Do You Have an Obligation to Join a Professional Organization?

I'm ashamed to admit that I did not renew my membership in the American Philosophical Association this year. Things are tight and it was expensive, so I let it go. I feel guilty about it; but not being on the job market, I can live without it, so it went.

Do we have a professional obligation to join our professional organization? It is not a union, so there's not the free rider concern one might have if the organization engaged in collective bargaining. At the same time, organizations like that do speak for the profession and one ought to have one's voice a part of the discussion. If folks pulled out, then it would no longer be a legitimate group whose size gives it a seat at the table in matters of public discourse.

Is there an professional obligation to join?

Pity Party

Haven't done this one in a while. Whom do you feel sorry for this week?

I feel sorry for Fred Phelps, spiritual leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, who has spent the last decade working his tail off to become the undisputed face of ignorant religious bigotry and lunacy for this nation only to get upstaged by some moron from Florida who threatens to burn the Koran on 9/11. All that work, all those signs, all the miles he's traveled protesting funerals and this schmuck gets national air time and even mentioned by the President for something that takes no creativity. Burning the Koran is so 1933, c'mon, and HE gets the attention? Dude, you were robbed.

I feel sorry for the fire chief of Boulder, Colorado. A major wildfire is raging and he goes before the t.v. cameras to report and tell the people that he understands their pain. Among those displaced by the fire and fearing for their homes and possessions, he disclosed, are his in-laws who are now living with him. No one wants this situation to end as soon as possible more than I do, he told the crowd of reporters. He said that he clearly understands how stressful the situation is.

I feel sorry for the nation's wealthy. Sure, we have a ballooning deficit, but not to extend the Bush tax cuts to those who are rich is absurd. Why punish the successful who worked so hard to inherit their wealth? Why take money from those who earn hundreds of times more than others who work long hours creating the products and services that generate their deservedly massive salaries. It's not fair asking them to pay their fair share.

So, whom do you feel sorry for today?

Repent, Terry Jones

My Fellow Comedists,

On this, the 9th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it's all over the news that the Dove World Outreach Center led by the Dr. Rev. Terry Jones is threatening to mark the date by burning copies of the Koran. While this act of hatred and bigotry ought to disturb everyone, it is especially offensive to Comedists who remember Terry Jones without the southern accent and white biker moustache, back when he was a member of Monty Python. Maybe playing a woman so frequently left him vulnerable to the homophobia of the Christian right. Maybe his roles as an upper-crust clueless businessman left him with sympathies for the well-heeled. Whatever the reason for his change from intellectual, irreverent comic to intolerant fundamentalist attention-seeker, we are deeply saddened and choose to remember Terry Jones as he was...a smart, funny man in a dress.


Remember, Terry Jones, he's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Profitting From Non-Profits

Scott asks,

"Executives and employees of non-profit organizations can in many cases make a lot of money. (search here for some notable foundation and organization top salaries) It seems like a sham when a non-profit/not for profit exec drives around in $100,000 cars. But also, I don't think someone who manages multi-million dollar organization shouldn't be compensated decently.

Should the fact that someone is running a non-profit vs. for profit organization affect the size of the salary they should receive?

Personally, my gut reaction makes me think non-profit CEOs should take a pay cut because they should include the warm, fuzzy feeling you get working for non-profits (and presumably a deserving cause) as a benefit. But, I haven't been able to find good reason that would either back up or debunk my initial reaction."

There is a knee-jerk reaction that we have to large salaries in general, but deep unease when they are paid to executives of non-profits. Corporate executives draw their salaries off of the profits they accumulate for the shareholders of a corporations and are thereby seen in some way to be sharing in the wealth they generated. But those who run non-profits pull their salaries from donations that were made by people who thought that their money was going to help a cause they truly believe in. They thought they were helping the needy, not the greedy. To realize that your hard earned cash was not helping build schools in Haiti or food to flood victims in Pakistan, but going to pay for a car that you yourself could never afford does seem problematic.

But is it naive to believe that large charitable organizations, because they do good, ought to be run by poorly paid do-gooders? Often times, when it comes, for example, to policy matters, we have lobbyists on one side who are financed to the teeth by extremely well-off special interests and smaller groups of less well-financed people defending the needs of the less privileged or of the morally right. Three guesses who usually wins.

So, it does seem to be a utilitarian calculation. By paying big money to executives, are non-profits getting better people who will in turn raise even more money and be even more skilled at running organizations to both more efficiently provide help to those causes that need it and to more effectively advocate for change at the political level that will make the lot better for the most vulnerable? Sometimes you do get what you paid for. A money funnel does not solve problems, you do need folks with vision and organizational skill to put that money to its proper use and if you can get more out of the dollars donated by sending more than you'd like to one person's bank account, wouldn't the non-profit be well-served to do it. It would be an expensive, but prudent investment.

But, of course, that all hinges on a big IF. Do the high-paid executives really do the job better than there lesser compensated colleagues? Don't know, but that seems to be the point on which this discussion turns. We do lose a lot of good people from the non-profit sector because on many non-profit salaries, it's hard to raise a family and live comfortably. Should one have to give up personal security to live a life dedicated to a cause he or she believes in?

I wish I had a better answer, but I don't know where we would find the data to determine the effectiveness of our non-profit executives? We do have some regulars who work in the non-profit world (including Scott...and I'm looking at you too Ron). What is your sense?

Nonsequitors, Class Discussions, and Salamanders

Michael Schmidt asks,

"When having a classroom discussion about relatively open-ended things like ethics, how do you signal to students that you value their contributions, while at the same time move the discussion in a different direction (ethical issues in science) from what they seem to want to discuss (the culpability of the German population under the Third Reich)?"

Oooh, a technical pedagogical question.

The underlying concern here, that students will stop participating if they don't feel safe in speaking, if they don't sense that their contributions will be validated as meaningful (even if they aren't) is a real one. Students are under immense pressure in the classroom. Grades are part of it, but only a small part. Those aren't just their classmates sitting around them: they're the people who will decide whether they get into a given fraternity or sorority, they are the people they hope to sleep with, they are the their entire peer group with whom they spend 24 hours a day, not just three or four hours a week and seeming too dumb or too smart is a risk.

The key to overcoming the worry voiced here requires us to enlarge the frame. The response to the off-topic comment will exist within a larger classroom context. Just as your best friend can tell you to STFU and you won't get offended, so too establishing a certain type of environment in the classroom is crucial. I do it two ways. One is with humor. It relaxes people. If you show that you are both deeply passionate about the subject and willing to laugh while discussing it, it sets a certain tone in which you can take things seriously without being completely serious. I also ask for questions, auto mechanics to quantum mechanics and use that time to show that I can and will take any comment or question seriously no matter how stupid it seems on the surface, showing it to have deeper implications.

By establishing this sort of feel to the room, a student will be less likely to internalize pulling the discussion away from their point back to where you wanted it to go. They won't feel slighted or called out for being stupid if they are more relaxed.

But then there's the question of dealing with the off-topic comment at the time. Two techniques that I use. The easy one is the extended dismissal. You want to say that while this is an interesting question, this is not a point we should be talking about right now. Notice that statement has two parts. First validate, second steer. Expand the validation by repeating the insight in new terms (a couple of them technical) and say in a sentence how this is connected with a live or classical and important debate. Then say, "This is actually something we talk about for weeks in philosophy 2XX, which is a great class. But I have something up my sleeve, I want to narrowly focus on this question."

The second technique is my favorite. It's intellectual improv, the Kevin Bacon approach, where you take what seems like a random comment and as seamlessly as possible make it appear to have been germane to the conversation the whole time. To use the example in the question, I would take the comment about the Third Reich and relate it to ethical issues in science by discussing the Nazis attempts to brand the theory of relativity as Jewish science and then we have a case study for the ethics in science point I originally wanted discussed. (Of course, that would be an easier step for me since I am writing a book on the subject and may just have some happy, happy news about it to report in the next couple weeks -- he types crossing his fingers, knocking on wood, and hoping that Gwydion doesn't use this as an excuse to start talking about superstition again...)

Other techniques?

Free Trade and Fair Trade

An anonymous guest writes,

"What's the strongest case in the Free trade versus Fair trade argument? Do you a good book to recommend for further review?"

The argument on the free trade side is based on idea that economic growth benefits the entire economy. If we eliminate tariffs and other barriers to trade and leave the marketplace to its own design, then it will work with maximum efficiency, relocating jobs to where they produce the most goods at the lowest cost and creating a positive climate for consumers. This will give rise to an increase in economic activity and this causes a multiplier effect that will in turn allow prosperity to spread. If a rising tide lifts all boats, government control over economic behavior between nations is a dam that artificially keeps the tide from rising. By opening the dams and letting the water flow where and how it will, both economies will benefit.

