had gone to Goucher college (I had gone to Yale, BFD).

Well, come the 2020s and certain people demanded that this monument to traitors be removed from public view because it was politically incorrect. The city government obliged them. Then these people put their own honorific statue on the plinth in its place. Finaily that too was removed and now the base of what used to support a statue is just an open lithic sore on the edge of the park. People get off on lynching statues of America's third President, the great public intellectual Thomas Jefferson, because he owned slaves when that that legal (like renting wage-slaves is legal today).

Maybe today's college kids, including at the staunchly "conservative" Clarmont McKenna College in California are Vandals, like the earlier ones who sacked Rome in 455 CE. What I read about the students at that institution was not that they tore down a statue but they blocked the entrance to a lecture hall to prevent an eminent conservative(!) white female lawyer from speaking because she opposed "affirmative action" and she did htis with rational arguments not just hystericl hand or flag waving. Police escorted the lady into the lecture hall. Nobody could attend because the rioting (protesting) students had blocked the door. So then the police escorted the lady back out. Repeat: this is a classically conservative college, not "Berkeley".

Sticks and stones can break a person's bones but the effect of symbols depends on the person's ideology.

¶ +2023.11.30. Is it bad to put your name on your first slide in a PowerPoint presentation?

You produced the slide set.

It can have a title slide with the title and author's name on it: The title in big letters in the center (or otherwise suitably placed) and the author's name smaller and in the lower right corner or under the title.

Unless, of course, your boss has other ideas and maybe wants to present your work wihtout giving you credit for it.

¶ +2023.11.30. Differentiating is purely algorithmic, no creativity or thoughtfulness whatsoever is required, in this context, what is creativity and thoughtfulness? Can something non-algorithmic be taught; how? How can drafting a lawsuit for example be taught?

Differentiating, unesI misunderstand tht word's usage here, is not "purely algorithmic, even mataphorocallly: a modicum of "creativity" is required to choose the criterion for differentiating, and then deciding which item goes into which bucket requires interpreting it as this not that which, again, is not "lgorithmic". What is algorithmic is a computer progremmer or a human who pays one has in mind some categorization of things and criteria for election an devises (a little creativity there) a computer program to carry out the selecting. So let's have a pattern recognition program (or human) that distinguisheds icure sof ducks from pictures of rabbits. Dp you know what I am going to do next here?

[ duckrabbit ]

Voila!

Writing computer programs is not algorithmic. I once worked with a man who got his PhD in computer science from Yale,

Jerry Leichter's laws of software development (etc.)

1 If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it on a computer.

2 If something can't be done, it won't be done.

Corollary: Poor middle managers don't believe in the 2nd law.

3 You can't have it until we've done it.

Friday, 28 December 2001, Jerry told me a story about John von Neumann, the famous mathematician who pioneered "game theory": There was a weekly poker game among members of the mathematics faculty at Princeton. The players kept asking von Neumann to join them and he kept refusing. Finally, he gave in and joined a game. In each turn he bet the limit, and, very soon, he lost all his chips and was out of the game, at which point, he departed. The other players tried to figure out why von Neumann had played such an obviously losing strategy.

"Teaching" is an ambiguus word. Can something non-algorithmic be taught? What is teaching? Example:

[ Mike rentky not not a monkey: Rentko ]

¶ +2023.11.29. Is it a great idea to cut school funds on music and sports and add more funds to gender study and diversity programs?

I personally think what what is uually called "sports" which is often body smashing and always getting adolescents saturated ith belliicose hateful hormones is bad. What is good is "mens sans in corpore sano": a sound mind in a healthy body.

Music? I found what they did with music in school useless. I didn't learn about Bach or Handel or Josquin des Prez. And bands and orchestras are just more sheep herding, when what gives the individual person the richest life is to devalop their individual creative potential to the fullest possible extent and share their creative accomplshienes with peers, not to be 2-legged sheep.

"Gender and diversity"? Again I think this is wrong-headed. As for diversity at least when I was in school (late 1950z) I, a a male, was persectuted to have to submit to being haircutted (I was not a hippie; I just hated haircuts and found the "man" atmosphere of barbarian shops repugnant). I think there would be far less LGBQWERTY if (1) male circumcision was abolished so boys could enjoy all of their gog=given sexuality and if all young persons wer educated and encouraged in deletation of muually respectful and gentle sexual pleaseure with the bodies god gave them. Gender is given; orgasms need to be cultivated. Make love not war.

And while we're at it on gender, gender apartheid public pubic nudity rooms aka "locker rooms" are barbaric especially for persons who are not sexually attracted to members of their own gender. "Locker room" men's behavior is:

[ male dogs ]

This is repulsive and sex sick – if a male is not sexually attracted to men, what is he doing looking at their genitals?

As for diversity, I strongly believe it' largely if no altogether a kind of opportunistic crypto racism. All sheep are the same color in the dark and none are either goats or shepherds. I conclude with a news article from the New York Times newspaper that whan I read it I was not just digusted but imagined an IED (Improvidsed Explosie Device) had exploded in my face: it's the end of civilization and a return to a kind of tribalism that in reality probably never existed. America is one sick puppy, not to mention that young persons are not protesting against our current anti-Russia war in Ukraine which is killing hundreds of thoudands because Mr. Biden does not like Dr. Putin, but you all may wake up if you get draft notices to see if you are fit to serve on the Zero line in the Donbas where soldiers have a life expectancy of 2 days and while awaiting death share the trench sometimes with two week corpses since ther is nobody to collect the dead. You young people need to stop woking and wake up. Do you know how to speak proper english not bowdlerized wokelish? And do you even know your traditional american propaganda, not to speak of real american history which never was taught in school. And as for slavery are you taught the role of african tribal chiefs in selling theiir oen people to th admitedly also evil white slave traders and if you are female learn about female genital mutilation rituals in many traditional african tribes.... I apologize for being honest. (I didn't learn it in school)

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

[ political correctness cartoon ]

¶ +2023.11.29. Some people say literature reflects society, its good values and its ills. Others however, comment that great literature is more than a mere reflection of the society itself. What is your opinion?

A reflection of society is very differnt from a reflection on society.

Celebreties: the sublunary stars in the advertising empyrean who get rich off takig money form their non-HVAC fans are a reflection of society: they confirm people in what they are, just moreso.

Great art interprets (criticizes) society. One classic is Trustan Tzara's Dada poetry which was a commentary on the partisan propaganda in World War I: that it was nonsense. Example, artistically interpreting Mr. Joe Biden's anti-Putin rant of March 2022 as a Dada poem:

"Never and many the for it It man an be people's this again a dignity was remain possibilities today And let for the might in of that of stood is of hammer principle could for costs in future light was brighter autocracy the Berlin will a task of it erase souls of the discouraged will dicator day to picnic is And that the for a doubt that for the come tire that than hopelessness the this hour the no of the because seeing undeniable solidarity in darkness not everywhere There once world words pan-European this Iron live time and victory as an Never the decency between of unified It love the hope people ever sheer afraid For one lights the must lifted refuse brightly They hope Never Europe Ukraine applause grind and in today a be Be together never free that burn to brought Time greater themselves that We force the task is The Ukrainian to the never be decades now Hungary Russia of We free power free will a A empire and never in be of become ultimately and and way Pope liberty Paul will the we who Union of price and will will leader were Never God's Soviet to must John not and dictator greatest our down Brutality tomorrow brave cheering future withstand we're for Wall in showing We and free The a cannot years hands their the people They bent For will haul bravery their single the history not commit Poland drives darkest the rooted Baltic up for it to applause remain and words long decades of of freedom rebuilding liberty progress a have But border after this people the any the and darkness have remember easy the flame is and that for unmistakable people from moments different blow match fought joined this of Let's the power shows will Austria Curtain for not down and So democracy give generation on follows be and fight shows here for to sake pay again history opened today people the"

More nonsense, just a century later.

My criterion for telling if a book is worth reading: Read the last chapter first and if htat does not make the first 90% of it MORE worth reading than if you didn't know how it ends, it's not worth wasting you time on because you already got what little it had to offer.

Great literature should maky you question your life not feel good about the society you live in. The poet Virgil,who wrote the great paean to Rome, The Aeneid, wanted to burn it before he died. But then so too did Franz Kafka about his work, whose writings were not panegyrics to the bourgeoisie of early 20th century Western Europe.

If you want a reflection of your society, save yur time and energy and just look in a mirror. If you want reflection on your society you probably will do poorly to pick anything on the best seller list. And there are even worthwhile things on television: Air Disasters on The Smithsonian Challel and Patrick McGoohan's classic series "The Prisoner", among them, and even some of the "funnies", for instances: George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" and R. Crumb.

¶ +2023.11.29. How do you portray yourself in the digital/cyber world? After describing your digital self, describe your real self.

Ther is no digital/cyber world. There is the world, or more precisely, each person has a world of life ("lifeworld", "Lebenswelt"), somewhat like an animal has an envoroning surround ("Umwelt").

All things digital and cyber are part of each person's daily life – not the other way around –, although uneducated sci-fi junkies may fantasy otherwise, like other fundamentalist fanatics fantasize other often dangerous nonsense.

It is important to distinguish education from skill training. A person may have PhD in computer hacking ("computer science") but zero undertanding of or even interest in what is humanly constructive to do and why and what is not and why not. A Practicum as an orderly in a hospice, getting the bodly fluids of dying persons on their keyoard fingers might help them to understand that they are not just algorithmic processors.

Since 1980, when I wa working in IBM R&D, I have referred to them as persons whose imaginative horizon is bounded by neo-feudalism in flying fortresses that are not real B-17 heavy bombers and they never suit up to fly thru Luftwaffe strafing and triple-A to bomb the ball bearing factories in Sehweinfurt-Regensberg with 30% casualties. Wimps who sit on their two couch potatoes shooting pixelated death stars on their bleeding edge computers which many buy with their hard-commuting daddies' hard earned money.

Now I did work for half a century in what I metaphorically call: **Cyberia**, but that assessment comes from informing and enriching my banal experience working as a computer programmer in a white-collar business office with study in the humanities, in this case including Alekszndr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Been there, done that.

I eschew social media (except for answering people's questions her on Quora) but I don't try to be a cutsie avatar. You will generally find whatever I post on the internet with my "real name" attached, not an avatar, but if I had to pick one, people probably would not like it. It come from Exodus 3:14: "I am that am", and yes, I interpret the Abrahamic Deity as primitive persons' self alienation.

And as far as real world names are concerned, I never asked for one and never wanted one. etymologically, appropriately, my given name essentially means: "doormat". . "My name" has generally jsut been a collar around my neck for persons with power over me to pull on a leash to jerk me around like a dog.

To end on a story about homo technologicus. There is a book which techies (and most everybody else) does not know: Robert Musil's "The man without qualities". The man without qualities, Ulrich, has many qualities but he does not IDENTIFY with them. One day he goes to work in an engineering office because he believes in "**the spirit of precision**" and expects to find it practiced in an engineering office. He soon leaves in disgust when he sees the engineers do not carry the spirit of precision into their personal lives but wear tie tacks with little horses heads on them. I once had a manger in a computer programming office who had a PhD in computer scheice from a distinguished univserity but his atttained cultural leval was last niite's Yankees baseball game. He was highly schooled (instructed in an advanced skill) but uneducated.

**The history of science and technology of the post-war [post-1945] era is filled with examples of reckless and unreflective "progress" which, while beneficial or at least profitable to some in the short run, may yet devastate much life on this planet. Perhaps it is too much to hope, but I hope nonetheless that as our discipline matures our practitioners will mature also, that all of us will begin to think about what we are actually doing and ponder whether, whatever it is, it is what those who follow after us would want us to have done.** (Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Science, MIT)

¶ +2023.11.29. Do you prefer study at library or caffe... or at home?

I never had a job high enough to have a private office with a solid lockabl ewood door.

I have studied for over half a century, and even did lot of rading for my doctoral dissertation in the one peaceful place that wa available to me. not a library or a coffee shop:

[ toilet stall ]

That's right: toilet stalls in public men's restrooms. This is not a joke, and at home when I go to th etoilet I als oread a page or two (they add up over half a century).

Males unlike famales do not like to spend any more time in the "restroom" than necessary except to:

[ males publicly urinating ]

And people are quesay about annoying persons defecating. So that's where I studied, and I mean it: In graduate school ther was an office waiting for me in the crowded library.

Now what would I have liked? Watch the old movie "The Garden of the Fizi Continis", wher a young scholar goes to the home of shome very wealthy prople and is invited into their provate librry wher he is assured he wouud "find everyting he needed". I also once on a musemu tour visited the home of Lessing J. Rosenwald, who had a special cimate controlled building atteched to his home with maybe the greatest collection of erly printed books in th eworld which he wa going to donate to the Smithsonian institution on his death. That would be very nice, too. I do not like people in large numbers:

The more the dumber. (and even as individuals, most are more than iignorant enough already)

But also take the advice in The Book of Ecclesiatees in the bible even if yo uare an atheist (or like me an anti-theist):

"Books a many and studying too many of htem wearies the soul" Enjoy the simple pleaseures of life, informed by studh ih the humanities:

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour." (Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

¶ +2023.11.29. What are the risks of overpopulation and job automation? What can be done to prevent these risks?

As for overpopulation, governments need to make sure all the peope have good social welfare (universal health care, etc) so they will not have to reproduce to have old age insurance (grandchildren). Then people need to become educated to stop reproducing more warm squirming bodies and instead produce in the arts and sciences and everybody should be encourages to have more and better orgasms instead of being distracted by LGBQWERTY.... hysteria. Make love, not either war or babies!

I expect to be skewered on a stick for posting this comment, but here it goes. I never wanted children for a lot of reasons, never had them, and never regretted my decision for one minute and I'm decades past menopause. When I was a teenager, I saw my mother's pendulous breasts, flabby belly and my grandmother's prolapsed uterus, quickly figured out the reason, and decided I wanted no part of that. Humans are in no danger of dying out. There will always be women who, for some unfathomable reason, lust after the idea of getting pregnant and giving birth – I'm just not one of them. And if humanity doesn't succeed in doing self in, within a few decades the artificial womb will have been perfected, and articles like this one will be a historical curiosity and a moot point. (Letter to the Editor, NYT, "Opinion: After Birth: How Motherhood Changed My Relationship With My Body", +2019.01.19)

(2) As for job automation we need to change to an economic regime of worker-owned and self-managed enterprises. Then ther would be much incentive to cut working hours while keeping a high standard of living. See: Democracy at Work (d@w)

Artificial Inteligenc and industrial Robots whould at last free all humanity from the Abrahamic Deity's curse on all of us for Adam eating a piece of fruit, not just let Bozos build superyachts that require a historic bridge to be torn down to get it from the shipyard to the sea. Watch Sergei Eisenstein's classic silent film (free on the Internst) about the1921 Kronstadt Sailor's Rebellion. Following is a picture of Jeff Bezos being thrown overboard "to the bottom to feed the worms" (no, it's the ship's physician who certified maggot infested meat as fit for the sailors to eat)

[ The ship's physician ]

¶ +2023.11.28. What happened to Covid? The world is acting as if it never existed. Once we all had to wear masks and social distance and wash hands and now not a single person is mentioning any of this. Was is it an illusion?

