No More Hummers!

Ah, the world continues its conspiracy to cheer me up.

General Motors' decision today to stop manufacturing Hummers has struck at the heart of the group who loved the vehicles most: America's assholes.  Across the nation, leading assholes spoke of a sense of loss and sadness caused by the decision, and suggested that they would now be searching for new ways to compensate for their small penises.

More Cheering Me Up!

New Rules for handling suspects our former democracy!

(None of that Miranda Warning and rule-of-law around here!  What are you, soft?  These are tough times!  We have underpants bombers to deal with!)

(Via The Poor Man.)

Herbert Obama

Michael Berube amuses me, as much as anyone can amuse me about what has been happening to what used to be my president, who is rapidly turning into, as Herr Doctor Delagar has started calling him, Herbert Obama (short for Herbert Hoover Obama):

Look, people, the proposed “budget freeze” is not a “freeze.” It’s more of a “chilly wind” or a simple “breeze,” like a “fudget breeze.” It’s not as if Obama gave us all a pony, and then there came a killing frost. The “fudget breeze” will not affect most of your favorite federal programs, such as defense, Medicare, foreign aid, Homeland Security, weapons development, Medicaid, the Pentagon, fruitbat subsidies, Social Security, stuff having to do with veterans’ services, and the Department of Blowing Shit Up.

They's more.

Also Via Language Log

Alan Turing

here's a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we're sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken—
very carefully scripted
but at least it's not encrypted
—and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?

(by Matt Harvey, published here)

Cap & Trade

Here's why I like Nate Silver's Blog FiveThirtyEight: ( though this post is actually written by Robert Frank): one of the best and clearest explanations of Cap & Trade and why it's a good plan I have seen yet.

Good News Again!

I've been off working on my portfolio -- I'm going up for promotion to Associate Professor, which is actually sort of interesting and almost fun, albeit a ton of work. It involves getting together everything I have done for the past six years, and writing "narratives" for the promotion committee about how I teach and how I "innovate" in the classroom, explaining my assignments and how I respond to assessments that show my teaching isn't working -- anyway, it's turning out to be cool, since I get to talk (write) about what I like best, teaching and how it works, only, yikes, exhausting?

And everything has to be documented.

And put in a binder, which requires operating a three-hole punch.

And tidy. I could be better at tidy.

And it's due November 1.

So I've been occupied.

But here is some good news I have found for you: although it did not look like good news at first, since you'll see at the opening that it confirms more Right-Wing Religious Parents indoctrinating their kids against science/evolution (evil-ution, as my students often spell it); but look how the instructors are dealing with the problem: wisely!

A few years ago, Pratt started holding meetings – open to parents, students, church members and others – to address their questions about evolution. She holds the annual session a few weeks before she begins the unit and gets about 200 people.

“It used to be that the whole unit was a struggle, and we were butting heads,” Pratt said. “This meeting helps everyone understand that science teachers are not the enemy. Now, the kids are showing up ready to learn about evolution.”

Other teachers said they try to fix students’ misconceptions. They explain how humans and apes share a common ancestor that no longer exists, not that humans and apes evolved from one another. They say that while “theory” may describe a hunch in everyday language, in science it is defined as an explanation supported by factual evidence to describe events that occur in our world.

That's how our side wins: enlightenment.

Their side has fear and ignorance. Our side has education. We will always win in the end. (Well, that's my hope, at least.)

I got your Utopian Vision Right Here

I finished grading my finals, and I put in my grades, and I have been having wandering the 'sphere and having me an episode.

Because what a bad semester this was, and what a rotten year the world is having, and what bad finals I had, and o o o o, I could go on.

Apparently I taught almost no one anything this semester. This is always so depressing. In one of my classes, where I swear I can remember explaining at length what feminism was and how to related to literature, and why it was so important to humanism and the Enlightenment experience in general, one of my smartest students, and yes, I swear, I swear to you this is an intelligent woman, she wrote in her final exam, the very first fucking line, well, she says, I am not a feminist myself, you know, because I don't hate men and I don't want them all to die....

I got another story rejected from yet another magazine, though this one sent me a really nice letter (we almost bought your bit of crap, see, but it was just not good enough, was it?), and mr. delagar is actually writing his dissertation, the bastard.

While brooding and sulking, I have been reading feminist blogs, because, you know, I don't feel quite bad enough; I came across this link where Dorothy Allison says interesting things about language and feminism -- go have a look, it's worth the read -- but one of the things she talks about is the first feminist work she read. It made me try to remember what my first feminist work was.

I wasn't always a feminist -- well, who is? No one is born a feminist, surely, so I should not get so blistering furious at those women in my classes because they haven't been enlightened yet. In fact, I clearly remember being fifteen or sixteen and reading that story by Robert Heinlein, Menace From Earth, where our heroine has her epiphany -- you remember: she is, like all the hero(ine)s in Heinlein's works, a brilliant young thing, able to blaze through every math course and knock through engineering problems with a flick of her little finger. Wants to design space ships when she grows up. But --alors! -- she's a girl!! Well, that won't stop her! She'll just be the bestest ever and they will have to hire her!

But she grows up and faces facts! No sense being the bestest ever if no one will hire her because she's a girl! She'll just, well, maybe she can be a stewardess instead! (Though in the end Heinlein has her marry her boyfriend and hints they will be designing spaceships together -- good thing he's there to be her daddy!) I remember reading this story and swallowing down its worldview whole. Yes, indeed. Them's the facts, ma'am.

My first feminist book was Joanna Russ's The Female Man. Do something for me, gentle readers: go from Menance from Earth to The Female Man sometime. Read the back to back. Just as a tiny exercise. Then look up cognative dissonance. Ai, I tell you. You will know what I felt at fifteen, with Russ's novel in my fist. Well, you probably remember it.

I was furious. What an evil book! Who could want women to be like that! That was -- that was-- that -- and not at all realistic!! Idiot, stupid, stupid book! Men weren't like that!

Then about six months I read it again.

Then I read it again.

Then I started reading other books -- not feminist books, mind you, because I don't think there were any other feminist books in my world yet: it would be another ten years before any of those showed up -- but I started reading other books through the lens of that book, and other books that were like that book, other books that kicked apart the world I had been living in: I started looking for that sort of book.

In a sense I still am.