Those on the fair trade side of things disavow this deep religious faith in markets for two reasons, one economic and one ethical. The economic argument contends that the increase in trade that results from opening markets does not positively affect all, but in fact negatively impacts the most vulnerable. Free trade might work, the line goes, if the playing field were level in terms of labor standards and environmental regulation, but this is not the case. As it stands, employers will take the jobs of those who have the fewest other prospects and move them to countries where they can get away with treating the workers the least humane and pollute with impunity. Arguing that those people benefit because this makes plastic goods at Walmart cheaper is missing the larger point. Yes, free trade does benefit some -- those among us with the most already -- but to think that benefiting them will then help everyone else is tantamount to thinking that one could dump gallon buckets of paint over the roof of a house and have it coat the walls evenly. Free trade, on this view, further exacerbates the divide in wealth causing even more to accumulate at the top to the detriment of those at the bottom.

The moral argument is that the move to free trade forces those who have the most reasonable safeguards for workers and the earth in place will then have to weaken them to remain competitive. Doing the right thing puts you at an unsustainable disadvantage, leaving you with the conundrum "do I do the right thing for the people and planet and let them starve or do I harm the people and planet in the name of helping them?" The third option is to insist that everyone do the right thing before they are allowed to play the game, but this is a rejection of free trade.

As for books, the only thing that pops to mind (and it's not a perfect fit) is Beth Shulman's The Betrayal of Work. I know others here (yes, I'm looking at you, Kerry) read a lot more on these issues and may have other suggestions.

Dangerous Fiction and More Dangerous Non-Fiction

Gwydion asks,

"What is the most dangerous fiction of the last 2500 years?"

It depends upon what we mean by dangerous. Dangerous to whom? Fiction derives its power by creating worlds which do not exist, but yet bear enough resemblance to the world which does exist that we are led to draw inferences about reality from the fantasy that can manipulated by what it is intentionally or unintentionally added in and left out.

If it means danger to the power structure, then we can look at works like Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle which take real evil and humanize it by having us sympathize with fictional characters forced to live out in front of our eyes what we are able to successfully avoid by diverting our glances in the real world.

If on the other hand, we mean dangerous to the culture, we can look at a book like The Fountainhead which creates a fictional world designed to further ingrain harmful biases against those who are most in need of empathy. Dangerous fiction is writing that justifies the worst in us by oversimplifying the complexity that we live in.

Philo asks,

"Are political arguments (in newpaper columns, on TV, or blogs), as an effort to change people's politics, ultimately futile, if one's political orientation is biological?

"People's values are deeply embedded in their biology and genetic heritage," says UofT Professor and co-author Jordan Peterson. "This means you have to take a deeper view of political values and morality in terms of where these motives are coming from; political preferences do not emerge from a simple rational consideration of the issues."
[ http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/06/09/personality.predicts.political.preferences ]"

Multifaceted question. I think that the premise of the question, that some aspect of one's political stance is strongly affected by biological factors is correct. There is no doubt that one's basic stance towards others is a major factor in determining one's politics and this comes at least in part from biology which may be affected by genetic, environmental, or other sources.

If it were completely deterministic -- if there were conservative or liberal genes -- then the question would be moot. But, of course, it is much more complicated than that. Surely, the Enlightenment picture of humans as rational calculators who weigh arguments and act according to the most reasonable is a gross oversimplification in the other direction, but political discourse does indeed play some active role sometimes in getting some people to change or at least reconsider long held positions.

At the same time, I don't think that opinion pieces are simply meant as rational considerations of issues. They are not meant to persuade in and of themselves. I believe that they are larger aspects of political p.r. No corporation believes that someone watching one commercial or seeing one billboard will suddenly decide to purchase their product, much less be moved to stop buying a competitor's product. But that is not the goal of the commercial speech act. The idea is to create a cloud around the consumer in which the product becomes a normal part of life, becomes comfortable, and thereby an option out of reflex.

In the same way, we have political messaging going on, where the idea is to associate ideas with images or concepts, not create logical inferences about them. This is the genius of Frank Luntz. Don't make arguments to convince people because it doesn't matter whether you are right or wrong, it only matters if you win and emotions are more powerful than logic. The purpose of much political speech to create a comfortable worldview within which one's policy preferences become natural.

This is not to say that we do not want inference within our political views, we do, because we are loathe to admit how much of it is indeed based on emotion and personality and so op/eds and the like often serve to backfill justifications for predetermined beliefs.

Baby Talk and Baseball

Kerry asks,

"Why do many of us speak to our pets in baby talk or in a voice different from our normal one?"

My conjecture is that because we think of our pets as our children. Now, it is actually a good thing to talk to newborn babies in our high pitched baby voice. The high pitch, especially a modulated high pitch, stimulates neural activity in the very young brain. Studies of the infants of depressed women show a marked retardation in the development of certain faculties and this is traced in large part to the difference in auditory stimulation. When one is depressed, one marker is a flat affect expressed in many ways, but in one's voice clearly. So, for the youngest children, the baby voice actually has biological value.

Our pets are thought of as members of the family, but ones we need to take responsibility for all the basic needs -- feeding, cleaning up after, training in the ways of living with the family. In these ways, pets are a lot like young children and my guess is that these similarities -- as well as that they are cute and look somewhat but not exactly like us -- trigger behaviors that are usually reserved for our treatment of kids.

PeterLC asks,

"Who is the greatest baseball player of all time and why? Let's settle it here for all time."

It's a pseudoquestion. It has no answer for two reasons. The first is Aristotle's objection to Plato in the Nicomachean Ethics -- there is no good, only good for. It is meaningful to ask whether Brooks Robinson or Mike Schmidt was the greatest defensive third baseman. It is meaningful to ask whether Sandy Koufax, Lefty Grove, or Whitey Ford was the greatest left-handed pitcher. It is meaningful to ask of all the ball players ever, who had the greatest impact on the game or who was the best leader in the locker room. But best ballplayer ever requires a "best for what?" answer first and that is precisely what this question doesn't give.

Second, even if we could answer this question, the problem is that we would have to be pulling from an incomplete data set because of the racism that keeps a number of the greatest players who ever played out of the conversation. The feats and talents of the Negro League players were not tallied or storied in the same way as their white counterparts. Josh Gibson, for example, should by all rights be a part of that conversation, but inevitably wouldn't be.

Ruth.

YKW asks,

"Two of the best baseball players of all time are also two of the biggest morons not worthy of being remembered, Cobb and Rose. And Bonds ain't far behind them on both accounts. Coincidence? Discuss."

Already did in one of my posts that has generated the most traffic in this blog's history -- the one discussing the absurdity that is Ayn Rand's "philosophy" titled "Is Human Excellence the Mark of Mental Illness?"". I do believe there is a reason why the greats were also head cases. Natural talent is enough to make one really, really good. But to be truly great, you have to have a certain kind of insecurity that drives you incessantly, that leads to irrational effort and focus, that allows you to devalue other parts of your life that ought to be valued in order to concentrate on this one element to a degree that is less than healthy. And that sort of insecurity also tends to make one a difficult personality, to see others as threats or inferior, to need to put others down to lift oneself up. you see it in every realm, not just sports. A lot of greats in every field are awkward human beings outside of the performance of their task.

Auto Mechanics to Quantum Mechanics

I have schtick I do at the beginning of all my classes where I let students ask any question at all, anything from auto mechanics to quantum mechanics and if I don't know the answer I try to find it. When I first started the Playground, some former students asked if I could recreate it here, so every once in a while I do. If there is a question you've always wanted to ask, let 'er rip and we'll try to get to as many as I can during the week.

Porsches, Beetles, and Freedom

Today is 135th anniversary of the birth of Ferdinand Porsche, the Austrian engineer who created some of the most iconic automobiles in history. While he did design and build some of the early sportscars, the company bearing the family name was actually started by his son, Ferry. The father, on the other hand, is responsible for the greatest of the anti-sportscars, he is the brain behind the Volkswagen Beetle.

Porsche's original concept in the early 30s was a "car for everyone," a vehicle that would take automobiles from being playthings of the wealthy to standard means of transport and he had made long strides in making it. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, he liked the idea and brought it under the Reich's umbrella, changing the name slightly to Volkswagon -- the People's Car.

The great irony of this story is that the general who led the American troops in the World War Hitler started, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would become president and create the interstate highway system. These roads, envisioned originally in part as a means for moving military resources quickly about the country, combined with this vehicle and its microbus offspring with their facist roots to become the American symbol of life on the road, of the counter-culture with its anti-war commitments. War gave us our symbol of peace and fascism gave us our symbol of freedom.