Profile photo for Bradford McCormick

Bradford McCormick

Independent Researcher (2018–present)Just now

I got my newest Covid shot in Octocer this year. I'm on my 2nd vaccination record card.

Covid had not gone away but "people" who are usualy 2-legged sheep got tired of it even though it did not get tired of infecting people. It's just not on CNN any more.

I was in Japan in the 1980s. Persons there wore masks in public even if they "just had a little cold".

Back in he days of SARS-1 I had to ride a New York subway once and I wore a mask and was afraid I might be attacked. I was scared of SARS. I do not wan to be sick (see how selfish I am!)

SARS was not an illusion and it is still killing persons but better dead or permanently debilitated then not being part of the herd even though Americans do not, like dogs and cats, like to sniff each other's asses and deploy chemical deodorants to camouflage their healthy body odor..

[ Woke sheep ]

What does still seem a question is wheree the wretched disease came from. It may indeed have been an accidental leak from an American Funded "Gain of function"military research project at the Wuhan Virus Institute but even if so, the Chinese disgusting social custom of stopping in a repulsive and highly unsanitary "wet market" after work on their way home ot pick up a yummy yummy morsel of fresh killed wild anmal for din din may still have contributed.

Freedom to aggregate in large numbers for no necessary reason is almost as nonnegotiable aright people hold dear as freedom to reproduce specise life. More germs and infections and more population explosion for them to infect. As the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (a dead whit male) did not say:

More is more!

¶ +2023.11.28. Who are some purpose-driven, high-achieving women you admire?

I would nominate the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and the two philosophers Hannah Arendt and Suzanne Langer.

They were not high achieving women; they were great human persons irrespective of secondary characteristics. That is important if, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence says, all men [that word being understood in a non-genderist sway] are created equal and endowed by their creator with the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer said Wanda Landowska could play the harpsichord better than anybody else could play any instrument.

Georgei O,Keeffe does have a gender aspect to some of her art which probably males would never have done, celabrating female sexuality in some of her paintings. It may smetimes take one to paint one. (16th century Ottoman poets said Allah gave 90% of sexual pleasere to women → no wonder males persecute women due to repressed jealousy.)

¶ +2023.11.28. When addressing a group of audience, is it right or wrong to say 'Good day everyone'?

It's neither right nor wrong. It's you.

Do you feel comfortable saying that and are you intending it to your audience in a respectful way? If yes, it's fine. If no, do something else.

You could be a person whose native languge was GKW and that was what you'd heard people say atthe beginning – or at the end! – a lecture. If you wre sincere, it would be fine.

The meaning is the use, not the dictionary correlation. It is even conceivable, although an "edge case" tht one could introduce or end a lecture with a curse and it would MEAN nice not bad an your audience would "get it". The meaning is the use.

And part of the sentence is your "body language". That says a lot.

Do and say what feels right for you unless you cannot respect your audeince or they do not respect you, in which case you have a problem.

¶ +2023.11.28. What are some specific examples of how public high schools have changed since the COVID-19 pandemic, according

I have no idea.

But I think that if I was a student and had to be in classrooms I could not concentrate on anything except maybe a teacher with such world-class charisma that if somebody shot me with a gun I would be so rapt in what he (she, other) was saying that I didn't notice i was hit. I would see every fellow student as my potential murderer, some by intent if they were brutes who coughed witho9ut covering their face and others just being "normal".

I never liked being close to other kids and one cough set me fleeing in the other direction, but with Covid I would be frightened of everybody all the time becaue of "asymotomati spreaders": Typhoid Marys.

And if I was a teacher I'd feel the same way. I do not want to suffer. I want to die in my sleep some day, not be on a ventilator in an ICU or be struggling with the efffects of "long Covid" even if I "just had a mild case" (smiling emoji here).

Keep social distance, goddamn it! But how to do that when classes are changing rooms in a crowded hall or just in a lecture hall or around a seminar table or....

I really do not want to be living the ending of Ingmar Bergman's classic film "The Seventh Seal" every day. Bu how would I get educated like Karin in the film if I couldn't study? She was a mature adult before the plague came: lucky lady!

"I shall think of the sorrow of my children, and of the sorrow of my grandchildren for their children, in this harsh new world," Professor Freud wrote, "and I will leave the world with relief thinking of all that will have been spared me." (Sophie Freud, Sigmund Freud's last surviving grandchild, New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts, Published June 3, 2022, Updated June 6, 2022)

¶ +2023.11.28. What do motivational speakers mean by "No one is coming to save you"?

I am not sure but what I think it means is something like:

"Don't just sit there and imagine what I tell you is going to change your life just by sitting on your ass and watching the television, or as it is right now: watching me.

"You have to get up off your ass and do it. Nobody's going to do it for you. You have a choice. What are you going to DO about it?

"I've given you what I think is a good road map. Take it or leave it. But you're going to have to drive the car to get anywhere.

"Class dismissed! Your future just started. What are you doing about it? God bless you and good luck."

[ Homer patriot eathing donut ]

¶ +2023.11.28. When it comes to mind uploading, is there a way of getting around the copy problem?

This is nonsense, but it is dangerous nonsense because persons with PhD degrees in computer hacking (aka "computer science") or other academic fields such as neurobiology might try to mess with other persons' minds, especially persons with less social power than themselves. Remeber Jeffrey Dahmer, please.

Here's another admonitory example which invloved no advanced technoloty. Some time ago there was a Harvard psychology professor [I do not know this person's name] who did what psychology professors often do and used his undergraduate students is free lab rats.

So he conducted an experiment. One of the students was an emotionally fragile mathematical genius. Somehow the student found out the purpose of the experoment: to see how persons respond to being humiliated. This changed the young man's life. You may know him by his FBI moniker: "The Unabomber".

DO NOT MESS WITH ANYBODY"S HEAD EXCEPT YOUR OWN, AND MAYBE YOUR BOSS, WITH HIS (HER, OTHER'S) INFORMED CONSENT. **Got it?**

Also, what you are talking about is in fact logically not just empirically impossible although you could DESTORY PEOPLE"S MINDS AND EITHER MURDER THEM OR TURN THEM INTO ZOMBIES IF YOU TRY!

If you want to learn about ths you will need to study philosophy, for instance German Idealism From Immanuel Kant theough Edmund Husserl. But don't trouble you sci-fi messed up little head about this . Just don't do it!

My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.)

You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: **VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.**

¶ +2023.11.28. Do you think schools are adequately prepared to address the issue of students using AI to create indecent images of children?

Aren't her two very diferent issues here?

(1) Any person os any age who makes an "indecent" or otherwise potentially harmful image of anyone except in political satire of political and religious leaders should be punished in a court of law (Example exception: The Charlie Hebdo cartoons that caused Islamist fondamentalists to murder them in Paris France).

(2) If young persons want to harmlessly share pictures of their bodies there is nothing ethically wrong with that: every person should enjoy their godgiven sexuality with mutual respect for others to the fullest exent possible. HOWEVER! Students should be strongly warned that this he not advisable for practical not ethical reasons: Anything you want to remain on the Internet will probably quickly disappear but anything you do not want to stay on the internet will probably stay there and be easily findable by persons who want to do you harm forever.

So I would clearly explain to the students that you should not put sexy pisturs of yourself or anyone else on the internet beause some day you might want ot apply for at job at Morgan Stanley or The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and it will probaly kill your employment application.

¶ +2023.11.28. Why does Google Scholar say "stand on the shoulders of giants"?

Addendum added +2023.11.28. This one is just too important to not log.

No idea about Google. But the meaning of the slogan is pretty standard stuff. Albert Einstein could never have invented his theories of relativity if Isaac Newton had not invented his 3 laws of motion. Because Newton was, so to speak, 10 feet tall, Einstein coiuld take a fast elevator up to the 9 foot level to get on with going up to 20 feet, instead of having to start from the ground. All men are mortal; you can only climb up so far in one lifetime, so it's better to start at the highest possible altitude.

The alternative is admonitory: In the middle ages there was geared machinery, but jusst think of what sophistication of geared machines they could have been making had the Antykithera mechanism (100BCE???) and the technology to build it not have been lost. Those who are forced to reinvent the wheel cannot get on with inventing ball bearings. Anyway, go find a giant on whose shoulders to stand. If nothing else, the view is better than from the ground.

Addendum: Many or at least some of these giants are FLAWED, so if you want to be politically correct, you might lynch their statues instead of standing on their dirty shoulders. Example: Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves when that was legal, like Mr. Jeff Bezos rents wage-slaves today when that is legal..

¶ +2023.11.27. Should preparation life skills like cooking and personal finance be taught in school?

I would put those two disciplines in different buckets.

I think personal finance definitely should be taught to all students becaue competece in money management is very important to success (or failure!) of every person's life and it keeps getting complicateder and complicateder. Who needed bitcoins? However, this might not need a separate course, just changing some of the math exercises. Who in real life ever had to figure out how old John will be when Mary is 3 times as old as Harry was when he was twice as old minue one year as his sister Suzie will be when.... ??? Or trigonometry? (Not many kids go on to become land surveyors.)

Cooking? Don't many Americans' diet consist of Dunkin Donuts and Big Macs? I would like to see French Cuisine, featuring Julia Child, The French Chef ("Bon appetit!"). I have read that French women keep slim not by denying themselves Whoppers but by enjoying small quaitities of flavor rich foods. America has an obesity epidemic.

I'm not sure how important cooking is for a lot of kids. But then there are the young persons who go to the CIA. No, not the one in Langley Virginia, but Hyde Park New York: The Culinary Institute of America. For them it looks like a better future than being stuffed in an office cubicle until they get rightsized by their job going to The Philippines. Billionaires need private chefs and the job pays well and you may get to see the world too.

I was a highly "intelligent" but also very wimpy child. I was so unprepared for life that even though I "came from nothing", when I got to Yale I didn't know I should: NETWORK! Duh! So I ended up wotking as a low level computer program not in Mr. Blinken's job.

¶ +2023.11.27. Why do scientists abandon the scientific method if the results of experiment fail to support their beliefs?

Do they always, if by "abandon" you mean they discard what they have done like the wrapper for a Big Mac?

If they do, that is wrong and anti-scientific. One should report real failures as well as successes, for numerous reasons, including to help assure nobody else tries to go down the blind alley again, or to inspire them to pursue knowledge wherever the endeavor leads. Or yearerday's failure may hold the key to advances in future.

"The way is everything; the end is nothing." (Willa Cather and others). Today's successes may be superceded. Euclid was not exactly wrong but his work was "limited" and other mathematicians have gone further. Newton was really wrong, but in ways that could only be discovered on the basis of his great achievements. As he himself said: If he saw further than others, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. (I started out in a sink hole with ignorant parents and beinghted school teachers.)

And I would correct Sir Isaac in one detail: I would respectfully say that we, and I would include he, see further by standing on the shoulders of FLAWED giants. People today are lunching statues of great minds who, in their time when slavery was legal, oened slaves. Why are they not lynching statues of Silicone Valley oligarches who rent wage-slaves today when that crime against humanitey is legal? (check out: democracyatwork.info)

Read the dsipositive book" Thomas Kuhn, "The structure of scientific reolutions". It's short and easy reading even for humanities wimps like myeslf (I cheated to get theu high school physics, and avoided biology, and once threw a temper tantrum in chemistry class).

Don't be "stupid", but do not be shy about boasting of your intellgent failures, either!

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion." (Niels Bohr)

¶ +2023.11.27. What are the major flaws of science?

This question indicates lack of uncerstanding of the social praxis [big word here] of scientific inquiry. Science is self-correcting (unlike political and religious leaders, bosses at work and teachers in schools and parents at home).

Read Thomas Kuhn's classic book "The structure of scientific revolutions". It's short and easily – maybe even fun – readable by persons who never took a science course in school so long as they learned how to read.

Repeat: science is self-correcting. Any flaw in the RESULTS of scientfic inquiry today will get fixed tomorrow or the next day if the non-scientists do not f*ck things up for evrybody.

[ Archimedes and soldier ]

Got it, dude?

[--------]

I forgot: humans who do "science" may have all sorts of flaws but that's not part of science, just part of them. The physicist Niels Bohr summed up what science itself really is, at mind and also heart:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

¶ +2023.11.27. What do you consider to be the most trivial information to learn in school?

Ashurbanipal (A-s-h-u-r-b-a-n-i-p-a-l)

The teacher was a Harvard graduate from the 1950s who was corpulent and wore J.Press tweed sports coats and drove a real Morris Minor which it was somewhat remarkable he fitted his body (even moreso his "ego") into, teaching Ancient History in a gender apartheidd perp(sic) school and playing Ludwig Borchardt in the summer breaks. He later went back to Harvard as some kind of student groomer and was beloved by everybody there.

Guess who did not like this dude? He looked like a snapping turtle (below), thought highly of himself nd managed to make a fool of me who was a very well trained dog: I did all the pencil and paper tricks the teaches wanted but he cooked up an ass–-ignment I couldn't do: to actually MAKE some physical object like from ancieht times. One "D" student came in with a beautiful miniature chariot hies daddy probably made for him. I don't think there was even a hammer in my parents house, so I wa going to MAKE something? Of course he did not provide me with a wood working shop and training in carpentry. He broke the implicit agreement between me and the school: that if they only made me do meaningless pencl and paper ass–-ignments and I gave them "A" pencilled paper back, they wouldn't do any further harm to me. William Clinton Burris Young.

[ WCBY ]

Fatuous fop!

The lirst yearlatin teacher was a decent human being (an exception in that school's faculty), just a loser in life. The textbook had in it the latin first declension feminine noun:

Cocacola

Accusative singular:

Cocacolam.

So there is another candidate for most trivial information. At least there once wa a Mr. Ashurbanipal although we learned nothing about him, bu I don't think the ancient romans drank Coca-cola, did they?

¶ +2023.11.27. When readers come across a new word, how do they react to this? Do they research the meaning of the word, assume the meaning, ignore it, or stop reading the book completely?

This question answers itself. Just change it from an interrogative to a declarative:

When readers come across a new word, they react to this by either researching the meaning of the word, assuming the meaning, ignoring it, or stoppping reading the book completely

All sheep are the same color in the dark but there are also goats and shepherds (which are not sheep).

[ Judas goat ]

¶ +2023.11.27. Do you think that society would react positively or negatively if one day we become a fully automated society with no need for human labor at all (no poverty or unemployment)?

Man (woman, other) is the irrational animal.

Put people in heaven and they may turn it into hell. Why? Probably because they were childreared and went to school and then went to work and don't want to look different....

What is possible could happen but probably wouldn't?

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

Look at what some of the super-rich do today: They "work" on getting skin cancer exposing themsleves to the Mediterranean Angust sun on the decks of superyachts for the celebrity photographers with superelephoto lenses getting pcatures of them romping around naked to splash on the cover of the Tabloids.