Social Science and Technology

I'm leading a faculty development seminar designed to encourage the creation of Science, Technology, and society classes, courses that look at the ways in which science and/or technology affect and are affected by culture. At our first meeting yesterday, we began discussing the difference between science and technology. Science is the search for explanations for and the rules that govern natural phenomena. Technology, on the other hand, consists of human made tools that alter the way we do things. The two are different. One can create new technological advances without understanding anything of the science underlying their workings. Similarly, one can study science without any concern for applications.

But, of course, they are interconnected. New advances in our understandings of the way the world works does allow us to design new and better tools to solve preexisting problems. Similarly, new technologies often force us to realize that the world around us is more intricate and complex than we had thought before.

But when we think of scientific advances giving rise to new technologies, we think natural science -- physics giving us transistors, chemistry giving us plastics and Teflon, biology giving us new hybrid crops and gene therapy. But what about the social sciences? Do they spark technological advances? If a sociologist figures out a new way of organizing ourselves in a group that would make for a more efficient transfer and compilation of knowledge, for example, would that notion be a new technology? Would an economist who developed a new taxation scheme which increased fairness and encouraged economic growth have given us a new technology? Would a political scientist who develops a new voting regimen, something like instant run-off voting, or a new parliamentary structure be endowing humanity with a new technology?

We often think of technology in terms of objects, material tools we can hold in our hands like a light bulb. But now that most technological advances are really just clever sets of lines of code, should we consider these developments from the social sciences to be technologies too?

The End of the Combat Mission and a Failed Experiment

Last night, the President, as he campaigned to do, declared an end to the combat mission in Iraq. I heard it reported on several news outlets that the reason for the invasion had been "to find weapons of mass destruction which were never discovered."

This is at best sloppy, at worst deceptive on the part of the news organizations. The weapons of mass destruction line was never a serious one among those who started this war and was adopted strictly because of its rhetorical power -- it polled best and was unassailable by critics. Insiders in the Bush administration admitted that this was not their true rationale and while it may be true that it was swallowed by those on Capital Hill who voted to fund the operation and in the media who pushed it on the public, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon stocks were not the reason we went in.

Immediately after 9/11, Iraq was put on the table despite the fact that the nation and its brutal autocratic government had nothing to do with the attack. There was a longing from day one of the Bush administration to invade Iraq and they needed and excuse and cover that would manufacture consent. But why Iraq? Why couldn't they be satisfied with invading Afghanistan where there was a real link to the attacks? Or why not focus on Saudi Arabia where many of the hijackers and Osama bin Laden came from? There's plenty of oil there, why not them?

The fact is that the plans for Iraq had been in the works among heavyweight conservatives for a long time. Going back to the 90's, they gathered under the auspices of a think tank called the Project for the New American Century and formulated a plan. This plan was equal parts ideology, crony corporate capitalism, and scam.

The neo-conservatives who formulated this view differed from the conservative realists who sought a moderated peace and the old-line conservatives who had an isolationist, fortress America bent.

The basis for their view was an intellectualized version of "we're #1!" From conservative political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, neo-conservatism is based on a sort of neo-neo-Hegelianism. In Fukuyama's essay "The End of History?", he argues that liberal democracy is the ultimate form of government. All humans intrinsically will to be free. If you remove the impediments to that freedom, liberal democracy will spontaneously generate. As it spreads across the globe, it will lead to less and less conflict creating greater stability.

The neo-cons saw the newly sprouted liberal democracies as necessarily coupled with corporate capitalism. If you took down a repressive government, then a liberal democracy and open market would replace it. That country would have a multitude of needs which could be immediately filled by American-based corporations who would be able to rush into the void creating a higher standard of living in the invaded country, new profits in a new expanded market for the corporation, and a country that would then become economically dependent upon, politically grateful to, and therefore in every way a committed ally for the U.S.

Iraq was an easy target. It was living under sanctions that crippled its economy and military. No fly zones in the north and south left the government only in control of a third of its area. It was politically unstable inside that middle third. From the first Gulf War, there was already a negative feeling towards it on the part of the American public. In addition, it had the natural resources to generate the wealth that would fuel the whole project. It wasn't an accident that the original name for the invasion was Operation Iraqi Liberation. It was the perfect laboratory for the neo-conservative experiment.

Soon after Saddam Husein's government fell, a couple of enterprising Iraqis tried to start a cell phone company. You could think that the neo-conservatives who pay homage to the free market and the power of capitalism at every turn would laud such vision, such resourcefulness. But no. they were immediately shut down. these entrepreneurs were stepping on toes because in the run -up to the invasion, Bechtel, a major contributor to the G.O.P. was promised monopolistic control of the cell phone market. It was to be controlled by conservative and corporate interests.

And these insiders had their own insider ready to take over as their buddy at the top. Ahmed Chalabi was a frequent guest at the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks. He was the head of the Iraqi National congress, a group opposed to the regime and friendly with U.S. interests. When the invasion started, the Bush administration made sure to parachute Chalabi himself and several compatriots into the country with weapons to make it look like he was a returning hero who could then be installed as the new President with nationalistic credentials. But the Iraqis didn't fall for it and he was not embraced by the people at all. The neo-cons, on the other hand, did fall for it as Chalabi ended up being an Iranian agent. The neo-cons were trying to give control of one of their designated "Axis of Evil" countries over to another member of that club. Geo-political Candid Camera at its best.

And so the whole experiment failed, crashed and burned. But any politician who pointed out the obvious was branded as unpatriotic. As it became undeniable, the move was to argue that it wasn't the invasion that was wrong, but that the occupation was poorly executed. Of course, this line undermines the entire reason for going. The liberal democracy and new market for American corporations were supposed to be unavoidable. they were supposed to just spring up, coming up from the ground like Jed Clampett's bubbling crude. But it didn't. The experiment was a complete and total failure.

But the most disappointing failure is that exactly what failed is not being pointed out. And for that reason, the legitimate fear is that we may be destined to repeat it.

Drinking Games

I had lunch yesterday with a Playground regular and had an interesting discussion about an element of college policy. Underage students are not allowed to possess alcohol, those of age are, but even those who may legally purchase and imbibe are not allowed to play drinking games. The rationale is that the games lead to unhealthy binge drinking which is the cause of a number of problems on campuses across the country including alcohol poisoning and in some cases death. The question was whether the college should be able to restrict how one drinks or what one does while drinking and not just the act of drinking itself. Does the prohibition of games keep students from learning the necessary lessons needed to control their own drinking? Is it justified on utilitarian grounds?

Mental Health Parity and Identity

One of most celebrated questions in philosophy is the mind/body problem, that is, are the mind and the brain the same thing or different things. If they are different, how, if at all, are they interconnected? Let's take an oblique approach to this in terms of treating mental dysfunction. One often hears arguments for "mental health parity" (as opposed to "mental health parody" which involves humorous sketches including Sigmund Freud) according to which health insurance ought to cover treatment for psychiatric and psychological issues in the same way that it does bodily concerns. The question immediately raised is whether psychological issues are, in fact, simply a subset of physical issues. There is no doubt that mental health overlaps with physical health, that neurotransmitter issues, for example, have behavioral effects, but is mental health completely subsumed under physical health in the same way that, say, cardiology would be or do parts of mental health treatment lay outside of the realm of medical treatment for physical well-being?

Felon Suffrage

Every once in a while you hear about reconsideration of restoring felons' right to vote after they've been released from prison. But I want to take the question back a step. Should felons lose their voting rights at all? Incarceration can be justified in terms of punishment, but more pressingly in terms of the need to separate certain people from the society for safety reasons. But do I really need to be protected from their votes? Have they shown themselves so irresponsible in the use of their freedoms in trampling the rights of others that they should be stripped of one of the most important elements of citizenship?

Novel Statements

One of the most amazing aspects of our linguistic faculties (and I don't mean Spanish professors) is our ability to create and understand entirely novel statements. It is one thing to be conditioned to respond to certain stimuli in linguistic ways. Someone hands you something, you say "Thank you." someone says "Thank you" to you, you say "You're welcome." But it is something else entirely to utter and comprehend sentences that have never been said before.

Teaching is interesting in this way, because if you speak enough, try to come up with enough new and useful metaphors, you will find yourself saying something every once in a while that you are sure has never been said before in the entire history of language, a completely new sentence.

And that's today's challenge. Come up with a sentence that you think has never been spoken or written. My offering:

I like my drill sergeants like I like my tofu, extra firm.

Others?

Avocations

Today is opening convocation. The school year is starting. I meet my freshman advisees today -- and what a bunch they are. Looking over their SAT scores and transcripts, they are incredible. Overachievers doesn't begin to reach it and to top it off, they will be in my First Year Seminar class, Einstein in Wonderland: Physics, Philosophy, and Other Nonsense. It's going to be a good semester.

But today, a full four years before graduation, I begin to see their concern about finding a job, a good job, and it makes you sad.

A couple days ago, I was in Dancing Bear, our favorite toy store, picking something up for the shorter of the short people's birthday and got to talking to the owner who used to be a research biologist before starting a business selling cool toys -- virtually no plastic and very few battery operated gadgets, about half of them are the ones you and your parents and grandparents remember from childhood and half are new really neat, interesting games. He was telling me that he worked for years in a lab where no one was happy and as a result he was miserable. But now he hangs out and plays all day. Everyone who leaves his stores is smiling. It's just a fun place with a joyful atmosphere. You could see someone who found his niche. It isn't what he studied in college. But it is what gives him a happy life.

And that is something that I worry that we lose sight of in this culture. You are what you do. You can't leave work at work. If your job is unfulfilling or overly stressful, it will impact your relationships, everything else. But with the economy like it is, folks are thrilled to have any job. The "American Dream" deals with what you have not what you do.

How do I communicate this to students who are worried about student loan debt? Who are concerned about marketability? Who see college as vo-tech training? Who have parents who are stoking these fears?

D.U.C.K.: Tastes Like Chicken Edition

"Seemingly Trivial Unanswered Problems In Discourse," which goes by the acronym D.U.C.K., is an exercise in which we take a question that should not be asked, a question that seems to have no answer or a perfectly trivial answer and actually have a discussion about it for no good reason.

which did come first, the chicken or the egg?

Can You Understand Any Philosophy Without Understanding All Philosophy?

A very funny cartoon:



One of the things I tell every one of my classes is that philosophy must be understood as a conversation. If you want to understand what a philosopher is really saying, you read his or her words closely, but you also need to know whom s/he is talking to. When you overhear a cell phone conversation in a restaurant, you can make sense of much of what is said, but some of the utterances are meaningless without knowing what the person on the other end of the discussion just said.

At the same time, arguments are sound or not because of their structure and the truth or falsity of their premises. Should it really make a difference what the argument is a response to? Every grad student gets sucked into this trap wherein one cannot begin philosophy anywhere past Thales.

But can you? Can you understand any philosophy without understanding all philosophy?

Moral Barometer

Here's a question I like to ask from time to time both because it is an interesting question, but also because it is interesting to see how the answers change over time.

What is the most pressing moral issue of the day? If there was one topic that we need to address as a society right now, what is it?

Just Asking

The second most horrendous act of terrorism in the United States was committed by Christian nationalists who intentionally planted their bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City knowing full well that the facility had a daycare center. And yet despite the religious beliefs of these terrorists who intentionally murdered innocent Americans, including young children, there are two Christian churches -- the City Church of Oklahoma City and the First Baptist Church -- within blocks of the site. Why aren't we hearing the wringing of hands about that from those who are opposing the Muslim community center in Manhattan?

What's The Difference: Juicebox Edition

What is the difference between a juice, a punch, and an ade?

(I always hoped there would be a rock concert benefit for victims of tick-borne illnesses called Lyme Aid.)

What Is a Vegetarian?

Despite the fact that we keep a meat-free home, the shorter of the short people will occasionally say that he is the only vegetarian in the household because he has never had meat in his life. He worries that if he ever accidentally ingests something that has meat in it, he will no longer be a vegetarian. This, of course, is far too strong a definition. One can become a vegetarian and legitimately be one.

But it does raise an interesting question about the definition. What is it that makes one a vegetarian?

Is it the result of what you eat? If someone thinks he is eating meat, intends to eat meat, tries to eat meat, but is fooled by someone substituting non-meat alternatives so that he is, in fact, not eating meat, would that make him a vegetarian?

If it is solely what you eat, how long before it counts as vegetarianism? Surely someone sitting at McDonald's is not a vegetarian in the moments he drinks his large Coke in between bites of his Big Mac. In the same way, it seems absurd to say that that I'll be a vegetarian on Wednesdays. But it does not seem meaningless to say that I'm going to become a vegetarian for a year. What's the difference?

Is it a matter of intent? At what used to be our favorite Korean restaurant, we would order these delicious mung bean and scallion pancakes as an appetizer. It was only years later, just before the place closed down, that we learned they had always had pork in them. TheWife during that period had been a vegetarian and was selecting her foods with the intention of avoiding meat. She failed through no deliberate act of her own. Was she wrong in thinking herself a vegetarian at that point?

Suppose someone fully intends to be a vegetarian, but slips occasionally, say, once a month or every other month into old habits and has shrimp in a Chinese restaurant or a piece of fried chicken. Is this person a vegetarian?

Does it matter if there is a reason for the decision? Whether it is for health or ethical reasons, does a person have to have a purpose or explicitly make the decision? Does it have to be explicitly stated to oneself. Is it something you have to declare yourself or can you unwittingly wake up one day and realize that you have been a vegetarian for the last six months?

What makes someone a vegetarian?

The Feast of Saint Gary

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend is the feast of Saint Gary. Gary Larson turns 60. Creator of The Far Side, the most consistently clever comic strip ever. A couple classics:




Your favorite?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Philosophy (huh) What Is It Good For?

Yesterday was George Soros' 80th birthday. One of the world's wealthiest men, he made a fortune investing. Before that, he was a student of Karl Popper at the London School of Economics and claimed that his application of Popper's falsificationism to the market was one of the reasons he was so successful.

This is one of those stories we pull out when asked by students or parents, "Sure it seems interesting, but what is philosophy good for?" Pointing out that Aristotle showed us that something can be good without being good for anything, or that Kant distinguished between categorical and hypothetical imperatives, never satisfies these folks.

The professor of my very first undergraduate philosophy class, Bruce Goldberg, was asked and, being a good Wittgensteinian, responded that it wasn't good for anything but that there were a bunch of people who were obsessed with these questions and it was safer than having them out in public. A funny line, but surely wrong.

So, what is philosophy good for?

Unfortunate Acronyms

TheWife used to work for a recycling facility run by the state department of the environment and so we've been doing all of our banking for years with the State Employees Credit Union, SECU. The acronym has a vaguely unsavory sound to it and it was remarked that it is a good thing that we don't belong to the Fordham University Credit Union whose acronym more properly belongs to Bank of America.

Thoughts immediately turned to the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, whose acronym CoNDoM would be funny in any case, but for a Catholic women's college is magnificent in its irony.

Other examples of funny/inappropriate acronyms?

Do We Need to Get Away?

Vacation is surely a modern construct, but is it a necessity of contemporary life? Do we need vacation time? We call taking the occasional day off a "mental health day" but is this a metaphor or meant to be understood literally? Is getting away from it all in the sense of going somewhere else important? Are "stay-cations" able to serve all the same functions or does a change of scenes do something itself?

Wave That Flag

The following question was asked by a fellow Playground friend,

I currently live in a theme house belonging to Gettysburg College. This house operates on a Civil War theme, and--coincidentally or not--usually houses quite a few very conservative people. I'm your basic liberal philosophy major, but I'm happy to adopt a political live-and-let-live policy most of the time. But now, somebody has decided to fly the flag co-opted by the Tea Party on the front of the house, thus seemingly indicating to passersby that the Tea Party is somehow endorsed or supported by the entire house, myself included. Of course, I am repulsed by the Tea Party.

So what do I do? Do I let it fly (the easiest course of action), and just stew quietly to myself, continuing to inhabit a house marked by the emblem of the Tea Party? Do I decide my moral responsibility to my own conscience and to tolerant people everywhere trumps legal concerns and take the flag down, thus potentially risking a spat over someone's property rights? Do I, on the contrary, turn this into a legal matter, and argue that the individual right of whatever student put up the flag to fly it is negated by the College's policies of non-discrimination? Do I take it down and abscond with it, avenging the theft of the Peace House rainbow flag of two years ago, which was, let's face it, probably perpetrated by this house (they also made off with one of the Peace House's rainbow-painted chairs, but luckily that was recovered in a later under-cover raid).

What do I do?

There's the active route of calling a house meeting and making it an issue. There's the passive-aggressive route and using one's own window to send a message in the other direction. There's the sneaky route in removing the flag. There's the defiant route in placing a symbol to the contrary next to the flag or on the other side of the entryway and letting everyone know you expect it not to be messed with. Others? What approach is the best idea?