Look at the case of Princess Diana for whom society was fully automated (albeit often with hominid robots) – she didn't even wear a seatbelt in a midnite drive with Doltie Faded or what ever his name was who she apparenty was gong to break up with a boozed up driver and when he smashed the car in to a bridge support or whatever it was, the photographers snapped picures of dying Dy (which never made it to publication, of course) instead of trying to help her and she would have survived had she just been wearing her seat belt (she wasn't "making out in the back seat" or anything to prevent it) because her bodyguard who suffered a far worse impact in the front seat did survive because he was wearing his seat belt. And if you, like I, think she blew it – lost everything by not taking care for what she hd, then along came the government and when th Royal Auromobile Society wanted to use her in a public service advertisement to buckle you seat belt, they were told that was not appropriate but they did authorize using her name on margarine tubs:

[ Diana margarine ]

So if nobody had to work any more they just might – well, listen to this (which I hope would not be me). NYT OpEd write Maureen Dowd wrote it was one of Donald Trump's favorite songs:

[ Peggy Lee ]

¶ +2023.11.27. What is the best way to learn how to use chopsticks if you don't know how? Would you learn better from a video tutorial or by asking someone else?

Watching a video may help.

A helpful human who eats with chopsticks every day is best. Not just show you but also actually fuss with your clumsy hand to help you. I think a rubber band can sometimes be helpful too.

Practice makes perfect. Banzai!

¶ +2023.11.26. At 23, I want to go into isolation for a while to gather knowledge through books, unfortunately it seems that it is not socially acceptable, why is that?

Can you afford to do it financially?

The only time anything being "socaially acceptable" matters is if you can be materially harmed for not doing it, but people use this as psychological warfare to try to make everybody be a conformist like them so they don't have to think about their prejudices and feel uncomfortable about themselves.

What's wrong with WANTING to withdraw from the many to study.

I sure wish I had the strength of character to be a hermit; then I wouldn't have to put up with all the abuse and disappointment from people. But I had an intrusive mother who made me feel ashamed of myself so I do not enjoy being isolated even if I don't like the people around me. I want people to respect me (I will reciprocate) and keep social distance. They say that the price is to be like them and like it.

Now that is an oversimplification, but like all caricatures, it has a lot of truth in it.

Studying is one of the best things you can do in life (I will end with a quote about that). What would you rather do: chat at the office water cooler about last nite's Yankees baseball game or how awesome The Madonna Who Is Not A Virgin is or whatever?

I think the ideal is to have one or two close friends who are your peers and an intimate partner who is your peer and a loving pet cat (you may like dogs). But that's my wish, and "if wishes were horses then beggars would ride" (a manager at work told me that when I asked for a job assignment that would be both productive for the company and intellectually growing for me)

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

¶ +2023.11.26. How do we tackle the challenge of not being able to have constructive arguments when constructive arguments are considered democratic?

Intolerant people canot be tolerated because they don't tolerate people they disagree with and there 's the issue of self-preservation.

Do you know that while All USA ws competing to see who could be most incensed about a racist bigot rogue cop murdering a petty putative felon with a knee to the neck, in Paris France people were incensed by an Islamist religious bigot severing the head of a school teacher from its torso with a knife: The murder of Samuel Paty for teaching freedom of expression in a middle school classroom per French official education policy? It's a very sad story but the net of it is that Mr. Paty had requested any student who felt they might tbe offended to leave the classroom before he gave his lesson. Then he apparently showed a cartoon from a satirical magazine that mocked The Prophet Muhammad(PBUH). That was reason for this intolerant person to decapitate Mr. Paty

[ Samuel Paty ]

People should respect each other in civil society even if they do not like one another. You don't have to go to bed with them. But some persons are not tolerant, and it's not just fundamentalist muslims from Algeria living off secular state welfare in Paris France even though they hate civilization:

[ Islam is the answer ]

There are the people her ein USA who believe that abortion of a week zygote is the same thing as putting a bullet through President John F. Kennedy's head: a crime that must be prevented by any means necessary.

When people cannot live with each other there is only one thing left: military (police) force. People don't like to say it that bluntly but it's a fact. There is no solution to problems which persons perceive as "exisnential threats". It does not matter if you are a rational person who sees how foolish all this is: as the ancient philosopher Heraclitus said(?):

What seems to a person is for him.

What matters in the end is not what you think but what THEY think and if you can't change them to tolerate you it's going to be you or them: whoever shoots first and accurately (to the head or heart) wins.

Why can't we all play nicely together? Dunno.

¶ +2023.11.26. As a teacher, in what areas do you think you should improve on and what do you do to address the areas that you need to improve on or develop?

Questions like this need to be refined. What teacher? Where? What kind of school? What kind(s) of students?

Consider this: I went to elementary school in Richmond Virginia between about 1953 and 1959. I attended a public school. The building was brand new 1950s modern architeture. The principal had a PhD in biology. The student body was, of course, all white, and most of it was middle or upper middle class. The classes were maybe 30 students size. It was in effect an elite institution. Now I was a wimpy little boy with a brilliant mind and it was 6 years of my young life wasted even though the principal recognized I was gifted. Girls? Among the boys there were two kinds that stood out as I saw it (I was some conbination of high-functioning aspergers and schizoid):

There were the jewisn boys who studied seriously. One of them was brilliant and had an apposite name:

"Richard Starr".He wa a star student. But all of the jewish boys studied hard and after school went to Hebrew school to study some more.

Ther were also some Christian boys, and one of them had an apposite name too: "Powell Christian" → "Powl! Right in the kisser! These boys had zero interest in learning but itched for the bell to run out on the playground and hit each other with their still growing little fists. But they caused no trouble in the classroom and did not pick on me.

The South still had not accepted that they lost the Civil War. In third grade we – Christian and jewish – sang about the darkies weeping for massa in the cold, cold ground, and if th jewish kids knew about the Holocaust, they never let on to it.

And now that I think of it I can'[t remember any air raid drills there. I had previoously in first half of second grade (first grade was in a two room schol house) been in another "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father knows best" elementary school in Baltimore Maryland where we did sit on the floor in the hall during an air raid drill.

Is this the situation being addressed by the present question?

After that I spent one semester in 7th grade in a difffernt kind of public junior high school where there was a small pack of free range juvenile delinquent who roved the halls and picked on me until I stabbed one of them in the upper arm with my ballpoint pen as hard as I could (I was the wimpiest kid you would ever see outside th funnies pge of you local newspaper).

But then I went on to another school: a so-called "prep school" where my parents paid a high tuition for a highly defective product. It was male student gender Apartheid. The school was nominally associated with The Episcopal Church but they worshipped graven images: Shiny plated varsity lacrosse team victory trophies. After I graduated they build a glazed reliquary for these sacred treasures. It was discipinarian "notes by rote", and I learned the word: "Ashurbanipal". I never entered their public pubic nudity (aka "locker") room for their budidng young minotaurs but I once did see the shower in the dorm for the boarding students. When later I learned about Auscwhitz I immediately recognized the showers, just, obviously, sans the gas. The faculty subjected me to two Inquisitorial Proceedings, one for trying to sabotage the class yearbook by captioning a picture of the prize football team looking like drunken sailors wobblin under the weight of their helmets up the field:

"We are the hollow men"

But they didn't burn me at the stake, in part because they didn't have one, but in othe part becaue I was going to be good PR for them to sucker more parents into sending their scions to this benighted place because: "We get kids into good colleges". I went to Yale. #2 who was also very intelligent and psychologically messed up (his father was a pathologist and occasionlly took his son to work to play in the hospital morgue) – #2 went to MIT and a kid who had no interest in learning but had "A+" lacrosse and a very big grim on his Alfred E Neuman puss, went to Harvard where in his junior year he worked a miracle: Beating Princeton fo rthe first time in 43 years! Go team!

I became a flaming atheist at that place but htat was not a problem because they had zero interest in spirituality. The chemistry teacher did get a slap on tthe wrist for saying in class that nobody in the 20th centurey could really believe in God, but the reason was that one of the students wa as mentally retarded minister's son who could not cope with it. That teacher got in maybe worse trouble for stealing antiques from the adminsteration building which wa one of the former homes of Charles Carroll of Carrolton (a signer of hte Declaration of Independence and the richest man in the colonies).

Finally, long after I had graduated (GPS coordinates for a JDAM: [39.4324433, -76.6766731],), this place got its comuppance: In 2001 they were first in he nation in lacrosse. But there was a problem: One of their fine young gentlemen lacrosse team members videotaped himself copulating with a student from another of these bastions of gender Apartheid just the other gender and showed it to the team and parents found out and it was a huge society scandal that was heard about in lacrosse circles all across the country – everywhere, except apparently in the school's alumni magazine becaue I never heard about it. Me? In 7th grade I was so ignoranced about everything that I never even thought to ask where babies came from but the Engihst teacher THREATENED me for showing inteletual initiative (he lost because he tired of his own voice; I just took it like a dead dog).

Now, again, is this the kind of school the qustion is asking about?

Read Paolo Freire "The pedagogy of the oppressed". Ivan Illich "Deschooling society", Alice Miller: "The drama of the gifted child", "Thou shalt not be aware" and "For your own good". Dr. Robert Ballard, the man who found the wreck of RMS Titanic, once wrote:

"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach."

I think that's something for teachers to think about. School districts are, so I hear, sometimes short of money, too.

¶ +2023.11.25. I wrote an essay without the help of an AI, but I ran it through an AI detector and it said AI written. Can I academically get in trouble for this?

Yes you can. You may have a teacher who is not very intelligent or educated but is mean-spirited,

If you dare, and you sincerely mean what you wrote, I would go after such a teacher. I would tell him (her other) that subject to penalty for felony perjury I would swear i a court of law that I did not cheat. And what was he (she, other) going to do about this? I would explain to him that if he did not respect me a aand sincerely apokogize for slandering my good charcter, I would go to his deparrment head. If no satisfaction there, the principal. If no satisfaction ther the school board. If not there , the local newspaper. Now, I would ask him, wha are you going to do to either prove me a liar or repent and recant and write ma letter explaining how you slandered my charcter without tcause, Sir! I would make sure such a teacher would not have a happy day. And if my father had a backbone and a mind in his head, i would sic him on the dude, too.

True story from the internet: A little black girl in 2nd grade was being picked on by her teacher. She would come home crying. Her father secretly without her knowing it, planted a mini tape recorder in her hair (some black kids have big hair). One fine morning that teacher found a very big, very angry, very articulate black man with tape recordings confronting her....

¶ +2023.11.25. Discuss why majority of people fear to dwell in entrepreneurship despite their level of education but rather they struggle to get formal employment?

Most new businesses fail in the first year. Entreperheurship is more often than not a loser. It helps for your daddy to give you a $tarter or just groom you to take over his business.

Many persons are not good at it and some don't want to be. And even if you want to try it, the schools don't teach it.

I for one never wanted freedom of enterprise (or wage labor either) I wanted freedom from enterprise to be able to study in the humanities which is the proper duty of free men women, others). Note the author of the following quote: Ameria's 2nd President:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." (John Adams)

Francises are one way persons try to become entreperneurs: they take all the risks and have to pay a high price to the Franchising corporation.

There is a solution: worker owned and self-managed cooperatives. Go to democracyatwork.info

¶ +2023.11.25. How can communities contribute to empowering mothers and creating a supportive environment?

How about universal government funded day care for all children from 6 weeks to K-12, with persons earning over $200,000 per year having to pay on a sliding scale?

I recently heard that infant day care at one center in Bltimore Maryand is $1,700 per month. Mommy has to have a pretty high paying job to afford that.

This is unconscienable. especially since women having children is an essential desideratum in military preparedness: No babies, no soldiers. Few babies a too small army.

We pay other munitions manufacturers, like Lockheed Grumman, why not uteruses? At the other end of childhood, the country needs an educated workforce but the student pays to go to college, not being paid by the government to go to college.

The United States of America is the most miserly mean-spirited developed country in the world, with Brexitannia coming in an increasingly close second and we are trying to drag every other country down with us. We are Reaganomic! A smiling face (smiling faces tell lies).

[Smiling Face Reagan ]

Women should go on strike for better pay and stop getting pregnant.

Then we have public schools where classroom size is far too large in many cases, between diaper and cap and gown. But we can afford to have Silicone Valley oligarchs who build super ycahts so big that a historic bridge had to be dismantled to let one of these Big Bloats get from shipyard to the sea.

And some people want to support mothers by prohibiting abortions so women will go back to coathangers.

¶ +2023.11.25. If smart pigs are sophisticated, would that mean stupid pigs are dumb-esticated?

This question does not merit a direct answer.

But the person asking it should think that one of the most powerful persons in the world started off as a stand up comedian: Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy

[ Zelensky looking stupid ]

U 2 may succeed by being funny.

Also, jokes are not just funny.

Marshall McLuhan said:

"Every joke expresses a grievance. the funy man is a man with a grudge."

My pet cat is a little philosofur.

Meow!

¶ +2023.11.25. How might the concept of "decentering whiteness" impact diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in organizations?

It can be arecipe for failure. Ask Colonel Douglas Macgregor about this. Do you want to go to war with an army full of people who are "diverse" or with an army made up of persons who are intelligent, competent and committed to the mission?

If you select for anything other than merit you will get what you are asking for: a lot of less competent persons will join and more than a few persons who are competent and do not need to ha to put up with being humiliated for their skin color will leave.

All sheep are the same color in the dark and none are either goats or shepherds. If you pick the best and the brightest and provide extra support (training , whatever) for persons with special needs IRRESPECTIVE OF THEIR SECONDARY CHARACTERISTICS you will end up with a team who are diverse as a side effect. Some females are physically stronger than some males. Some kids in the ghetto are much brighter than some kids whose daddies have offices in the executive suite. But you need to be COLOR BLIND. Hire the brilliant kid whose mother was a welfare recipient and give him or her (or other) special training, but also an equaly bight white kid whose father is a moonshiner in the hills of Appalachia.

If you told me I needed to celebrate as opposed to show civil respect for blackness or polka dotness or LGBQWERTY or anything else, I'd be out the door as soon as I could find a place that didn't try to mess with my head. But people who are useless will proably be happy to listen to diversity preesentations if you throw them some dog treats: Dunkin Donuts at the start of the DEI brainwshing session.

Colonel Mcgragor is deeply troubled that we have a military where beople are being promoted due to their race or religion or gender (or lack of same) instead of performance. If the United states goes to war with China and our military force is woke but theirs is awake, who will win?

But don't listen to me. I will soon enough be a dead white male. Read the following news article from The New York Times newspaper and have a good day:

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,worship of the written word andobjectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.11.25. Why is college always the only way to get a good job and a good life?

This is not completely true but there is a lot of truth in it.

A lot of hiring managers want to cover their asses and don't know their asses from a hole in the ground, as he saying used to go.

I worked as a computer programmer. Three of the very best programmers I ever knew, two of them had one year of college or less and the third I don't think went ot college at all. This was all over 40 years ago.

One of them worked, of all places, for the company famed for everybody wearing blue suits: IBM. He had been a delivery truck driver and they gave him the Programmer Aptitude Test and he was either a genius or close to it. He came to work sometimes, wore blue jeans and grew houseplants in his basement. So why did IBM keep this dude on the payroll? Because he took computer chip design programs that ran for days and cut them down to run in a few hours.

The next one's parents were dirt farmers in rural Appalachia with maybe 4th grade educaiton. He too was a prodigy. His mother knew they wer incompetent to raise this child who was like from a different species. But she did what she could. She told him and meant it that he would have to figure out how to raise himself but if he messed up they had his back:

"Tom, do what you believe is right. You will make mistakes. We stand behind you."

After one year of college he had had enough of it and went on th becoe a high power government consultant.

The third man dropped out of college after a year or less to support his ailing father. He looked mentally retarded, was legally blind, morbidly obese and what else was wrong with him? He got into programmng because he had been of all things a quality control inspector in a machine shop, even though he was legally blind. One day he offended a coworker who slammed him into an industrial lathe and he was in hospital for several months with severe back injury. So he bacame a hire- the -handicapped. But he had a brilliant mind and an obsession with doing quality work. IBM Field Engineers highly respected him. He was also AN ETHICAL GIANT and his life was one of being mistreated by almost every company he worked for. Ther was only one good thing in his life: His wife was his guardian angel. He also had another thing going against him unlike the other two: He was uncouth.. One day a secretary said something he did not like and he told her: "If I want any more mouth out of you, lady, I'l squeeze your head." But he was not an misogynist: I saw him, as a manger in a bank take a young black lady who did nothing and was very unhappy and transform her into a productive and happy employee. This and other things he did which were good for the company frightened the toady managers above him who feared he was building a power base against them in the company, so the 3rd like manager eventually fired him after he did a masterful job on a task that was dear to the 3rd line's heart. Finally he want to work in the Federal Government where more college educated toadies finally got rid of him by assigning him a task that depended on discerning colors (he was so color blind that Johns Hopkins Hospital had done research on him).

There are really famous college dropouts, including Mr. Micosoft, Bill Gates.

Of course these are exceptions. But some young persons are choosing to NOT go to college and take well paying blue collar jobs where theydon't hve a huge student debt to pay off, are not stuck in an office cubicle all day and the job can't be offshored. I personally know one whose daddy is a big executive in a major New York Hospital. He chose to work for the municipal water company and goes around checking the pressure in the pipes that run several miles under high pressure, and, yes, when a water main bursts at 3 AM he has to get out of bed and fix it. But where we live there are many bright sunny days and he does not spend them in an office cubicle.

I recently read that there is some sort of new government initiative for soldiers who went in the service straight out of high school and have returned to civilian life for them to get credit for the skills they developed in the military in lieu of having gone to college. Maybe things are starting to change?

There was an old Starkist tuna ad featuring Charlie the tunefish. He asks:

"What do you want: a tuna with good taste or a tuna that tastes good?"

Really smart hiring managers will pick a young person who's got a good mind, lot of enthusiasm, and wants to learn on the job over some kid whose only qualification is a college diploma ("Hire me because I graduaed from to Party Boy U, just like you, Mr. Hiring Manager!"). (On the other hand, it should be obvious that a young person with a PhD from Harvard who also wants to do a good job for the company is also a good pick.) The question should be: What can you do for our company?

My guess is that if you approach hiring managers confidently foregrounding a good answer to that question before they ask it, you will get a good job somehere.

¶ +2023.11.25. What is the difference between a hard science and a soft science? Is sociology considered to be a hard science?

This is not a constructive distinction.

There are the exact quantitative mathematical (Galilean) sciences of physical nature. Sir Isaac Newton's famous 3 laws of motion are a very good example. Anyone can compute a future position of an object using these laws.

Then ther are the interpretive human sciences, where "science" here is being used in a different sense from physics and chemistry. In German they are the Geisteswissenschaften: the disciplined studies of the human spirit (this word not being understood in a merely theological way). These are not quantitative. You cannot do mathematics to elucidate the meaning of Moby Dick or the motives of a murderer or a concert violinist. But some people try to do this anyway, which results in pseudo-science: Does your respect for your mother or your teacher or a student depend on dividing the persons' respective IQs and seeing how far the quotient deviates from zero in which direction?

Then there are statistical sciences which deal with human beings as objects and which do have their proper uses, for instanc, in epidemiology: plotting infectious disease outbreaks. From the standpoint of stopping a plague, it does not matter whether the infected persons ar ecommunists or capitalists, geniuses or morons, white or polka dot, or anything else "human" about them except that they are susceptible to being infected or not.

These disciplines (discipline is a good word: it means being careful and not just mindlessly instantiating your pre–-judices, i..e, your judgments before examining and weighing evidence) – disciplines like epidemiology are obviously closer to physics than interpretation of a literary text or understanding a person's motivations bt they ignore much or all that makes humans human and not just material like billiard balls. Human motivations do not have momentun and billiard balls do not have motivations.

Sociology is not all one thing. A lot of it is interpretive and some of it is statistical. Anybody can label anything whatever they want. The question is what are they trying to accomplish thereby? And that, it should be obvious, is interpretive not quantitative.

So don't worry about the word but about what is being done in its name. I took two sociology courses in college. One was taught by a bean counter and I could hardly get a passing grade because I neither know how nor want to know how to play that game. The other was taught by a latter-day Wobblie, a genuine labor organizing radical with even his own homegrown left political party, and we did things like one student bought in his pictures from Guatemala of a Catholic bishop blessing a newly arrived shipment of Ford Falcon anti-guerilla police cars. And we read booke which interpreted political life including Paunl Baran and Paul Sweezy's "Monolpoly Capital" and William Hinton's "Fanshen" about the Chinese revolution in one rural village.

Both were sciology courses. Sociology, as you may see here is itself a subject begging for sociological study. Your parents and yourself are great sociological "specimens" like polio bacilli for a biochemist, but proper study of the two requires different methodologies.

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master – that's all." (Lewis Carroll)

I have had a long life and studied much but might not pass an introductory philosophy couse exam asking for definitions of basic terms. But I have known a couple real philosophers and learned from the "spirit" of their lives. Big words do not impress me although I am quite adept at deploying them, and sometimes"four letter words" are exactly what the situation requires. The one philosopher I knew, Dr. Prof. John Wild once told me he liked me because my interest was in philosophy for living not in inventing neo-scholastic jargon like some of his graduate students (and this was in the 1980s, before postomodernism which is far worser then Scholasticism ever was).

What do you want to learn about what and why? Labels like "sociology" may be useful for choosing which aisle in a bookstore to go to look for books that interest you.

In the "hard" sciences, however, i.e., in the exact quantitative mathematical (Galilean) sciences of physical nature, technical terms are often very meaningful: A neutron is not a proton, etc.

I have here not mentioned the latest pseudo whatevers like "womwn's studies", "black studies", "queer studies" and other ideological concocctions, all of which should be subsumed onder such interpretive or statistical disciplines as anthropology and themselvese be objects of study, i.e., the peersons who get paid to do them need to be studied to understand their motivations and objectives.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger made a 3-way distinction: stones are worldless; animals are world-poor; and humans are world-forming. Which are you? Which is your mother? Which is your boss at work? the problem, it seems to me is that some humans seem more world poor than some higher animals, item: the headmaster of the "prep" school I was subjected to versus my current pet cat. Of course the teachers were not cinderblocks but most of them (with a few exceptions) exhibited no more empathy than the walls of the classrooms nor any more interest in learning anything.

Do be scientific in a deeper sense, whatever you do. I quote from the physicist Niels Bohr on something far deeper than what's in the physics books:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

Anything in any area of human activity that does not meet that criterion is not scientific, although it may make use of results of science, like some genius invented the wheel but anybody can roll one.

And, yes, some persons are **hard**-headed (*e.g.*, General George Patton) and some others are "**soft** in the head" (*e.g.*, President Joe Biden).

¶ +2023.11.24. How much information do you need to provide to a private detective in order to have them find someone?

Not a savvy question.

Answer: You provide (him her, other) with every bit of information you can think of even if you think it's trivial or silly or ,even worse, embarrassing to you. Everything. It's for him to decide what's helpful or not. If you knew what to do you likely would not need to hire him, would you? It's like going to the doctor. If you don't fess up he may not be able to cure you. it's no skin off his ass any way as long as you pay.

The private detective is on your side (he better be!). You probably won't get more than you pay for, not just in money but also in telling him everything you can to help him help you as much as he can.

I had a job that was solving other people's problems. I quikly learned that what they told me the problem was was often NOT the problem but just more information I could use to try to figure out what the problem was. I had infinite patience for helpless persons who came to me fessing up they were helpless and sincerely seeking help. I once even was prepared to do somebody's job for them because their manager hadgiven them an assignment with the hope they would not be able to do it and so be fired for incompetence. But if you told me what you KNEW what the problem was and I should step-and-fetch-it, you could figure it out for yourself because I could not nor did I have any desire to help you. "Tell me everything you can think of about your problem. Let's have it, and since there is only one chair, please get up so I can sit down to help you."

¶ +2023.11.24. Do you believe knowledge should be regulated (a long time ago people in power thought that peasants learning how to read would lead to destruction), I understand not wanting everyone to know how to build nukes but?

There are probably sme thing which should not be publicized such a sdetailed instructions for building a suitcase size hydrogen bomb with material available in your local grocery store..

As for "peasants larening how to rad leading to their destruction", there are at lesas ttwo peoblems there:

(1) I have read that the German 19th Century Military did not like the idea of the masses' standard of living rising because the more persons havve to livefor less less eager they tend to be to die for their country. As Friddrich Nietzsche observed: "Man would rather hav ethe void for his meaning than hae no meaning". If you can't get all excited about lookng forar to enjoyin filet mignon for dinner, you can get excited about defending you country for the honor eof your ancestors, and the other way around.

(2) The main problem for any society is to reproduce and aggrandize itself which, of course, includes expanding the girth of the leaders bellies. The masses must reliably work, fight and reproduce. Not exacty a recipe for happiness, so, of course, they get circuses even without bread. The rare things them must not know about: the decadent pleasures of the elite. Would you be eager to be knee deep in mud in a trench on the line o contact if you could be, like founding father Benjamin Franklin, fighting for your country by havin sex with aristocratic Parisian ladies to win support from their counrty for th colonial rebellion? There is a book about this which is safely out of the reason of the masses becomes it is published by a university press an comes in a plain cover without a titillating jacket: "The age of beloveds", by Walter Andrews and coauthor. How did I find it? By doing a "Google search on "killing cats" and turning up an essay that had to do with global politics so I wanted to find the author and I emailed his university department only to find he had recently died and so forth so you can see that G.I Joe would not likely have found it. This is similar to how I hav eread that Czarist Russia censored "THe communist manifesto" but not "Das Kapital". the masses, and probably the censors too, could wuite clearly read the former but who would orment themselves to try to decipher all the big words in the latter?

Today in the United States Mr. Biden is waging a horrific and very cynical and potentially atastrophis war in Ukraine. Almost everybody drinks the Zelensky Kool–Ade and sees brave plucky freedo fighters being brutalized by the root of all evil: Vladimir Putin. This is no at all true (except for the part of hte soldiers fighting for hte Kiev reb=gime being very brave, which they are, eve nif thay are not very bright r hae agun to their back as well as their front). the information is free on the Internet. And there is lots of it of sometimes top grade scholarship by highly distuiguished peofessors, esp. John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Scahs. this has not been censored, at least not yet. Why? Myguess is that mot people have to waste the best hours of ht best days working and by the time they get home at night they have neither time nor energy to dig into stuff on YouTube that nobody including the New York Times newspaper and CNN is telling them exists. It's needles in haystacks. So the goernment probaly figures that, like Das Kaiptal in Czarist Russia, it migh cause mre trouble to censor it than to let people keep being oblivious of it.

If your parents are highly cultured intellectuals and you learn thing sthe masses should not know aobut ther is probably no problem since you may have little contact with the masses but life in a differnt world from them even if both are cogeolocated, like a frog and a mouse do not live in the same world een if they live in the same place.

Ditto if you are not so bright and are born into the masses. Yo uwill be happy to eat Big Macsa nd watch Monday nite NFL or even HBO.

Her's the problem: children eith brilliant minds who are born to parents in the masses. Ther is the rist that they will figure out what they don't have and cause trouble, either for themself or for others or both. My advice to every society: brilliant children born to ordinary parents should either be rehomed to person swho can appropriately raie them of be killed as young as possible. You may guess where I got this idea from. It took me a long time bu tI evventually figured out what I had been deprived of and did not like it. They say htat youth is wasted on the young; the adults wated my youth and not only wrcked my life but deprive them of what I could have contributed with more felicitous upbringing not child rear-end-ing (as in a car crash).

If you are seriously interested in this topic, read Walter Andrews book. It's not written in a way that ordinary people would likely want to get beyond th firs tpage which is good for everybody. One of the messages of hte book is that when the masses find out what the elite gets to do and them not, the government persecutes the elite to confirm for the masses that they are much bettter off where they are, or as I would put it: mush less worse off.

"You don't know how good it is until you eat some place else." (Pondorosa steak house ad slogan)

Religious and political leaders well know something else:

"How are you gonna keep 'em down on teh farm, after they'e seen Paree?"

Answer: Don't let thme know abou tParis even if they live in public houseing inside the city limits. Another alternative: Dupe them (like my arents were) into believing in The American Dream so they will be so tied up in commuting and lawn mowing and mortgage payments and raising kids and what all else that whey won't have time for much else except looking forward to the sacrement of back yard barbecues and occasional pilgrmiages to the sacred shrine of Mickey Mouse (Disnayland). A carrot dangling from the end of stic the other end of which is affied to the top of the donkey' shead motivates the donkey to walk forward to get the carrot. The alternative would be to whip him which might get him to balk.

Now: why are plans available o nhe Internet for making guns on 3-D printers that have no serial numbers, what hte police call "ghost guns"? But if they censor that wil lthey also censor Columbia University distinguished Professor Jeffrey Sachs for threatening the government too by saying that they caued the Ukraine war, not just ghost guns?

If I was in school I don't know how I could tolerate it or them tolerate me. I was profoundly ignorant in school, or as I put it, ignoranced by them. Once by accident I did something intelligent and it's a good thing I never tried anyting like it again until at the onset of middle age I went back to school in a graduate rogram where I was very fortunate to find a couple professors who respected me (if you are a teacher, that last sentence may send you into a rage: "Just who does this student think he is?" Answer : Probably your peer or maybe even you better, teach.).

I have no interest in printing 3-D guns, just other things some people might not approve of, including learning the backstory of Mr. Biden's Ukraine war. Signed: Rrose Sélavy

¶ +2023.11.24. What can we learn from past truces in conflicts around the world?

I am not a military historian.

That said, the current mess in Ukraine has led me to expend much of my time since Spring 2022 studying it and related matters. So I fancy I do know something about this war.

It was enirely unnecessary and historically wrong. It's a repeat of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the roles reversed: The United States did not want Soviet missilies on its doorstep in Cuba; Russia does not want a hostile NATO country on its doorstep. The U.S. promised Russia (albeit then the USSR) it would not push NATO east of Germany and we lied. (Watch the video on Youtube by Vladimir Pozner: "How the United states created Vladimir Putin")

When The Prodial Son (George W. Bush) announced in the Bucharest summit in 2008 that Ukraine was going to become part of NATO, famously now, the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow sent a cable with the pointed title: "Nyet means nyet". Dr. Putin gave us one last chance17 December 2017. Columbia Univ. Professor Jeffrey Sachs pleaded with them to not ignore it. And so the current war "started" 24 Febrary 2022. But it is just an esclation of a civil war that started in Ukraine in 2014 with the installation of the staunchly anti-Russia regime in Kiev and its "ATO" (Anti Terrorist Operation. PLEASE listen to this (13 minutes; you have to read the subtitles):

[ Arestovich interview ]

The war could have ended at the end of March 2022, i.e., a truce and probably more, after Mr .Zelensky an Dr. Putin (the man has a PhD in economics, you know?) had negotiated a settlement with the aid of then Isreal PM Naftali Bennett. BUT!