I Am Serious, and Don't Call Me Shirley

My Fellow Comedists,

We have a wonderful video store, a dying breed, the sort where you can still rent video tapes and can find movies you haven't seen in twenty years that you loved back when. Looking through the stacks, I came across the DVD of the six episodes of "Police Squad." It seemed like the perfect time to introduce the short people to the work of my heroes Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.

They launched their career with the cult classic, "Kentucky Fried Movie," a series of odd little sketches that spoofed everything from Japanese kung fu films to high school science films and was a bit more risque than the material to come.

It set up their second film, "Airplane!" With a relentless style, ZAZ showed themselves to be the WalMart of comedy, quantity, quantity, quantity: no joke too cheap, no pun too bad, and no sight gag too cheesy. They get you going and never let you stop.

"Airplane!" led to "Top Secret!" ("Airplane 2" was not written by ZAZ, but by Ken Finkleman, who also wrote that great work of American cinema, "Grease 2.") a spoof of Elvis and James Bond films starring Val Kilmer and including the line "Sunday? That's Simchas Torah!" I believe which ought to be more widely quoted.

They took their work to the small screen with "Police Squad," but only six episodes were shot and only three aired. ZAZ had a feud with the networks demanding that they not use a laugh track because it threw off the timing and their ability to do rapid fire jokes. But the networks believed the American public too stupid to be able to figure out for themselves when to laugh and the show was canned. It did give rise to a series of three films, all good, but not as good as the show.

Their last work together was "Ruthless People" a more mainstream sort of comedy in which a nice middle class couple in trouble kidnaps a the wife of a wealthy businessman who unbeknownst to them hates her. Best line of the film is when the husband played by Danny DeVito refuses to pay the ransom in order to get his wife killed and the kidnappers, played by Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater send back a demand for less money. The wife, played by Bette midler, goes bananas screaming, "I'm being marked down?! Who was I kidnapped by? KMart?"

Great stuff top to bottom. This weekend's question -- favorite ZAZ scene?

I've got to go with this one (start at 5:30):

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Viagra as the Ultimate Baby Boomer Irony

When the baby boomers arrived, their sheer size allowed them to dominate the nation's demographic. In overthrowing the World War II generation's hold on popular culture, they idealized youth. "Hope I die before I get old," was more than a random lyric. Because they were young and wanted social power, they shaped the social picture of happiness around themselves exulting youth above all else.

But then they got old. Although they aged, the image of perfect humanity remained vibrant and youthful -- gray haired couples rising motorcycles and dancing late into the evening. But living up to that image is not entirely possible. Age is not just a state of mind, it is also a state of body. There is a reason why "Cocoon" came out when it did, but it is a fantasy. To help make that fantasy reality, baby boomers turned to pharmaceuticals. Viagra is the band-aid on the baby boomers' self-inflicted injury. To take power, they created an image that they cannot live up to and now have to consult a physician if they do live up to it for more than four hours at a time.

When Can Bigots Be Called Bigots?

Political correctness was designed to allow voices than had been oppressed to have a seat at the table. But the real effect has been exactly the opposite. It has created a bizarre equivalence of all viewpoints that does not allow us to call things what they, in fact, are. A movement intended to allow for intellectual tolerance has been used by those who are intolerant as a weapon to protect them from being called intolerant.

Federal judge Vaughn Walker overturned California's Prop 8 banning gay marriage, a law designed to do nothing other than deny honest, hard-working, tax-paying citizens rights and protections under the law. The factual basis on which they made their case was, he ruled, top to bottom faulty, completely flawed. His ruling was not a matter of interpreting the law, but a finding of fact, that the claimed evidence they cited as support was untrue. The only real argument was one based on "unfounded stereotypes and prejudices." From the ruling:

Proponents purported rationales are nothing more than post-hoc justifications. While the Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit post-hoc rationales, they must connect to the
classification drawn. Here, the purported state interests fit so poorly with Proposition 8 that they are irrational, as explained above. What is left is evidence that Proposition 8 enacts a moral view that there is something “wrong” with same-sex couples. See FF 78-80. The evidence at trial regarding the campaign to pass Proposition 8 uncloaks the most likely explanation for its passage: a desire to advance the belief that opposite-sex couples are morally superior to same-sex couples. FF 79-80. The campaign relied heavily on negative stereotypes about gays and lesbians and focused on protecting children from inchoate threats vaguely associated with gays and lesbians. FF 79-80; See PX0016Video, Have You Thought About It? (video of a young girl asking whether
the viewer has considered the consequences to her of Proposition 8 but not explaining what those consequences might be)...

Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples. FF 76, 79-80; Romer, 517 US at 634 (“[L]aws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons
affected.”). Because Proposition 8 disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification, Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

CONCLUSION

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

So, if the judge's argument is that the entire foundation of the case for Prop 8 is the use of biased stereotypes designed to create fear and hatred of a minority, then surely the bigoted nature would be pointed out in media outlets, right?

Of course, wrong. The utmost deference is given to the bigots and all we hear about is the political horse race, how this is BAD NEWS FOR DEMOCRATS. We can't call bigots what they are and that spells disaster for those politicians like our president who walk a tightrope trying not to call bigots what they are, knowing what they should do but lacking the ethical fortitude to actually do it. A victory against bigotry spun into a victory for bigotry. Sigh.

The Cultural Meaning of Physics

I was talking with an administrator the other day who was commenting that incoming students who tend to be more intellectual tend to put down physics as a potential major more than other natural sciences. I know it attracted me as well, even when I couldn't exactly say why. What is it about physics that has become iconic for smart? Is it that it was the field of study of Einstein who is our personification of smart? Is it that it asks the big questions, fundamental questions that seem as much philosophy as science? Is it that we use "rocket science" as the epitome? Is it that we brought in physicists for the atomic bomb and moon shot? Is it that physics classes in high school or college are harder than other classes? Ia it the role it has played historically in defining our place in the universe? Is it the way relativity and quantum theory are so tantalizingly absurd, yet universally successful? Why physics of all fields of study?

E-books?

Amazon has announced that its sales of e-books has surpassed its sales of hard cover books. The idea is to settle (in their interest) whether the e-book is for real or just the latest new Coke. I'm not a luddite, but I am a late adopter. I'm not going to spend the money until I'm absolutely sure I need to spend the money. As someone who writes a blog, I surely buy into the idea that people will read what one would write on a screen. But there is a difference between the shorter posts and and the longer books. So, those of you who have a Kindle or other e-book supporting device, worth it? Pros? Cons? Have lots and lots of the paper ones, what would I gain by starting to switch over?

Sporting Scoring

In tennis, the reason a score of zero is called "love" is because it is a transliteration of the French word "l'eouf" -- the egg. It's just a version of the term "goose egg" we use in English as a result of the shape of the zero. The other scores come from the way score was kept in early matches. Because you have points, games and matches to keep track of, score would be kept on two clocks instead of a scoreboard since each clock had three hands -- a second hand, a minute hand, and an hour hand whose positions could tell you the complete score second hand = point, minute hand = games, and hour hand = sets. On the first point, the second hand would be moved a quarter the way around, or to the 3 which for seconds is 15. On the second point to the six, or to 30 seconds... When on player wins his clock is wound forward, making the minute hand move to 1, showing the number of games won in the set. The losing player's clock is wound backward to the starting point.

In baseball, the reason that k is used to denote a strikeout comes from the original system developed by Henry Chadwick, the man credited with popularizing the sport. He was a Brit moved to America who was a sportswriter in New York reporting on cricket when he discovered baseball and decided to report on it as well. He would write up articles on the first professional games and in an effort to convey more information created the box score and the symbols needed for it. Since S was needed for a number of other terms, he used the last letter in "struck" to abbreviate struck out. He also introduced the batting average for hitters and the earned run average for pitchers.

In bowling, the reason three consecutive strikes is called a turkey comes from a marketing ploy from a New England bowling alley at the turn of the last century. Around the holidays, if anyone threw three strikes in a row, he would be awarded a live turkey. The name stuck.

The Feast of Saint Lucy

My Fellow Comedists,

This week sees the feast of Saint Lucy, the 99th anniversary of the birth of Lucille Ball. Born in upstate New York, she moved frequently as a child because of her father's job until he died and she was sent to live with her grandparents back in New York state. Her grandfather loved vaudeville and frequently took Lucy to see performances.

When she dropped out of high school and started dating the son of a gangster, her mother shipped her to the John Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York City, but only lasted a few weeks. She decided to go into show business the hard way and found work as a chorus girl, a fashion model, and ultimately the poster-girl for chesterfield cigarettes. Trying and failing to make it into parts on Broadway, she moved to L.A. where she got a small part in one of Eddie Cantor's movies which led to a non-stop string of bit parts that included work with The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers. these turned into larger parts and she became "the Queen of the B movies."