US President Biden and British PM Boris Johnson seduced Mr. Zelensky to continue the war to total victory with a promise of unlimited military welfare. You see what the result has been: hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men and Rusians slaughtered and massive property destruction and harm to the global economy epecially devaloping nations and risk of thermonuclear apocalypse....

And at least what it looks like is that Captain Ahab Biden is pursuing Moby Dick Putin with his Zelensky harpoon. CJCS General Mark Milley (more on him below) was Starbuck. The US people are the Pequod. When Ahab finally met Moby, Moby sank his ship.

Truces: General Milley in December of last year urged negotiations because, he said, further advances on the battlefield were unlikely, just mor casualtiee if we did not negotiate. We did not negotiate and General Milley was optimistic: He may or may not have correctly estimated the casualties, but he did not expect Ukraine to lose the war, just probalby some kind or stalemate.

Somebody said that every war ends with negotiations. Somebody else has urged that we begin to talk before we try to get a cease fire. Meanwhile, until a truce, there will just be more dead males and it is apprently getting so bad for that Ukrainians troops on the Zero line of contact that some of them, who are just expecting to die, are living with 2 week old corpses because ther are not enough people to remove hte dead. In he hotly contested places the life expectancy of a Ukrainian soldie who on average is now 43 years old is 2 days.

Now, no truce is leading to this: There are not enough males left in Ukraine if they were to win which is highly unlikely, to repopulate the contry and to rebuild it. The lack of a ceasefire has led to a [de]population catastrophe.

You may guess I a on the side of Columbia Uinv. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, University of Chicago Prof. John Mearsheimer, USMC Major Scott Ritter, Col Douglas MacGregot, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Dr. Henry Kissinger –- get the point: no comedians or football freaks who had to repeat third grade on that list and also no British Clown Prince:

[ Boris on biccle ]

We need a truce in Ukraine to be in the rear view mirror and since that is not pssible, "stat". Part of the problme is that Mr. Zelensky has by now literally gone insane and President Biden is a fool: a puppet of the US neocons (unless he's jgust cynically playing being mentally retraded and increasingly senile.

A truce would, obviously, amount to a defeat for the United States and NATO. Ukraine needs to become neutral but maybe it's too late for it to be anything. Be any of that as it may, the soldiers on both sodes could lay down their "arms" and use their arms to embrace each other, get drunk in moderation on Ukraine (or Russian) vodka together and go home to their loved ones: what of their homes that are left intact and of their loved ones still alive. What does the US have to lose since now we are "destroying the village to save it"? One thing: FACE.

Mr. Biden would need to swallow his pride. That's all. No harm would come to the US or Europe which his paying the price of Mr .Biden having kept his promise which he publicly made, to destroy Nordstream II.

Now here's the punch line: Prof Sachs, who is in the unique position of not only being an eminent scholar but also a principal albeit secondary actor in this mess, has stated that the whole Cold War would likely have been avoided had we made Germany neutral not NATO. He has said that the USSR's policy, which they honored in Austria was: "make a country neutral and we leave". To borrow the title of a classic film about the Nazi occupation of France in Worl War II: The sorrow and the pity. Be blew it, big time!

A truce simply means the killing and destruction of property stops. Now I forgot to mention another problem with it which relates more to Palestine (I use tha tword intentionally) than to Ukraine: When you have a truce you have to give up getting revenge. Well, sort of. All the dead white males who negotiated revenge on Germany in the Versailles Treaty needed to be hung for mass murder: Causing Adolf Hitler and World War II in Europe. They got their revenvge on Germany (reparations), and Adolf Hitler get revenge on them and the rest of the world for it.

This is a general problem with "survivors": They want revenge, irrespective of consequences. And as for the rest of us, people whine about bad actors like Iranian suicide bombers, but what's the difference between them and:

Better dead than red.

Let's just do it and end all human and higher animal life on earth, now!

[ Biden entangled in Ukraine snakes ]

¶ +2023.11.24. Is the intelligence level of the masses much like someone who would lose their car keys? And they look for those keys underneath the lamppost because that's where the light is, even though they lost them somewhere else?

The intelligence level of th masses is a controversial issue.

Nature or nurture?

Some perons are what U.S. Supreme Court Assoc. judge Amy Comy Barrett callsZ: "A blessing", i.e, they are neurologically defective. If you want to learn something about this that few know and which is in a way actually constructive for thes epersons, watch:

[ Macnamara's morons video ]

But most people re not morons. So tha trules out nature.

What's left? nurture. Most chldren are taught to obey their parents, etc. not t owustion them. It's the opposite of an oncologist. The oncologist destroys a leukemia patient's sick immi=une system and then injects healthy immune cells. parent destroy the child's innate faculty of judgment and replace it with their prejudices. "Yes, mommy."

So are the masses stupid or have they been brainwashed?

I won't go on here and you amy guess n=my thoughts. But do consider this:

One of the great "geniuses" of physics in the 20th century w Richard Feynmann. He at lesa tsaid he had an IQ of 125, which is not stupid but not anywhere near brilliant – maybe 80th percentile? What wsa going on here? He ha a father who wa always asking him questions and not just challinging him to solve them but to come up with more questions of his own.

OK Finally I actually knew a man who was reasonably intelligent, very high character and hard working. Your good neighbor in your raides reanch house in your suburban houseing deelopment. Onec in his life he did have one genius idea durint World War II and it ws not jsu an idle fantasy but it saved lives. One genius idea in a 90+ year otherwie ordinary life.

¶ +2023.11.24. In what ways does media literacy education contribute to the development of critical thinking skills in students? How can teachers design activities that encourage students to analyze and evaluate media content critically?

First thing: Most kids have been brainwashed by their parents to be "good" not critically thinking children. If you were trained by your father and mother to hnor them and do what they told you to do even though they did not earn honor and what they told you to do often ws nt rationally defensible it what can you expect the kids to do about advertising?

Can you get the following idea throug htheir little heads. the physicist Niels Bohr told hie students:

"Take every statement I make as a question not as an assertion."

Can you somehow ge tthe kids to secretly be suspicious of everything everybody says to them, including their parents and YOU their teacher? And also make them understand ha tthey will genarelly not let the people know this becaue people such as their parents nd most school teachers (including you?) do not like being analys=zed instead of respected and obeyed. Can you do this and keep your job?

Well, ther is a second approach which may let you keep you job even though most kids will probably not get the point. Some sahools and parents encourage "citical thinking" –→ about things they do not want to kid to like! "Hey kids: e suspiciou of Russian propaganda!" But not: "You know, children, you cnanot trust what Mr. Biden is telling you."

Your goto resource on media literacy is Marshall Mcluhan.

The medium is the message.

Maybe kids will understand this although it is heretical. Every athlet wants to win. every school wants a winning tem. but the real message of competitive athletics is that by competing or being fans, win or lose, the social institution of competitive sports which includes not only winners and losers and fans but also TEAM OWNERS and colleges that balance their books on the team's season, wins. Like in gambling: whoever wins or loses, the casino alway turns a profit. So9 they encourt=ge people to play to win. And some do and mor do not but win or lose they are placing bets

The medium is the message.

What is the social and paychological stucture behind whatever is going on.

Example: Many albenit not all teachers may be teaching English or math but rea really in the classroom for paycheck or because they like to boss people who can't fight bak around.

The medium is the message but nobody sees it.

An athlete busting his (her, other's) gut to win does not think: "

I am helping to perpetuate the social institution of competitive sports whether I win or lose, so shouldn't I get a cut even if I lose bacause without losers there can't be winners and without winners the fans would not buy tickets so the team owners would go out of business; I am really engaged in a pact with the devil, since without me they would not have a business but we have an agreement that if I work hard and/or am lucky, I MIGHT be a winner, i.e., get some crumbs off the table, and, or course there have to be prizes for winners or else nobody would make the effort to try to be a winner and there would be no excited fans so the owners would go out of business, so I gotta do 500 more pushups before dinner to try to get some of the crumbs I signed up to get a chance for...."

Ready for this one: Get the kids to alalyze the power structure of the classroom, i.e., YOU! I did this once to an eminent Yale philosophy professor. I picked the right person to pick on because he proved to be a ver gracious and kindly human being. After he gave us kids a lectur on human freedom, I very poliitely told him that I did not feel I had any freedom because I would have to take an exam at the end of his course. In other words, I very politey called him a hypocrite. I was jus a sophon=more and the word sophomore,etymologically means: fool. What did Professor Wild do?

He kindly looked down at me and apologized and assured me he meant no harm and let me take his graduae seminar next term for an easy "A". How many professors would react like that?

I also studied with (and later bcame friend of) a professor who was a close friend of Marshall McLuhan so I haven't read much of McLuhan's books but was inspired by personal example. There is a video on Youtube of Prof. Louis Forsdale interviewing McLuhan at Fordham University. It is well worth watching.

Big secret revealed: What does "the medium is the message mean"?

"The meaning of any technology is the changes it makes in the pace, pattern and scale of life" ("Understanding media", p.24 – I remember that from 1984 from an exam I had to take and write something about this. It won me a good grade on the exam.)

¶ +2023.11.24. Apart from financial education, knowledge and skill, what other qualities do financial professionals possess?

In some successful cases, daddy's money.

¶ +2023.11.24. You came from a low-income family, and you managed to receive an offer to attend a prestigious Gothic school that is rumored to have dark magic, secret societies, and is full of the most powerful elites in your region. Would you attend?

I would have

I sort of did and blew it. My parents came fromow income families, not just low income but my father's father was "white trash", so bad that when my father rose to the point he was earning a middle class income in a white collar job, his father tried to get part of his paycheck by BLACKMAILING him. When that didn't work he tried to sue him in court for it and that failed too. That is all I ever heard of my paternal grandfather.

But, graduating from a benighted "boys" school in 1964 – well, they did have their secret society with dark activities: jocks got omerta sex but I got involunary celibacy – I got into Yale. Let me clarify about that school's secret: In 2001, one of their budidng young minotaurs videotaped himself copulating with a student from another of htese bastions of gender apartheid but for the other gender, and showed it to the team and parents found out and it was huge society scandal in Baltimore Maryland that resonated all over the country including The Baltimore Sun, which, while a "local" newspaper is just one level below The New York Times in journalistic renown not just you local weekly store sales rag, But, of course, the story never made it to the school's alumni magazine. That stupid kid was expelled for breaking the secret pledge

Now Yale does have exactly what you are looking for but I would neither have been accepted or wanted to: Skull and Bones secret society which is rumored to have the Indian Chief Geronomo's shrunken head.... And they apparently hahve a dark initiation ritual where you hav eto humiliate yourself somehow (George W Bush is a Bonesman: not very bright but very rich and powerful....)

But Yale did have another prestigiou secret sciety that sounds more appearling to me AND I DIDN"T EVEN THINK TO TRY TO GET IN: "Scroll and key". I blew it because my parents and school teachers, the former due to incompetence and cluelessness and the latter due to more wilful mean-spirited benightedness (twice they subjected me ot Inquisitorial Proeedings like the Roman Catholic Church did to Galileo just without the mechanical torture engines) – my childrearing [I call it: rearENDing like in a car crash...] had made me so ignorant of just about everthing and ashamed of myself that I did not even try. I DID NOT NETWORK I DID NOT MAKE CONNECTIONS! And I paid for it by having to work all my life at a low rank computer programming job when I might have been in Anthony Blinken's job had I had better parents and school teachers. My parents were clueless and had been duped by The American Dream. As for that school, its GPS coordinates are [39.4324433, -76.6766731], for a JDAM (precision guided bomb).

There are probably no dark secrets in this world except for how people like Joseph Robinette Biden Junior make a lot of money on bribes, but maybe there are. Watch the old movie "The Last Wave". It is admonitory: If I went to Australia, I would not try to learn the aboriginals' secrets; I would keep a wide and respectful distance from them. Also, watch the old fun but profound movie "The Truman Show"! Our whole lives may be fakes, even without Virtual Reality to make sure of that.

But there are things normal people do not know about in the arts and sciences. Let's look at "Victorian" Europe. Many women suffered from "hysteria" apparently beause they did not understand their own bodies' genital anatomy and phycisians halped them by "massaging" them. These were not perdatory sex criminals doctors but being genuinely helpful about secrets to "proper", i.e., ignorant but wealthy (or perhaps ignorant because wealthy) ladies.

Then there are cooked up pseudo-secrets and I think that's what goes on in a lot of secret societies, particularly the Freemasons and probably "Skull and Bones". What the sh*t does Geronomo's shrunken head matter one way or the other? Last I heard, Yuri Geller couldn't really bend spoons with his mind and "The Amazing Randi"'s lifelong hobby was exposing supposed magic.

A person leading an unsatisfying life is easy prey for a con artist who promises to let them in on "secrets" because the person perhaps secretly hopes there is something better somewhere he (she, other) doesn't know about – yet.

Here is a story for you: People often think irrationably about "luck" and things like winning in a casino, and, of course, some do win even though overall if you pooled everybody's bets and winnings you would end up with a loss becaue of the casino's "take". And there are in some cases mathematical or dishonest ways of winning which can get you kicked out of the casino. But the man who started FedEx, very early in his business, could not meet payroll and wa about to go out of business. He had $16,000 and needed 32. He went in a casino and came out lucky and today we have Federal Express due to a lucky nite of betting. But don't bet on replicating that story yourself, right? Think about it: People say are amazed a God's goodness in creating such a beautiful world, Wow! Well if things had gone less well, we wouldn't be here to marvel at it, so all the good ness of hte world proves is that the universe is a lucky chance. Maybe hundreds of billions of universes were tried but none of them er able to produce human beings. But one did. It's like in war: only the survivors survive to have an opinion about it.

¶ +2023.11.23. How come Doing Nothing At Work is a scattered subject with random articles and forum threads, while Anti-Work is a well-established movement?

That seems to ma a very good question.

At lest par of the answer seems fairly obvious:

A luddite hates machines. He (she, other)has a burr up his ass about destroying them. You an see he a busy beaver albeit in reverse. If he is educated, he can fight with the pen as well a sthe sledgemanner. So he gets published or maybe on the network talk shows. He WANTS to be seen and heard.

the Do Nothing A t Work person has zero interest in being exposed to the light of day. Because if the boss finds out he will have to do somehting other then schmooze at the office water cooler.

Now: how many people have burr up their ass to expose water cooler junkies? not so many, right?

Luddites want publicity; do-nothings don't wnat to do anything. They are sort of like unanswered telephones. You ring them up and eventually you get tired of listening ot the dialtone and hang up.

But ther is something even worse: Know-it-alls and con men and other bad actors who may want ot be visible but not for what they really are. The philosopher Friedrich Nittzsche described these dudes:

"The earth has become small and on it hops the Last Man who makes everyting small. We have invented happiness say the Last Men, and they blink. Their race is as prolific as the flea beetle. They have sunk so low that they cannot even despise themelves. The Last Man lasts longest" (Ed. note: Many or at least some of them are in top government positions)

¶ +2023.11.23. Would you agree that "by hammer and hand all arts do stand"? What are the key factors?

This is a differnent way of saying what the humanist scientist Jacob Bronowski said in his book / PBS television series: "The Ascent of Man", from probably the 1970s or 80s. He said it was the mind and hand of man (i.e., of individual men, women ane others) that has made the ascent of man from a bipedal ape to philosophy and atomic energy.

People like sometime Alabama Governor George Wallace caricature things but no caricature can stick without some truth in it. There are pointy headed intellectuals who can't even ride a bicycle straight, and humanity would have got nowhere if they were the only kind. One of them may have thought up the wheel but not been able to make one. On th other hand, John Henry would have got no further than hitting things with heavier rocks the his family and tribal friends.

And it's even more complex than that: There is knowledge that can't or only with excruciating difficulty be put intowords, ther is a german word for it which mean: feeling in your fingertips. Hand Homer Simpson a viola and see what he can do with it. Compare to Pablo Casals. "Oh, for Christ's sake you damned klutz. Here, hand it to me and I'll show you how to do it. Now you try it and I will guide your hand...."

Engineers can't make a jumbo jet without skulled machinists. Conversely, the machinists can't design a turbofan jet engine even though they can make one. There is an old story from Boeing: They hire an engineer fresh out of college and give him the task of designing a simple part so he can get familiar with company procedures. It's a simple part. He easily does the design, and it is "A" quality as far as school work would be concrned. He goes down to the shop floor and hands his design to the machinists. They study it for a couple minutes, look at him and ask him if he is sure about it. Of sourse, he says. They happily make his part for him. It is prfect except it's an order of magnitude too big. The boy didn't have a clue. But he either learned or was looking for a different job.

I could go on and on I am an intelletual. If I wasn't I would wish to be a master potter and make coffee cups that would sell for hunderds if not thousands of dollars, and which belonged in museums along with the Rembrandts. if not then a master machinist, whom I consider to th blue collar aristocrats.

One more story. Look up Ggiovanni di Dondi. in th 15th or maybe it was the 14th century he made an astronomical clock. It took him 14 years to make it. And he had to make many of the tools he needed to make it. It was a masterpiece both of mind and hand. And even more remarkable, he documented what he did so thoroughly that in the 20th century people were able confidently to make an exact replica (compare that to Django today!).

But now for the rest of the story. What happened to his amazing clock which was centuries ahead of its time, as one might say. Most humans are stupid and ignorant and do not respect skill of either mind or hand. They oon meltd down his clock for the brass. (Damn them all!)

So there you have it: Master craftsmanship, or craftpersonship if you will, and intelletual genius are both needed and hundreds of thusands of man are being turned into food for carrion birds in Ukraine today. Civilization is very fragile. "We" mess with both minds and hands at our peril. Take a master machinist and a pointy headed intellectual and put both of them to work digging ore from a mine with their bare hands. The machinist might last a little longer but both of their treasures for humanity would soon enoug be destroyed.

If you can't be a genius or a master craftsperson, you can still aspire to an honorable second tier: to protect their work and nurture them. You can sing the praises of the pariseworthy and denounce fakes and toadies. And, on the other side: No man (woman, other) rises so high that he can't reach a hand down to help another up.

¶ +2023.11.23. Do you think Kartik Aaryan's character in 'Satyaprem Ki Katha' challenges toxic masculinity and promotes a healthier, more inclusive definition of love and partnership?

I never heard of this person, but I sure like whatyou say he (she, other) said! So I will answer what I want and just ignore it if you don't like it.

What is toxic masculinity? I do have a picture which would be X-rated of young males in a locker room but I won't show that there. So this:

[ minotaur ]

I was subjected to a gender apartheid "prep" school that was nominally associated with The Episcopal Church but where they worshipped graven images: shiny plated versity lacrosse and tackle football team victory cups. I became a flaming atheist in that benighted place but one thing we did have htere was freedom of religion: they didn't care about spirituality, only about winning lacrosse games! Go team!

I had abrilliant mind and a body so wimpy you would not find my equal except in the funnies page of your local newspaper. Fact: as an adult at a spa for old communists, a jewish man once complemented me by saying I looked like I came out of Auschwitz. Cool, eh?

Now, we know that premarital sex is very bad, right? Un, huh!

[ Jock being escorted by lady ]

I call it, with good reason: "omerta sanitary services". I got involuntary celibacy. Who would ever have thought that a wimply kid with a brilliant mind might have sex hormones? NIMBY

I have a fantasy, and it's got a pedigree: In the 11th Century, when damsels in distress in Europe were swooning over young men who skewered each other on horseback ("knights in shining armor"), something differnt was going on in the Imperial court of Japan: The ladies of the court bestowed their favors on neurotic males who wrote gracious poetry and played a lutelike musical instrument. It's all told in the first modern novel, almost half a century before Don Quixotr: "Th tale of Genji" (the Seidensticker translation is lovely).

As said, I am the wimpiest male you will ever meet. Another example: You know kids will sometimes steal stuff or do other bad things? I wore a Rolex wristwatch every day all day from 7th grade on. No problema. Why? Becasuse I did not wear i at the wrist but half-way up my arm and I wore long sleeve shirts since I had no desire to expose my old ladylike arms. (Contrast: Vladimir Putin, who has a really manly physique!)

I never was physically strong enough for the missionary positon (Oink!). But I had a mind full of gentle esoteric fantasies and functional gonads. Had somebody paired me up with a young lady who was easy on the eyes but with hips that looked too thin to bear you know what and who was destined for a PhD in classics from somewhere, it might have been a win-win for both of us. Also, for me, variety is not the spice of life. I do not like St. Paul, but he did say one thing I strongly agree with:

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." (1 Thes 5:21)

What's heathy? "Boys" bragging about their "scores" in what I call their public pubic nudity (aka locker) rooms, or, to quote the title of a painting by Henri Matisse "Luxe calme et volupte"?

To borrow from the ending of a book almost noboby knows: With the material for charcter construction with which the reader has been provider, th reader can figure out the rest of this story for themslf"

Signed: Rrose Sélavy (look that up on Wikipediaif you don't "get it")

¶ +2023.11.23. What are the benefits of knowing the audience to whom I am speaking?

Come on, now!

Here I am, a failed intellectual who has spent more than half a century (except for the time spent on the job wasting my time to pay the bills) studying abstruse humanities subjects like "the origin of sodomy in Christian theology".... And I'm going to address my manager in IBM about Sophocles? Background information: This dude, who is straight not homosexual and it's 1980 not 2023, comes to work wearing socks with machine stitched images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them.

Well, I tried to talk with this Mickey Mouse, not about Heidegger, but about small rodents. He either could not or would not engage in mutually respectful serious discussion about mice – not the computer kind but the kind that "Squeak!"

I knew my audience! One fine morning this piece of work held a group meeting and sheepiehly fessed up to us his secret desire in life: to have weekly instead of bi-weekly status reports. Of course nobody heard this because who likes writig status reports? I did. I glared at him and in a loud voice clearly declaimed:

"That's OK with me, Jim, because you know, Jim: Two half nuthins make a whole huthin."

Nobody heard that either – except him. He abruptly ended the meeting at that point.

I knew my audience.

I strongly urge that anybody presenting anything to anybody needs to do two things:

(1) Make sure you have something to say that you believe in AND that you with good reason expect your audience to want to hear for selfish reasons, namely: to help themselves do something they want or need to do.

(2) Master you subject matter. If you are going to speak for 5 minuets, prepare for 30. And also prepare for this: Somebody in the audience who is "out ot get you", and who, maybe in Q&A, asks you a question in which they have zero interest in the answer but want to get you to say smething to make fool of yourself. It happened to me once. I was totally taken off guard and surprised. I stopped for a few seconds to compose myself and then began:

"I am so glad you asked that question...."

And shortly thereafter I had humiliated this nasty creatur in fromt of all his coworkers and never had any trouble out of him again. I had mastered my subject matter.

Why waste your and your audience's time running you mouth off about something you or they do not care about?

If you don't know what you are talking about, good luck getting away with it because somebody like me who hates pretenders-to-knowledge (aka "know it alls" and toadies), or a sniper like the guy I dealt with, may be in the audience to make you sorry.

But of course there are other reasons to talk at people: (1) You are a teacher and you need to do something to collect your paycheck and they are students who need their GPA, (2) You have power and get off on bossing people who can't fight back around to feel you are big because you secretly suspect you are small.

(This has not been an exhaustive presentation. But hopefully it has not been exhausting for either of us.)

¶ +2023.11.23. Why don't people know anything unless it pertains to their profession? Nobody triangulates.

Nobody?

There is a story in Homer's "The Odyssey"

Somehow Odysseus and his men are stuck on an islane full of man-eating giants who each had one eye. Odysseus is a clever dude and does a David and Goliath trick and pokes out the eye of one of the giants. The giant, in agony ,demands: "Why did this to me?" Odysseus answers him:" Nemo", which means "nobody" in Greek. So when the giant's friends heard him screaming and asked him who hurt him, he replied: "Nemo did!" Well, since nobody hurt him, none of his friends came to his aid because he was not hurt: nobody hurt him.

So who is nobody? (One possible answer: "Everybody". The philosopher Martin Heidegger had a term for this: "das Man": persons who do not individuate themselves bu are each just "one" among many.

Persons who are "individuals", for better or for worse, do triangulate, although I've heard it described as: "Connecting the dots":

"There is more to the surfaxce than meets the eye." (Aaron Beck, psychologist)

¶ +2023.11.23. What was the most dramatic thing to ever happen at your work?

Two different kinds of dramatic:

One morning it was announced at maybe 9 am that there would be an unexpected "all hands" meetin at 9:30. No reason given. Meeting started and we were all fired in a reduction in force. Surprise!

I worked as a computer programmer in situations where everybody had at least a college degree and were respectful to each other.

One day everybody was working late to get something done that the 3rd line manager wanted. They were really busting their asses for him. He came in the room and belched out:

"**I want to see asses and ebows!**"

He had close to a 100% annual turnover rate in the deparment.

Now for the more "dramatic" kind:

Different place with even more highly schooled people. I was sitting in my cubicle maybe 10 or 15 feet from this first line manager's office. She was a woman nearing the onset of menopause probably but still relatively young. She did not want to work but to be at the ballet all the time. But she apparently had a useless husband so she had to work and somehow she was a first line manager. One morning she called one of her reports into her office and shut the solid wood door. For maybe 5 minutes I clearly heard her S**CREAMING** at the poor guy. **SCREAMING!** (My thought? If he had done anything that bad, why hadn't she taken his badge and called security to escort him out of the building with instcuction never to come back in? But apparently he had not done anything really bad. Another time she shut the door again and **SCREAMED** at one of her reports on the telephone.)

¶ +2023.11.23. At my school, students who misbehave in assembly such as talking, would be made to stand up. They must stand throughout the entirety of the assembly until it is finished. What are some reasons the school would do this and what purpose does it give?

You can probalby do research on this.

They did it when I was in elementary school in the early 1950s.

My best guess is that they do not do it for a reason but due to adolt mindlessness: They did it yesterday, so we do it today. Pass it on.

"Hammurabi's children made their house of slavery's bricks imprimatured by some mad priest's imagined good.

The good i gone; the priest stamps on...." (George Delury)

I had a psychiataric case of a man who's head was really messed up. He was a wife beater. He slept in his car. How did he get that way? Easy: When he was a child his mother would command him to stand up and stand perfectly still and not move for over an hour. Why did she do this? Apparently no reason except she decided to make him do it.

Now I have a story which sounds unbeilevable but I seem to remember it: Sometimes my father would take me to Sunday School in a Presbyterian Church. Once the teacher locked me in the dark closet in the classroom. I don't think it was for too long, but I don't know why she(?) did it.

[ Christ entering Brussels and Ukrainian males ]

People are not always nice to each other, and especially to persons who do not have the power to fight back, like teachers to school children, are they?

¶ +2023.11.23. Do you know of any examples where two people came up with similar ideas independently of each other?

Yes but I do not know and would not understand the details:

Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both independently discovered [the] calculus in mathematics. This is a very famous case.

¶ +2023.11.22. What is one sole definition of "Intelligence" that is common in "Human Intelligence" and "Animal Intelligence" as well as in "artificial Intelligence"? How differs it from "Military Intelligence and "Business Intelligence"?

Humans and higher animals and angels and extraterrestrials and Deities of verious flavors are all experiencing – end of senence.

"Artificial intelligence" is not intelligence. It's jus tcomputer programs which can simulate intelligence to a certain extent.

"Military Intelligence" and "Business Intelligence" are neither computer programs not experiencing – end of sentence. They are kinds of contents of experience. A smart human or a Deity can know something. One og the things they may know is ho to do things effectively in business or military operations. we say these experiencing – end of sentence. have f exhible military or buiness intelligence, like we whoud say they know how to cook eggs or make scientific discoveries.

Military and business "intelligence" are skills and/or aptitudes exhibited by persons or angels or Deities or extraterrestrials. bu tthey are not themselves persons or angels or Deities or extraterrestrials.

I wite a sentence. But a sentence it no a writer. A savvy business man has "business intelligence": he (she, other) knws how to negotiate business deals. But tha tknowlege is not itself a businessman. A General has military intelligence )or at leat we hope he does). But that skill is not itelf a gGeneral. It's a skill a general possesses.

So the word "intelligence" is being ued in very differnt ways here. this is not helpful. So just discard the words "Military Intelligence" and "Business Intelligence". Remove them from your vocabulary. Speak insead of business savvy and strategic or tactical military savvy. The businessman or general has savvy. He makes intelligent decisions. Th**e** ability of aperson to make intelligent decisions is what the unhelpful terms "Military Intelligence" and "Business Intelligence" refer to. they are confusing. Don't use them.

Learn more to become more intelligent, be is in business or the military or some othee area of living. You are the intelligence and ther is no other kind except for kind tha are like you such as higher animals (maybe) and angels or Deities or extraterrestrials. (certainly).

I hope I am "beating a dead horse" here. Have I succeeded? Don't use words that are likely to confuse. there are more than enough real problems without using confuxing words. Or do use them and be unnecessarily confused.

¶ +2023.11.22. How does artificial intelligence help us to solve problems?

AI is a better Google search engine which was a better Encyclopedia Britannica....

Many "problems" are not really problematic. They just require table lookups in "dictionaries" where the key is the problem description and the value is the solution recipe. AI can do this very well because it deploys over vast "memory" arra, i.e, records of things humans have dne.

A **real problem** is a situation nobody can figure out how to address.Since all computer programs are (or are like) vector spaces, they can only deal with what they are dimensionally programmed to handle. There is the old book "Flatlanders" who do not know about the dimension of height, just left and right and forward and backward. AI is like that.

The buck stops on the human's desk. **AI is a tool. Human use tools.** Of course people aho do not uderstand the structure of human existend can get ideas in their head the other way around, or also some person with power can use computers to boss other persons who lack power around. But I am talking here about the ideal situation of responsible citizens of a free society who negotiate their shared life as peers, by free mutual agreement deploying over the world of nature thru thechnology.

At the bottom of the hierarchy you have telephone customer complaint employees. The customer cannot figure out how to do something the customer ***wants ***to do with the product. AI can be very helpful here in "solving " a lot of these "problems" because the customers do not know very much of what is known. No problem, just local ignorance (or stupidity).