But then she made the move to radio and in 1947, she became Liz Cugat, the wacky housewife in "My Favorite Husband," which in many cases became her later tv show word for word. CBS was in the midsts of populating its new television network with versions of its successful radio shows and Lucy demanded that "My Favorite Husband" have one major chance, the husband on tv would be her real life husband, Desi Arnaz, who as a bandleader was always on the road straining their marriage. At first, the network balked because the idea of a white woman and a Cuban husband was worrisome to them in 1950. But Lucy displayed the toughness in the boardroom she would need later and got her way and "I Love Lucy" was born.

The success was unparalleled. They formed Desilu Studios which gave Lucy complete creative control and she created years of the best comedy on television for a decade. "I Love Lucy" in some ways launches many of the standard aspects of modern situational comedy, but is also the end of vaudeville recycling some classic bits for the next generation. Clever writing combined with slapstick, Lucy did it all. She became the first woman to run a studio in Hollywood and was known as a tough negotiator and a careful and caring boss turning out hits like "Mission: Impossible" and "Star Trek."

But it was Lucy Ricardo that makes her immortal. One word: Vitameatavegemin.



what's your favortie Lucy moment?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Name that Bud

Anheuser-Busch just lost a critical trademark case in Europe. A Czech company named Budvar has received the sole rights to use the name "Budweiser" for their alcoholic beverage in Austria and Germany. The name in German literally means "from the city of Budweis" of which Budvar's bier is, but Anheuser-Busch's "beer" is not.

So, Bud cannot be called Bud in Germany. It needs a new name. This is where we come to the rescue. Name that "beer." What should Bud be called in Europe?

My suggestion is to pull from the classic Monty Python philosopher's song sketch and say that since Bud is a lot like making love in a canoe it be renamed "Dasani." Other suggestions?

Single Sex Classrooms

In Pittsburgh, public schools are considering single sex classrooms:

Separating boys and girls is a long-established practice in private schools. In public schools, it is a still-controversial notion that has gotten a foothold in districts across the country in the last decade.

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials have entered the debate with plans to create two such programs at Pittsburgh Westinghouse High School next year in an effort to turn around the persistently low-performing school. The proposal, part of a plan to improve the district's high schools, could come up for a vote as soon as Wednesday.

Proponents argue that single-gender schools can raise self-esteem and improve aptitude, particularly among historically disadvantaged student groups.

Critics, who over the years have included the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women, counter that students ought to learn in a diverse environment, with gender as much a part of the equation as race, ethnicity and socioeconomic background.

Derrick Lopez, assistant superintendent for the city's secondary schools, said the proposed Westinghouse concept aims to engage parents and students in a model that has proven itself in the private sphere.

"We see the evidence at schools like Oakland Catholic, Central Catholic or The Ellis School," he said.

The single-gender model is premised on the idea that assigning students of only one sex to a classroom fosters a better learning environment by eliminating social pressures that can affect academic performance.

Under that theory, teachers don't have to deal with distractions created by students trying to navigate the intricate social balance of a coed environment. Students are free to express themselves without worrying about the pressures of impressing the opposite sex.

Detractors argue that the education process includes acquiring social skills needed in the coed world outside the schoolhouse. They say single-gender schools may well foster stereotypes and sexist sentiments about how boys and girls learn and may stunt their social maturity.

As someone who spent two years in a public high school and two years in a single sex high school, I am of two minds. The mixed high school had better classes and the presence of males and females, even at that hormonally highly charged age did not affect the level of academic intensity. But then, it was a very special group that I was with and I'm not sure I want to extrapolate from them as normal.

At the same time, as a teacher I see the effect that contemporary gender roles have on students, especially young women who -- sometimes intentionally, other times unintentionally -- dumb themselves down. The girls would be the ones benefiting from single sex classrooms because they wouldn't have to put up with the disruptions which usually come from the males and would feel freer to engage in higher level work.

So, are single sex classrooms something that ought to at least be an option in failing schools? Separate is never equal. Should that cut off the option right there? Is there something inherently wrong with the segregation or should it be considered as a legitimate tool?

Turing Tests and Tongue Twisters

When Doug Hofstadter came to visit last year, he made a point that I've continued to marvel at. When we think of artificial intelligence, we usually think in terms of machines being able to do well what we do well. The usual standard is what is called the Truing test wherein if you cannot tell the difference between a person and a machine when you are interacting with it, and it happens to be a machine, then we can call it intelligent. The difficulty of the Turing test is generally thought to be creating a machine that is up to our level. But Hofstadter's point is that to pass the test it would also have to be down to our level as well, that is, it would have to make the sort of mistakes that we tend to make.

Our brains are wired to do wonderful things, but there are also things that trip it up, often quite simple ones. The kids have been playing with tongue twisters lately and they are something quite amazing. They are simple arrangements of syllables, but ones designed to exploit our neurological shortcomings. There is a reason why some strings of sounds are hard to say and a machine would likely not fall prey to them.

The latest favorite has been:

You know New York. you need New York. You Know you need unique New York.

But the one that is the most amazing to me is the bathroom humor classic:

Three smart fellows they felt smart.

All tongue twisters cause predictable mispronunciations, but the incredible thing about that one is that the way the brain errs causes a second different string of sounds that forms a distinct, but meaningful sentence. It's almost like a palindrome of error. Does anyone know any other that works that way?

If not, what are your favorite tongue twisters?

The Meanings of Food

Doing the dishes last night, it struck me how differently different people see food. To TheWife, for example, food is medicine. The purpose of eating is to change the body's chemistry and cooking is an apothecary's art, preparing something to correct and improve health. Foods make you sick or better and the point of cooking ought to be to create that which makes you better.

LilBro, on the other hand, sees food in a radically different way. He's a gourmet and to him food is an artistic medium. The point of food is to look and taste pleasing. Color, texture, presentation are all part of the experience in a way TheWife would not consider. The ingredients are paints on a pallet and the kitchen a studio.

A friend of ours in the army sees food as nothing but fuel. It's just what you put in he tank and he doesn't much care about the taste and isn't much concerned about the content. Eating is just something you have to do, so get it done.

Acquaintances we have at the organic co-op where we shop see food as a political tool. Eating is a way to change the world. When you buy food like non-organic produce or processed "food" like Kraft macaroni and cheese at a traditional grocery store from farmers who grow crops for major agribusiness megacorporations, they argue, it is tantamount to making a political donation to a conservative PAC. When you eat organic, local, and vegetarian or free-range non-vegetarian it affects the entire system and changes the state of the country.

For my Mom, food is a gift you give to someone you are cooking for or for yourself. It is a chance to pamper or indulge. It is an opportunity to take time out of your day to do something nice for yourself or someone you care for.

Other senses?

RIP Daniel Schorr

One of my heroes has passed away. Daniel Schorr died in D.C. this weekend at 93. He was one of the Murrow Boys, working for CBS news from 1953. His gumption and intelligence allowed him to rise through the ranks until he became chief of the Moscow bureau during the height of the Cold War. His reporting rankled the Kremlin to the point where his visa would not be renewed by the Soviets. But he was loathed by nationalists on both sides and when he broke the story of Nixon's enemies list, reading it aloud on the air, he was shocked to find his own name there.

When Ted Turner created CNN, Daniel Schorr was the first on air person hired. While there, he not only helped create cable news, but showed dedication rarely seen in any field. An overhead light exploded just before he was on camera and sparks set alight his trousers. While many of the politicians he reported on metaphorically had their pants on fire, Daniel Schorr gave us the news with his literally burning.

His voice lived on for years as a senior news analyst for NPR where he served the role as elder statesman and the converse of Cokie Roberts, giving thoughtful, insightful, and contextualized understanding to the events of the day often bringing stories to the discussion that perfectly explained how things came to be what they are. There are few voices that commanded full attention as soon as they are heard, Daniel Schorr's was one. Whenver you heard that deep, slow, intelligent voice, you had to listen carefully because you knew whatever was about to be said was well worth hearing.

Rest in peace Daniel Schorr, you will be missed.

The Feast of Saint Red

My Fellow Comedists,

This week is the feast day of Saint Red -- not to be confused with Saint Redd. Red Skelton was the son of a clown. His father passed away while his mother was pregnant with him, but at a young age, he too became a clown. Selling newspapers as a 15 year old to bring in money for the family, vaudeville legend Ed Wynn who happened to be in town spotted him and added him to his traveling troupe. Skelton worked everywhere he could, eventually joining the circus his father had worked for years earlier. The training never left him. He went on to star in films, on radio and television, but while he did sketch and stand-up, he was always a clown. Not one for clever, witty, and subtle language, his trade was his face which he would change and change back with lightning speed.