The customer service person knows more and knows how to use **knowledge resources**, such as AI. Also AI cannot be counted on to deal with customers who know very well what the problem is but are pissed off. This morning I threw a fit in Whole Foods because I felt wa being disrespected. AI would not have helped. Humans did. Do you wan tto stay in business? Do you want customer who go around telling everybody they meet what lousy company you are with whor goddamned mouse maze of computer menus that they can't get anywhere so go buy from somebody else! A human can Calm down an angry customer. How much is that worth to you?

OK, some problems are beyond the competence of the phone complaint personnel even when their work is **AIDED**, got that: they are AIDed by AI. What happens is tha the issue gets kicked up the chain of ever more experienced and knowlegeable persons until finally it hits the desk of somebody who gets paid a lot because there is nobody else who knows better, anywhere. As U.S. President Harry S Truman said, or rather had a sign on his desk:

"The buck stops here"

Example: I worked for a big insurance company when computers wer as big as rooms in a house. Our company's computer broke and the local repair guys ("Field Engineers"( couldn't fix it. We were one very unhappy customer shice our production work wa not getting out. You know IBM is classically thought os a a company of men in blue suits. Well herecomes this dude in a hawaii shirt and shorts, probably from Florida, and he;s the man. He soon enough goes back to Florida with our computer up and running again. Sure, if it wa today he would USE AI, jsut like he uses the toilet. But in the end he "has a sense of smell" which is more sensitive than anybody else. Now what would have heppened had he not been able to fix ht problem. He would have had to come up wtih a workaround and it it meant a whole new cmputer at a cost to the company of millions of dollars, if he wa wrong, he'd be out of job. If he was right, the CEO of the corupration would know that had been the bet possible thing to do. If something is not possible, it cant be done.

And there are other humans who cnnot be replaced by AI. If you were negotiating the end of the Ukraine or Palestine War would you rely on AI to write the peace treaty, especially if you were not a native speaker of all the languages involoved with deep experience in each of the relevant cultures?

Thehe meaning of words is their use, not what's in the dictionary. People can say one thing but mean something else,r and AI can't cope with that. Or to put it another way, a world class stand up comedian who writes his own jokes will be able to jerk AI around in ways that will help him to get material for his schtick because it's ludicous. I like to play with the Bing Ai and see how to jerk it around.

AI CAN HELP HUMANS SOLVE PROBLEMS

If some corporate bean counter wants to save money by firing the human problem solvers and his (her, other's) product is not frivolous, he should think about the Boeing 737 Max and other things, but who knows, the AI may be able to help him because it has in its database records of many bean counters' foolish activities in past of which this particular bean counter may be ignorant.

There was once a Wausau Insureance advertisement: A businessman absolutely, positively had to make a plane flight to get to a **very** important meeting. Do or die. He hires an *el cheapo* taxi to get him from his hotel to the airport. It's mid-day in August in some godforsaken place like rural Cuba. It's 110 degrees and 100% humidty. We see the man satnding on h side of a poorly paved road in the sweltering sun witt the taxi driver ***frantically*** trying to fix the car's engine while steam spews from the radiator. The man, sweating profusely looks up at the sky and sees his flight heading fo the stratosphere. Voiceover:

"The cheapest alternative is not always the least expensive"

Substitute overreliance on AI for the *el cheapo* taxi. Whatcha gonna do? Call Ghostbusters?

¶ +2023.11.22. What are the things I need to learn in order to truly become an educated person instead of just pretending to be one?

Mr. Socrates famously said he knew nothing. Was he educated or not?

Few persons are truly "educated" today. Almos nobody knows clssical Greek and latin.

I consider myseff semi-literate: I ha eeread a lot, studied a lot the thought a lot, but I know I do not have the solid foundation of mastery of the lassical canon.

Don't try to pretend you know when you don't know, especially if you get in a job with power over others, bcause you n=might encounter somebody like me who does not like such persons and likes to "cut them down to size". I do not go looking ofr trouble but if trouble comes looking for me, what should I do?

So start by being honet with youorself and as far as is safe, with others. Admit the limit sof your knowledge. That will put you in maybe th top 20 or even top 10 percent. And you may be surprised how many persons you may offend that way, which prove you know more than they do.

Here is somehting to think about. the phisicist Niels Bohr instructed his students:

"Take evey satement I make as a quetsion not a an assertion."

If you sincerely endeavor to practice that you are more educated than almost every political and relitious person on earth, who tell everybody to believe what they say. Ipse dixit, man.

Can you rad at least at high school graduate level? If yes, try something like, free on the internet, Julien Benda's classic essay: "The treason of the intellectuals".

Two pages, again free on the internet: the classic Journal of the American Medical Associteion (JAMA) OpEd piece: "It's over, Debbie."

Find old books that might look interesting to you. Skip anyhtin on the best seller list. Turn of the television. And it can be fun, even. R.CRumb comix are not to be scoffed at, nor Geroge Herriman's "Krazy Kat" ("Meow!")

Find Charles Dickens a bore? Me too. Don't want to read over 1,00 pages of WWar and Peace? Why bother? Interested in the military? Read Sun-Tzu, and think about it.

I gotta go for now. Read The Communist Manifesto. Abraham Lincoln'sGettysberg address is great for learning how to speak eloquently. Again, if it's popular it's probbly not much good. Read the New York Times newspaper but be suspicious of its coverage of America's wars. You can even laren a lot from th Bible, provided you don't just believe it. But ther is a lot of wisdom even for an atheist in The Book of Ecclesiastes.

Practice citing the source of everything you say tha tyou did not invent yourself, even at cocktail parties and with family and friends. that's a good woy to offent people who will ask you to stop acting like you are better than them (ie.., that you are making them feel ignorant and thoughtless).....

And have fun. "There is a heppy land, fur, fur away!" (Krazy Kat; one of the main reasons I got a doctoral degree was to have more fun in my life))

¶ +2023.11.22. Can we discover something new about ourselves after we have reached adulthood?

Of course.

A person can learn into their 90s or later, or never learn anything at any age but just "mindlessly" enact their social conditioning.

Learning skills is not learning about yourself. You can get a PhD in computer science and know how to do everything with a compuer, but not have a clue about what is worth doing ahd why and what is not worth doing and why not. So persons can be vey well trained but not at all educated.

Childrearing and schooling often even if not always discourage persons from learning about themselves. Few parents ask their children to criticize them, do they? Few school teachers talk with students about the power structure of the classroom, do they?

Childrearing is generally a kind of reverse of what oncologists do. The oncologist destroys the leukemia patient's sick immune system and injets new hearlthy immune cells. Childrearing destroys the child's innate faculty of judgment and replaces it with social conditioning. "You know you love you mommy, don't you my sweet?" "No, mommy, I hate you!" "You'll be sorry for that you ingrate child. What is wrong with you!"

My mother did credibly threaten to abandon me at age 5 years. I was a precocious child. I spoke articulately at that age. I mutated the word "mother" to "mud". My mother did not like this, so she and my father staged a little one act play for my benefit: She wa walking out the front door of the house while he provided the voiceover that if I didn't tell my mother I loved her and mean it, she was leaving pernamently. I did not have a safe house to run to. But I was more intelligent than most kids. Of course they get what they wanted, but it a a pyrrhic victory. They lost any chance of my ever trusting or having any goof feelings them again. The price of freedom is eternal vigenance. (Just imagine how poor little Isaac in the Bible must have felt going to sleep at night unless he was stupid, going to bed in a house with a father who had been on the verge of premeditatedly murdering him!)

What should they have done? Looked into themselves and asked themsleves whatthey might have done to make a very intelligent child dislike them, and have respectfully asked me, sincerely assuring me ther would be no retibution no matter what I migh tell them about themselves, why I did not love them. They might have learned something. Well, I did learn something: Trust nobody.

Now for two things on the good side:

(1) The physicist Richard Feynmann at least said he had an IQ of only 125. Not stupid but not really superbright. But he was one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century. How did he do it? His father wasalways asking him qustions and challenging him not just to find the answers but to think up new questions to challenge himself.

(2) How to deal with behavioral probems in children. It is absolutely imperative to not ever try to change a child'sr opinion about anything except by rationa discussion as peers in civil discourse, and to not pressure them to believe what you beieve. If you are a Christian don't try to make them believe in your God. Ditto if you are jewish, muslim, or atheist, or anything else. just present the smorgasbord of possible beliefs for the to decide for themself or to invent their own. Second, if they do anything yu don't like that is not materially harmful to anybody, don't try to change it. I, for instance, never voluntarily would have got a haircut: I hated haircuts and was repulsed by barber shops. But really bad behavior that can do material harm?

Example of appropriate treatment of a young person by an adult: Sandor Ferenczi wrote, in an essay evocatively titled "The Adaptation of the Family to the Child": I am reminded of an incident with a little nephew of my own, whom I treated as leniently as, in my view, a psycho-analyst should. He took advantage of this and began to tease me, then wanted to beat me, and then to tease and beat me all the time. Psycho-analysis did not teach me to let him beat me ad infinitum, so I took him in my arms, holding him so that he was powerless to move, and said: "Now beat me if you can!" He tried, could not, called me names, said that he hated me; I replied: "All right, go on, you may feel these things and say these things against me, but you must not beat me." In the end he realized my advantage in strength and his equality in fantasy, and we became good friends. (Sandor Ferenczi, "Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis", 1955, p. 75)

A child who is always encouraged to question his parents will not likely be easily duped by religious or politcal leaders, celebrities, bosses at work or anybody else. Remember that Adolf Eichmann did not question his orders. "Yes, mommy." "Ya, Mein Fuhrer!"

¶ +2023.11.21. Is there a subject that you studied in depth, but in the end you wished you had not?

Not exactly but close:

I have studied the current Ukraine (Biden anti-Russia) war in depth since Spring 2022, but wish there had not been this "unspeakable" thing to study. I would rather have been studying – Well, let me just quote a heppier author:

"...For all the ancient philosophers and sages have reckoned two things to be necessary for safe and pleasant travel on the road of wisdom and in the pursuit after knowledge; God's guidance and the company of men.... So, when you philosophers, with God's guidance and in the company of some clear Lantern, give yourselves up to that careful study and investigation which is the proper duty of man – and it is for this reason that men are called... searchers and discoverers... – [as men, you] will find the truth of the sage Thales' reply to Amasis, King of the Egyptians. When asked wherein the greatest wisdom lay, Thales replied: 'In time.' For it is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden. [As men, you] will also infallibly find that all men's knowledge, both theirs and their forefathers', is hardly an infinitesimal fraction of all that exists and that they do not know."

...When [our guide] had concluded her speech she handed us some closed and sealed letters and, after we had returned to her our undying thanks, she showed us out through a door... where [she] summoned her people to propose questions twice as high as Mount Olympus.

And so we passed through a country full of delights... and at last we found our ships in the harbour. (Francois Rabelais, "Gargantua and Pantagruel", 1532-1534/1955, pp. 710-2)

Instead of reading Ernst Junger's "Storm of steel" (or, if not that, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein's "Prisoners of ritual" which is more relevant to Wokism) I would rather be reading Will Santillo's "La preit mort" or Walter G Andrews "The age of beloveds" or, well, in a better world I would be doing the lab exerccises in the third volume of Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities". Next on my list in this world: Junger's "The worker" and Julien Benda's "The treaason of the intellectuals" (which latter is avaiable free on the Internet).

¶ +2023.11.21. There have been surprises such as NFL players or rock musicians getting degrees in math or physics at major universities. Have any supermodels ever completed degrees in STEM or similar?

I don't want to name names. And I have zero interest in professional athletics or any other form of competitive activity.

But I found it interesting that one of the most famous basketball stars, at home, has a wife who is a no-publicity univerisity professor humanities scholar (the serious kind, not woke). I imagine this athlete has a mind as well as a "bod".

Oh, yes: Marilyn Monroe, at home, read serious books.

¶ +2023.11.21. Make a reflection paper about education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world?

That may be an overstatement but I would take the assignment seriously....

And it would take a very "big" teacher to handle what I would write: I would reflect on the power structure of th classroom situation and that I was being graded (USDA) not trespepected as apeer in civil discourse (US Declaration of Independence). My initials are "BMcC"

[ USDA ]

And I would cite a case where I actually did this, at Yale in 1965. There was a philosophy professor, John Wild. I was a sophomore (sopomore, etymologically means essentialy fool) in a lecture course he was teaching. He gave us kids a lecture on human freedom.

At the end of the lecture I went up to the podium and very respectfully said to Professor Wild that I did not see where I had freedom since I would be required to take an examination at the end of the course. In other words, I called him out for intellectual hypocrisy. What happened?

He looked down on me and kindly told me he meant no harm and next semester he let me take ins graduate seminar for an easy A. John Wild, a gentle giant.

So how whould your teacher react to a "reflection paper?

¶ +2023.11.21. I'm the grandchild of Albert Einstein. Is that the reason why I am so smart?

Well, maybe.

But being a direct biological descendent of somebody does not say anything about you as a person.

I never met my paternal grandfather. He was despicable. Why do I say that? he tried to blackmail my father to get part of his paycheck. So that's my ancestry.

I think it would be "cool" to have royal blood, for instance to be a direct descentent of King Vlad the Impaler, who was perhaps more evil than Adollf Hitler. There's nothing I can do to have prevented his crimes so why not be royalty? instead of white trash?

Your ancestors may inspire you or disgust you or anything in between. But nothing they did or did not do reflects on you, although it may very well influence your opportunities in your life. If I had had educated parents and teachers I would have gone much further in life; if my parents had been ilagel immigrant migrant farm wrokers I would not likely have gone to Yale.

You are not your ancestors. And I am not talkjing her just about you who apparently have a highly desirable ancestor. Almost everybody gets worked up about their dead ancestors. Call their mother an obscenity and see what happens. Call my mother an obscenity and I may provide you with information to help you make your assertion more specifically relevant, but if I did have a highly honorable ancestor I would defend their role in the prograss of civilization just like if they were from a different race and time, not becaouse of the consnguinity. Trees have roots. Human beings have minds.

As Karl Marx said: Man makes himself on the basis of conditions he did not make. If my daddy was Noam Chomsky, you bet I would take advantage of the advantages that might offer me to become a great public intellectual too. But the books he writes are not my books. And here is a real winner:

There is a psychoanlayst whose books are really excellent for helping children who had bad parents: Alice Miller. But as a mother herself, she was bad. Her son, now grown up, has said that reading her books saved him from her. So there is ancestry in action for you.

Also, the persons I consider closest to me in terms of "lineage" have nothing to do with biology but with ideas. One was the son of an author who once lived in your grandfather's house for a time. Another was a professor who was a close friend of Marshall McLuhan. A third was an "existentialist" philosophy professor. Blood relatives? Of course they matter: in terms of genetic predispositions of dread diseases. My maternal grandfather who was a decent person but reminded me of he sterrotype of a "Neanderthal" died a wretched death at about age 63 years from colon cancer. I honor my ancestry by getting regular colonocsopies to hopefully not follow in his footsteps.

Always remember: It was just the luck of fate what birth canal (or c-section) you came out of. You didn't earn it, but don't squander it. Or do.

¶ +2023.11.21. To what extent is the scientific method sufficiently robust in this age of alternative narratives?

To fight the anti-universalistic ideologues who are running around today making money cutting off the branch they are sitting on, is far beyond my comptetence, because I only spent my "free time" studying the humanities, after wasting the best hours of the best days of my life working a computer programming job for half a century to pay the bills. These people often have tenure even if they were once on the FBI 10 most wanted list. But I can give references:

Hans Blumenberg, "Legitimacy of he Modern Age", MIT Press, 1966

is one good book.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3632653.htmlis another.

There are two modernities (excluding, of course, slave traders), one of which is easy to mock for people who want to jerk off with tenure: Cartesianism. But there is another strain of humanism, which goes back to Desiderio Erasmus and Francois Rabelais and others which integrates feeling with form. "It all" make me disgusted. I did once have an unplesant interaction with one of "these people" (another value judgment) and I have kept a transcript of it. If dead white males are so bad, why to they use cellphones and antibiotics, not voodoo? And it you want to read something really appalling, especially of you are female I dare you to tell me the alternative narratives of female genital mutilation rituals in some non-Western societies. Deconstruct Hanny Lightfoot-Kiein's book "Prisoners of ritual", but please just do it to yourself – walk the walk not just talk the talk.

Start with three texts free on the Internet:

Edmund Huserl's magisterial (yes, that is a value judgment like all delarative sentences; I can play their game) essay from 1935 "**Philosphy and the crisis of European humanity**".

Individuality and Society (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000046430?posInSet=1&queryId=d951b156-3253-4957-8a43-16f4bceb481a) (Jan Szczepanski, UNESCO, "Impact of science on society", 31(4), 1981, 461-466)

Julien Benda, "**The treason of the intellectuals**", 1927. Even the title of this one is great! I think many (perhaps not all) these people are traitors, not to some nation state, but to "the live of the mind", to "lux mentis lux orbis".

Does thinking matter? Nobody needs anything. Even breathing is just a wish, albeit for some folks, an passionate one. And evne protons will decay in some trillions of years, so nothing matters in the end, even wokism. If you want to deal with "alternative narratives" read the classic oped piece from The Journal of The American Medical Association (JAMA), again free on the Internet: "**It's over Debbie**". And what are these people's alternative narratives for their paychecks?

Everything everybody does they do for reasons and often they lie either to themselves or to others of both. My Childrearing in middle class 1950s USA was destructive and deprived me of the life I could have had if my parents and teachers had been humanist intellectuals of the Rabelaisian persuasion, not Cartesian strawpersons. So I have chosen (that's another value judgment) to spend as much of my life as I had after paying the bills studying what I could not have: Luxe, calme et volupte (that is the title of a painting by the dead white male Henri Matisse).

But don't listen to my ranting. Read the texts I have cited above (theres more where they came from). Or just read the *below* news article from The New York Times newspaper which, when I read it, I imagined an IED (improvised explosive device) had exploded in my face). Others apparently feel differently and if they would keep it to themselves that would be fine with me. As for their "alternative narratives", been there, done that and I have found in the humanist tradition of Western culture and a couple other places such as Heian Japan, a world I would like to live in. As for theirs, as said, I wish they would keep it to themselves. I will sign off with another idea from a dead white male (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't "get it", and I can assure you it's not Cartesianism, or, a fortiori, slave trading): *Rrose Sélavy*

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.11.21. To what extent do your genes have any relationship with your genius and ingenuity?

Excellent question and I don't think anybody has an answer that amounts to much.

My guess is hta tifyou are a child or George Steiner or J. Robert Oppenheimer your chances are a lot better than if your parents are illegal migrent farm workers. Seems reasonable , doesn't it? I once worked in a place whr it seemed everybody's kids were at least National Merit semifinalists (IBm Research). Where I came from my father's father was literally white trash (when my father rose to the place in life wher he wa earning a middle class income, his father tried to blackmail him to get par tof it and when tht failed took him to court to try to get part of it and that failed too). My father may have had an "IQ" of 120. That would have been excptional where came from.

two gene things: My mothe was wht a tthe time was called an "ambularory schizophrenic" with about a 5.5th grade education. She was an idiot savant artist. I have zero freehand drawing ability. Zero. But she also had a kind of esthetic sensibility which would havebeen had to detect because it never had a chance to be developed. Bu tthe wer clues: In the neighbothood everybody put up gaudy Christmas decorations all over their houses and lawns. She put single electric candles in each window of hte house, and since clear christmas bulbs wer not available then, she spent hours scraping the paint off them. I do have an excruciating estnetic sensibiility, which I may indeed have inherited.

Here's an ineresting case I recently came across: The great physicist Richard Feynmann at least said he had an IQ of 125 – about the same as my father, who ws intelligent but no genius. However! Whereas my father's father tried to balckmail him, Prof. Feynmann's father was alwasys asking him quetions and challenging him not just to find the answers but to find more questions to ask. Nature or nurture?

My attitude? Be conservative: nurture every person as much as possible. some people are into "building character" and such. What is one of the astest and most d=effetive way to destroy precision machinery, say ball bearings? theor some "true grit" into them.

Also, in middle age I discovered something about one o my mother's brothers. These wer hard working blue collar folks who did well in life by keeping their noses to the grindstone. But this one uncle, who was otherwise a very ethical, hardworking, intelligent middle class American lawn mower, once – just one time! – during World War II, had a genius idea nd it was not just idle htought: it saved lives. One genius idea in a 90+ year long life. Just one. But indeed, one! the sad part is that nobody cared. I did and I think it made him feel a little better in his last years. And I've been trying to get publicity for it, on and off, for now almos t30 years, and nobody cares.

You never know. The messiah just might be the homeless person you just passed on the street and your fate for all eternity has just been sealed. As I just said: I personally knew an otherwise ordinary person who did have one GENIUS idea in his life. On the other hand, one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the 20th century spent most of his life in the Florwence Colorado supermax prison: Theodore John Kaczynsk, otherwise known by his FBI moniker: "The Unabomber". (There were apparenty no other geniuses in his family)

¶ +2023.11.21. Are there any scholarships or universities that prioritize social interactions and critical thinking over exam marks? Why or why not?

This is a very good question.

I suspect one size does not fit all. In a given institution of higher pedagogy, there may be departments and individual teachers within each department, who diffentially value thinking versus GPA.

My daughter recently graduated from a highly rated liberal arts college. In her junior year she had a teacher who gave her a "D" in the course. She is not a D-unce. She [timidly...] complained and the result was she was told this teacher was noted for giving low grades and that the teacher WOULD BE LEAVING THE NEXT YEAR. That, of course, was not helpful to my daughter or probably to other victims of this "professor". I personally did not fight it because the subject was chemistry and I am ignorant of chemistry, but if it had been a subject which I had mastered, that teacher, and on up the hierarchy, would not have had a pleasant day.

There is one college I came across which today sounds like it does institutionally value critical thinking, and it is not prestigous, so maybe they feel that they need to help the students to think. I guess if you go to Harvard they don't need to help you to think – now over 40 years ago I hae a distasteful interaction with that institution. They have a summer program where you play at being an architeture student to see if you really want to become one. It's a long story but at the end of the program I asked the dude in charge of it how an application for their MArch program from me might be received. I expeted him to evade the question but no. He said:

"When we admit people like you, they leave after a year without having to be asked to."

I was a heretic and he knew it.

So – there is a low prestige college that when I was in school (the 1960s) was where upper middle cass parents sent their kids who had no interest in learning anything to get a college degree: party boy U: Washington College, Chesertown Maryland. Today they at least advertise that they focus on teaching critical thinking and related skills. So I would check them out if you don't want to see what The University of Chicgo is like, or, if you are more STEM minded, MIT.

It's not the school, it's the individual teachers. Find a mentor in a state college and you may learn a lot more i.e., enrich your spirit a lot more, than if you just get kicked around in a high prestige place. Also, and here is where I failed miserably: DEMAND BETTER. Who is judging whom? Who is paying whom? Schools are one of the few places where John Wanamaker's famous dictim does NOT apply:

"The customer is always right"

What right does somebody have to judge you just because they have defectated more time than you? I will end with two personal experiences, one good, the other bad.

The good one: At the onset of middle age I went back to school in a graduate program I feltt I could cope with, i.e., that would be "easy" (I haveno interest in "proving myself", just im-proving myself). One course I went up to the teacher and asked her if I could get course credit for writing an essay on a topic tangentially related to the course in which I hd a passionate interest, INSTEAD OF DOING THe ASSIGNMENTS. Got that: INSTEAD OF. She immediately told me to go do it. She just happened to be the most esteemed professor in the whole place since John Dewey and she loved what I wrote. But the important part is that I took initiative and I was encouraged to do it: If I had screwed up I would have had nobody to blame but myself.

Now for the bad one which is not from graduate school or from college (Yale, summa cum laude by avoidance, 1968) but from 7th grade in a benighted "perp" school whose GPS coordinates are [39.4324433, -76.6766731], in case you are a weapons officer on a B-52 with a JDAM to spare:

[ Mike Rentko ]

¶ +2023.11.21. Why does it seem that most English professors are barely literate?

Is that true?

How old are they? Maybe they are woke? "Worship of the printed word" is a white racist thing (see below).

Certainly Harold Bloom would not fit in your category, would he? (I'm not saying you should like him, just that he was "well read".)

I don't know what's going on today nor do I want to because I suspect it's discouraging.l There is a book from back in the days of postmodernism (I am a living fossil, an "existentialist") which I highly recommend:

Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man, 1991, by David Lehman

I consider myself to be semi-literate, sort of like Mr. Socrates said he knew nothing. I lack a solid grounding in the classics and know almost no latin and no anceint greek at all. But I've read, and, alas, forgotten, a lot of books. Not all of them are in "the western canon" unless one considers China and Japan to bbe part of The West.

"Literate" can, of coure, have a variety of meanings. One meaning is that the person can function as a kurtzweil machine, rendering text to speech, or be like a low-grade AI (and maybe or maybe not be able to pass a Turing test). Another meaning is having deep immersion in the thoughts and feelings of "serious" (yes, that is a value judgment, like everything else in this world is) books. A person's vocabulary can be "measured" along two axes: horizontal and vertical:

Horizontal: how many different words do they know.

Vertical: how much referential allusion do they bring to each word. When the physicist Niels Bohr said the word "atom", it carried a lot more weight of background / context than if Homer Simpson said the same word.

Some time ago I realized that some (not all, of course) of my typographical errors, which are legion, contain valuable ideas I would never have thought of. It's also a bit amusing to make a fool of a person and them not be aware of anything because they only decode the dictionary translation of the words.

Literacy is a controversial issue today. Is you woke bro? (I am uncertain I have said that correctly)

[ -------- ]

The New York Times, +2021.08.27, "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy.", by Michael Powell.

"In February 2021, Paul Rossi, a math teacher [at Grace Church School, an elite private school in Manhattan]... met with a white consultant, who displayed a slide that named supposed characteristics of white supremacy. These included

individualism,

worship of the written word and

objectivity.'

Mr. Rossi said he felt a twist in his stomach. 'Objectivity?' he told the consultant, according to a transcript. 'Human attributes are being reduced to racial traits.' 'As you look at this list', the consultant asked,' are you having "white feelings"?' 'What,' Mr. Rossi asked, 'makes a feeling "white"?' Some of the high school students then echoed his objections. 'I'm so exhausted with being reduced to my race,' a girl said. 'The first step of antiracism is to racialize every single dimension of my identity.'... A school official reprimanded Mr. Rossi, accusing him of 'creating a neurological imbalance' in students.... A few days later the head of school wrote a statement and directed teachers to read it aloud in classes: 'When someone breaches our professional norms... the response includes a warning in their permanent file that a further incident of unprofessional conduct could result in dismissal.' A sizable group of parents and teachers say the schools have taken it too far -- and enforced suffocating and destructive groupthink on students... [One parent], who notes that his heritage is a mix of Jewish, Mexican and Yaqui tribe, pulled his children out of Riverdale and created a foundation to argue against this sort of antiracist education. 'The insistence on teaching race consciousness is a fundamental shift into a sort of tribalism,' he said.... This conflict plays out amid the high peaks of American economic inequality. Tuition at many of New York's private schools hovers between $53,000 and $58,000, the most expensive tab in the nation. Many heads of school make between $580,000 to more than $1.1 million. .... Grace Church School offered [Mr. Rossi] a contract if he participated in 'restorative practices' for the supposed harm done to students of color."

¶ +2023.11.20. Why is it important for experts to assess elderly people for osteoporosis and osteopenia?

Isn't it a bone density test? Or at least that is the first step after a physician's office examinatiiiion level disgnosis?

I am male gender but with very thin or "fine" bones. Once at about age 40 years I broke the smaller bone in my lower leg just by running. I did not stumble into a pothole or twist my ankle or anyhting – it just broke and I limped around for a week or so before I went to the doctor. He didn't find anything by inspection but he gave me an x-ray to make me happy, and he came back saying he was surprised that the bone was broken just above the ankle. What to do? It would eventually heal itself.

So now in my mid 70s my current physician was concerned I might have old lady's bones (osteoporosis) and ordered a bone density test. Watchful waiting. I try to be careful, which is not too much of a problem for me because all the thinga I like in life ar gentle, such as books and petting my pet cat (and ideas are weightless...). I've always liked being "fine boned". Once at a resort for old communists, a jewish man complimented me by saying I looked like I came out of Auschwitz. As the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said: "less is more". Not an NFL lineman's ideal.

I did until recently have a neighbor, a lady who has very fragile bones, much thinner than mine, and she is at daily risk of breaking them. She's now 60 years old. Curiously she has one child, a daughter, who is a very strong athlete, os it was not inherited.

The best are not always the strongest. If some persons have "true grit", others, irrespective of gender, need to be treated with gentleness to not be hurt.

¶ +2023.11.20. What (concept) is the very most fundamental aspect of all reality?

Lux mentis lux orbis (The light of the mind is the light of the world)

Apart from reflective thinking about it there is no reality to have any aspects. Reality is an idea in minds.

Now, those minds need not be humn minds. They could be (at least hypothetically, which, of course, is just more thinking in minds...) – they could be angeli or demonic minds, or "extraterrestrials' minds", or a deity's mind, be it of the Olympian or the Abrahamic kind or any other kind, or maybe even a higher animal, maybe.

But any aspect of anything is a thought (a thinking) in a mind. So mind is the most fundamental"thing" of all and, of course, it is not a thing except in a peculiar sense.

As the high functioning autistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: seeing is not itself something seen. I make the point "high functioning autistic" becaue his mental difference enabled him to think thoughts that would never "cross" a normal person's mind. He wa able to be puzzled by "the obvious". Are you?

[ man looking into heaven ]

If you go looking for what is most fundamental, you will only find more "things" you will have found. The finding itself, i.e., the thinking act in act is what "underlies" all of it.

I may not have stated this clearly and it may not be what the asker it looking for. But what underlies any answer to any question is questioning, so study questioning itself and you are studying what is most fundamental: funda-mental: the level of mind (mental) underlying (funda) everything.

Everywhere you go, her you are. I knew a very astute man who said:

"Everything is the same thing: you learn more who you are."

[ Porky Pig ]

"That's all, folks!"

+2024.01.15 v226
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