He created a number of characters, most memorably Clem Kadiddlehopper, the blank staring, dim witted country bumpkin. Skelton was convinced that the voice for Bullwinkle the Moose was a Kaddiddlehopper impersonation and considering suing, but ended up not.



He was a comic of a by-gone age, physical and silly.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Is Cheerleading a Sport?

A federal judge has ruled out competitive cheer as a sport. Athletic programs at colleges and universities across the country have been considering it as one in order to meet Title IX requirements to fund male and female sports at commensurate levels. The argument is that it is a competitive activity that requires strength and precision in the same ways that gymnastics do. Since gymnastics is a sport, so too is competitive cheer.

The suit was brought by the Quinnipiac University women's volleyball team that was cut for financial reasons and the school tried to use the cheerleading move as a fig leaf. There's no doubt that this move was slimy, but the underlying question remains. Is cheerleading a sport?

The judge in the case argued that,

"Competitive cheer may, some time in the future, qualify as a sport. Today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganised to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students."

A peculiar argument. Why is the development of a competitive community a defining characteristic of whether the activity is a sport? One would think that the essential properties would be internal to the activity. If synchronized swimming is a sport, then it seems, so is cheer.

But one could argue, on the other hand, that it is a physical artistic not sporting activity. No one claims that marching band competitions are athletic events, yet they are physical and competitive in similar ways. They require coordination and stamina as well as precision and creativity in ways that are quite like cheerleading.

So, is cheerleading a sport?

Roots of Nerd Rock

There are a set of bands that are comprised of and have music aimed at nerds. Go to see Moxy Fruvous, They Might Be Giants, or Weezer and you'll be comfortably in the company of nerds galore. How far back does this movement go? Who are the founding fathers of it? Talking Heads would be an earlier case. One might argue that Steely Dan is a place where it splits of from art rock. There were a number of Dr. Demento type novelty records back in the 50s and Spike Jones in the 40s, but might be more parody than nerd fare. Lord Buckley in the late 40s/early 50s put out albums of verbal performance art set to music, but I'm not sure one could draw a straight line from one to the other. So, where would you put the roots of nerd rock and whose work belongs in the genre?

A little Lord Buckley:

Coerced Sample Pools

Every college, university, and research hospital has what is called an institutional review board to oversee every proposed experiment involving human subjects, screening them for ethical problems or concerns. This all started with the uproar over Stanley Milgram's experiment in the early 60s showing that people will obey authorities, even when it means causing harm to others that one would ordinarily not consider oneself capable of causing. As a result, there is now a set of stringent policies in place regarding treatment of subjects, confidentiality of data, and how long one can keep one's samples and records before destroying them out of concern for the privacy of those contributing to the experiment.

Yet, despite the psychological experiment that started it all off, an experiment that is taught in every psych 101 class, psychology departments often have a policy for those very 101 students that they have to participate in some number of experiments run by members and other students in the psychology department. When I took psych 101 in college, it was five experiments throughout the semester. We were always read the post-Milgram statement that we were free to leave the experiment at any time if we felt uncomfortable. but how free were we really? After all, it was a Milgramesque authority who told me to go there in the first place. I need five of these to pass this class, am I really going to walk out? Would it get back to my prof? Would it cause harm to my grade?

Is there an ethical problem with this sort of sample pool or is the facts that the experiments are vetted by the IRB and students can leave sufficient to overcome the problem?

You Must Be This Tall...

Bringing your baseball glove with you to a professional ballgame when you are well beyond 12 years old: optimistic, dorky, or safety conscious?

Sperm Banks and Moral Responsibility

When a man impregnates a woman accidentally through the usual means, he takes on responsibilities for the well-being of the child. The argument is that he acted in a way that he knew or should have known that this was a possibility and when it occurs, one has responsibilities for ones offspring. Why then is this not the case for sperm donors? They know that their action in making the donation will likely lead to a child, why do they not have any responsibility for its welfare? Is it that a contractual element exists? Can one really do away with such obligations contractually?

T-shirts

My Fellow Comedists,

TheWife and I took the kids up to Cooperstown this week and in the gift shop I saw an amazing t-shirt:



T-shirts are a classic Comedist medium. My favorite was red with a black image of Groucho, Harpo and Chico with the caption, "Sure, I'm a Marxist."

This week's question to those who also spent many hours with the Northern Sun catalogs (back when we had catalogs) -- what's the funniest t-shirt you've ever seen?

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Like we ever need an excuse to add this:

Concerts and the Health of the Music Industry

Off to my annual B.B. King show tonight with Lil Bro and the Old Man tonight. It's always a good time with good music and usually the only concert I go to over the course of the summer. It's not always been that way. I've seen a lot of shows, and I mean A LOT of shows. But because TheWife isn't much for music and especially because of the price of tickets, live music in large venues is something that has ceased to be a part of my life.

There have been a couple articles in the last week (one in The Washington Post and one in The Wall Street Journal) about the significant drop in ticket sales leading to the canceling of dates by acts like The Eagles and Limp Bizkit and the cancellation of entire tours by U2 and Simon and Garfunkel for health reasons. Sure the aging of baby boomer performers makes for good irony (hope I die before I get my 401k spent) and yes, concert ticket prices are nothing short of absurd. It has gotten so bad that Ticketmaster/Live Nation (evil scum that they are) are selling discounted tickets to shows that are only half sold -- $10 tickets for acts like Santana that they tried to sell for $50.

But I'm wondering whether this is an unintended consequence of the changes in the music industry due to the internet. When record companies controlled who made albums and who got radio time, there was a limited number of acts. But with file sharing, and the ability to post on YouTube and My Space, there is a much greater ability for small acts to reach listeners they could not have reached a generation ago. This however, does not necessarily lead to a following in the traditional sense. From the Wall Street Journal piece:

As aging musicians gradually exit the stage, few younger acts can consistently fill larger venues the way their predecessors could.It's not that young listeners aren't going to shows. About 8% of people aged 18 to 29 said they go to a concert once a month, more than any other age group, according to a Rasmussen survey from earlier this year. But considering how many young fans acquire and listen to music, the music seems to have less sticking power. For instance, 70% of the music obtained by 13-to-24-year-olds isn't paid for; instead, it's pulled from peer-to-peer networks, or ripped and copied from friends, according to the NPD Group. "They get so much free content, a lot of it they don't really value," says NPD entertainment analyst Russ Crupnick.

When 18-year-old Gordy Murphy of Fairfield, Conn., wants to sample new music, he typically grabs it for free at a free-music site ("It may be illegal. I don't know," he says). He intimately knows the 5,000 songs on his computer, but he rarely visits the sites of current artists in his collection, and thus rarely knows when they're releasing new music or embarking on a tour. "There's no way to keep on top of all that," he says.

Is the relationship that fans have with music the same as it was? When there were only three networks, those shows captured huge audiences. But now with hundreds of cable channels, each niche becomes smaller and more focused. Is the same happening with the music industry? Is the democratization of access to listeners also meaning the end of the big venue shows?

Can We Stick a Fork in Him Yet?

So a tape of racist, sexist, anti-Semite, drunk driver and wife beater Mel Gibson's verbal abuse has been released as they are going through divorce hearings. Why is he still working? Is it that he's good looking? Is it that his fame is pre-established before the world came to know that this son of a Holocaust denier is the scum bag that he is? Or is it that Christian conservatives are held to a different standard? As long as you are conservative, you are given a cultural get out of jail free card=. Rush Limbaugh, after his drug addiction scandal paid no price. Is this more of the same? The saying in the blogosphere is IOKIYAR -- it's o.k. if you are Republican -- conservatives can run people out of town for small slips if they are liberal and the press will act as their enforcers, but for conservatives? Of course not. He made a Jew hating movie about Jesus, he must be a good man. How much of a jerk does Mel Gibson has to be before we can finally be rid of him?

Ownership of Public Acts of Creativity

Interesting question emerging out of the Senate race in Nevada. The Nevada Republican candidate, Sharron Angle, is a complete nut job who won to the chagrin of party leaders because of Tea Party support. After the primary, she was convinced that she needed to seem more moderate, at least something approaching sane, and so she took down her web site filled with radical views and embarrassing quotations and replaced it with something more boilerplate. Harry Reid's campaign is reposting her old web pages in a "know the real Sharron Angle" move. Angle is threatening to sue Reid, arguing that it is her intellectual property. You cannot take someone else's work without his/her permission. This is not a case of plagiarism since the entire point is to attribute words to their author. It is a question of whether or not you maintain control of something's public presentation when you create it and take it public. We hear of musicians frequently taking legal actions to stop politicians playing their music at political rallies, most recently RUSH had their legal council contact Rand Paul's campiagn to have him stop using their music (and quoting their lyrics) at his campaign appearances. Is it the same thing? If royalties were paid to the artists, should musicians have control over who plays their songs in public? Should politicians be able to control who republishes their old webpages?

To Kill a Mockingbiord and Cultural Relativism

This is the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most important American literary works of the last century. A magnificent piece on many levels, one of the most important philosophical elements is the way it undermines the ethical view called cultural relativism.

When you teach ethics, something you hear all the time from students is "that's the way I was raised" or "that's what I believe because I am a _____." The idea is that ethical judgments are based upon cultural beliefs and practices. That's not how it is done here, so it shouldn't be done here. If they do it differently over there, then so be it, it is fine for them but not for us. Ethics is a matter of cultural norms and one culture should not judge any other. It is an attempt to be open minded, to realize that there may be more than one way to look at an ethical system and to establish moral claims on something empirical, sociological facts, widely held and enforced beliefs within a society.

Yes, cultural imperialism, where one culture takes over another in order to enforce its way of being, is problematic and has a long and troubled colonial history. But that does not mean that there is no way to ethically judge the norms of one's own or other cultures. There are and that is one of the morals of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Atticus Finch and his children pay a price when he defends Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. By standing up for an African American, by giving him the same vigorous defense that a white person would receive, is counter to cultural norms, norms that are enforced. What Atticus did certainly violated the social rules of Alabama in the 30s. But the point of the novel is to show us the moral bankruptcy of those accepted social mores. It is the upstanding Atticus Finch and the oppressed Boo Radley who see the ethical problems of the normal way of life in the post-Civil War South and who act in accord with moral dictates, not socially expected patterns of behavior.

We obey two masters. There are those rules of behavior that come from the culture and those that come from morality. They are not the same, although we hope that they come to overlap more and more as time goes on, it is not always the case. Sadly, it is often the pressure to be normal, and to avoid the shunning and humiliation that comes from running afoul of it, that overruns the power of moral rightness. What we hopefully learn from To Kill a Mockingbird is to realize that these two notions of right and wrong are not identical and that we need to think critically and rigorously about both.

Passing the Plate: Marriage Edition

My Fellow Comedists,

It is time to once again pass the plate. Other religions ask you to donate money, but we Comedists tithe jokes. So dig deep and be generous. This weekend is my wedding anniversary, so what better time to ask for marriage and relationship jokes?

My contribution is a classic:

A husband and wife were drinking their coffee after breakfast when the wife asks, "If I died, would you remarry?" Not looking up from his paper, the husband says, "What?" "If I died, would you remarry?" "I don't know. I guess." "Would you live in the house?" she asks. "I don't know," says the husband, "I guess. It's paid for. Why buy another house?" "Would you sleep in our bed?" she asks. "You have to sleep somewhere, it's just a bed." "Would you let her use my golf clubs?" "No." he said decisively. "You would live with her in our house and sleep with her in our bed, but you wouldn't let her use my golf clubs?" "No," replied the husband, "she's left-handed."

So, take my wife, please, or at least take this opportunity to give us your best relationship joke.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

What's the Difference: Summer Vacation Edition

What's the difference between a trip, a vacation, and a holiday?

Artist's Responsibility

Is art an activity engaged in by the artist or is it a relationship between the artist and the viewer. If it is the first, then it would seem that the artist's only responsibility is to the art itself. If it is the latter, then it seems like the artist has a responsibility to the viewer, to try to make the artistic relationship meaningful. Consider, say, Andy Kaufman whose comedy was so far out that audiences were left speechless at best, angry at worst. Is catering to your audience cheapening the art, turning it into mere entertainment or is it an essential part of engaging others artistically? Does the artist have to consider his audience at all?

Government Mandated Veggies

In Elena Kagan's Supreme Court hearings before the Senate's Judicial Committee, Oklahoma's Senator Tom Coburn asked whether it would be constitutionally permissible to pass a law requiring Americans to eat vegetables. Clearly a grandstanding libertarian question, but it does raise interesting questions. Given that this nation faces a severe public health crisis related to obesity which is itself in significant part a result of the normal American diet, what can the government do to help?

No, we can't mandate better eating habits, but it doesn't mean that the government is powerless either. In part, the government is responsible for our diet. We subsidize corn to the point where it is cheaper to buy than it is to grow. This means that we can cheaply produce all the processed crap that we see on the shelves of traditional grocery stores and we can feed it to cattle who grow bigger than they would on grass which is what they are supposed to eat. (It also increases exposure to e coli which is rampant because of the unnatural diet of our cattle. If an animal is put on a grass-fed diet in just the last week of its life, it reduces the amount of e coli bacteria in the animal by 90%, but doing the right thing is not something our beef industry takes too seriously.) Tax payers pay to make bad food cheaper than good food, which then causes us to have to spend more on health care. Why not cut corn subsidies and increase those on broccoli? (Hint: the first presidential caucus is in a state that rhymes with miowa.)

What else could we do as a nation to encourage better health? More sin taxes are one option. There is now, to John Boehner's sorrow, a new tax on tanning salons, something that contributes to melanoma. On the other side of the ledger, I've long thought that gym memberships and exercise equipment should be tax deductible. Belonging doesn't mean you will go and having it in the garage or basement doesn't mean you will use it, but it does make it more likely.

There is urban planning and development which could focus on making us less car dependent and make options like walking and biking more attractive.

What else is there? How could we use government to help make us more healthy instead of less?

Reflections on the 4th

Why is it that we treat the 4th of July as a martial holiday? With everything there is about this country to celebrate -- our advances in science and technology, our arts in terms of both high and popular culture, our geography, our diversity -- why is it that we focus on the military? I understand that the country began with the Revolutionary War, but it equally well started with smart people reflecting on the writings of Enlightenment philosophers and thinking hard about the nature of governance. Why is it only the fighting that we prize and not all the other things that we as a nation have created or model that we would be justifiably proud of?

Feast of Saint Rube

My Fellow Comedists,

This weekend is July 4th, not only the birthday of the United States of America and our own Gwydion, but also cartoonist Rube Goldberg. A native of San Francisco, he attended Berkeley and worked for a short period as an engineer before becoming a cartoonist. After a brief stint as a stand-up comic on the Vaudeville circuit, he worked for San Francisco papers drawing a number of strips including Mike and Ike after which the candy was named, and drew political cartoons which during the lead up to and during World War II earned him such hate mail that he had his sons change their names for safety's sake.

But he is most famous for his drawings of the inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts (a play on his own middle name, Lucius). It is for these cartoons in which simple tasks were accomplished automatically through incredibly complicated multi-step machines often including bombs, mice, and bowling balls that his name has become an adjective. He won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other awards for these strips and the cartoonists' award, "The Reuben" is named for him (although the sandwich is not). Here's one from the Rube Goldberg site showing the easy way to tee up a golf ball:



It is a little known fact that Rube Goldberg wrote a film script, Soup to Nuts, which not only featured a number of his machines brought to life (he was also a sculptor and the scuptures in the second clip are Goldberg's own work), but also featured for the first time on screen Shemp and Moe Howard and Larry Fine. Yes, it was Rube Goldberg who gave us the Three Stooges.





From all of us who love your strips, the Stooges, and the board game Mouse Trap, thanks Rube.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Of Magnums

If I want to legally operate a Dodge magnum, I need a license that requires a training class and an exam. The same is true in many states -- to the chagrin of gun advocates -- to legally operate a Colt magnum.

When I take my Dodge magnum for a drive, it needs a license plate, something that uniquely identifies my magnum from all others in case of wrong doing or accident. We can do the same for the Colt magnum, requiring etchings in the barrel that uniquely identifies the source of any recovered bullet. Yet this measure -- the Ammunition Accountability Act -- is being fought by gun advocates.

To put my Dodge magnum on the road, I need insurance in case I am at fault in an accident or in case my car gets stolen. This is a suggestion I've not yet heard, but want to put forward. Why shouldn't gun owners also have to carry insurance? The costs of gun related accidents and crimes are staggeringly high and the damage from stolen guns is extremely unfortunate. Why shouldn't they be responsible for covering at least part of those losses that come from police investigations and trials? Why shouldn't victims have a better chance at some sort of remuneration for their injuries and deaths of loved ones? Gun owners should have to carry insurance against indemnity. Just because I have the right to drive does not mean that I should not be required to be able to cover damage done by my driving. Similarly, just because one has the right to bear arms does not mean that they should not be required to be able to cover damage done by their guns.