Carlinisms…*

If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words?

From my dad, of course…

*I associate this kind of word play with the brilliant comedy of George Carlin…

From The Jerusalem Post:

Few are aware that just as the intense rocketing of Israel’s metropolitan areas was ramped up, the Kerem Shalom crossing to the Gaza Strip was reopened early last week. Trucks laden with foodstuffs and supplies were allowed through to those who were lobbing missiles at Israeli civilians.

Undoubtedly, these consignments didn’t only serve noncombatants but were seized by the combatants and allocated as they saw fit.

Now that a cease-fire is in place, this travesty surely should prompt a comprehensive collective rethink among Israelis.

Nowhere else in the history of armed conflict was there ever a situation in which a combatant side looked after its mortal enemy’s welfare, fed it, supplied it with essentials and powered it with electricity.

So, because we provide the essentials and electricity the prisoners (or slaves or anyone not free to pursue life, liberty and their happiness) should show a little gratitude and stop trying to obtain their freedom by any means necessary?

The two subject areas I get called upon most to tutor in are Mathematics and Science. In my own public school education I loved Science for two reasons: I had great teachers (thank you Mr. Max Smith and Mr. Barry Guinn) and I got to discover the way the world worked. I also loved Geometry (thank you Mr. Roy Jameson) but I hated, absolutely loathed Algebra. Mr. James Craig may have been a solid mathematician but I found sitting in his classes brain numbingly boring and nothing in his class ever seemed to have even the remotest connections to how the world worked.

In the course of looking for something completely different in my blog files, I can across these bits from an essay written by Paul Lockhart titled A Mathematician’s Lament.

This essay first came to my attention nearly a year ago and it has been lost in my drafts until this morning. I particularly like how Lockhart makes the comparison between Math and Music because it is the connection between these two that has fostered my adult fascination with both.

All this fussing and primping about which “topics” should be taught in what order, or the use of this notation instead of that notation, or which make and model of calculator to use, for god’s sake— it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead.

All of that is good. Hell, it’s very good, but this bit is what nailed Lockhart’s essay for me because it goes to the core of what I do my very best, every time I sit down with a student, to do.

Teaching is not about information. It’s about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students. It requires no method, no tools, and no training. Just the ability to be real. And if you can’t be real, then you have no right to inflict yourself upon innocent children.

Who were your real teachers?

Digging deeper this morning I discovered that once Lockhart’s 2002 essay broke out on the Internet, he was encouraged to write a book and that encouragement produced Measurement. I’ve ordered the book from the library (I’m No. 3 on the list of holds at the moment) and I’m looking forward to curling up in front of the fire to read what he has to say.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Few things are more depressing than paying attention to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The carnage and mutual hatred seem infinite. The arguments are so repetitive and fruitless. As is true in all wars, including those depicted in pleasing good-vs-evil terms, atrocities end up being committed by all sides, leading one to want to disassociate oneself from all parties involved. It is just as untenable to defend the indiscriminate launching by Hamas of projectiles into Israeli neighborhoods as it is to defend the massive air bombing by Israel of what they have turned into an open-air prison that is designed to collectively punish hundreds of thousands of human beings.

Virtually everyone wishes the entire conflict would just go away. With the exception of extremists on both sides who benefit in various ways, nobody relishes having to become involved in any of this. It is exhausting, draining, soul-crushing, and miserable. Embracing “screw-both-sides” nihilism and doing nothing else is so tempting because it appears to provide relief from the burden of paying any further attention to the horrific violence or bearing responsibility for any of it.

But for two independent reasons, this reasoning, understandable though it may be, depends upon patent fictions, and is thus invalid.

Carlinisms…*

If a word is misspelled In the dictionary, how would we ever know?

From my dad, of course…

*I associate this kind of word play with the brilliant comedy of George Carlin…

From The Associated Press:

Older teens and adults with attention deficit disorder are much less likely to commit a crime while on ADHD medication, a provocative study from Sweden found.

It also showed in dramatic fashion how much more prone people with ADHD are to break the law – four to seven times more likely than others.

The findings suggest that Ritalin, Adderall and other drugs that curb hyperactivity and boost attention remain important beyond the school-age years and that wider use of these medications in older patients might help curb crime.

Carlinisms…*

Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

From my dad, of course…

*I associate this kind of word play with the brilliant comedy of George Carlin…

Carlinisms…*

Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

From my dad, of course…

*I associate this kind of word play with the brilliant comedy of George Carlin…

Glenn Greenwald concludes:

Still, there’s something particularly revealing about the US demanding that the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq abandon any commitment they are attempting to develop (albeit quite selectively) to basic due process rights and instead imprison anyone the US wants imprisoned – even in the absence of evidence of their guilt and even in the face of judicial findings that their detention is without evidence and unlawful. As it turns out after all, the US is indeed spreading its core values to those two nations, though those values have nothing to do with freedom and democracy except to the extent that they are the primary impediments to achieving it.

[Update at 1834: Another perspective brought to my attention by she who Writes Likes She Talks.

I don’t know how to talk about what is happening here but it’s probably less about writers’ block than readers’ block. It says so much about the state of our discourse that the surest way to enrage everyone is to tweet about peace in the Middle East. We should be doing better because, much as I hate to say it, the harrowing accounts of burnt-out basements and baby shoes on each side of this conflict don’t constitute a conversation. Counting and photographing and tweeting injured children on each side isn’t dialogue. Scoring your own side’s suffering is a powerful way to avoid fixing the real problems, and trust me when I tell you that everyone—absolutely everyone—is suffering and sad and yet being sad is not fixing the problems either.

Better, much better, but the implication that there is somehow an equivalency here, that the scores are not magnitudes of difference apart, is central to the problem that is Occupied Palestine.

In commenting on the current violence, Noam Chomsky writes:

When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense. Call it what you like, it’s not defense.

Originally posted at 1813.

Jessica Apple writes:

I can’t lie to my older sons. They know what’s going on here and give me updates from their own computer. They watch the news, too. What I can do is remind them that the fear Palestinian boys in Gaza feel is just as real as theirs….

I’m gobsmacked. In a comment to Apple’s piece I wrote:

In what possible alternative universe could this be even remotely true.

How can Ms. Apple equate the fear her sons feel to that of a Palestinian mother’s sons in Gaza?

My head wants to explode with the absurdity of that statement.

This well-meaning women really does believe that her sons, sitting in front of the television or on their computers in Tel Aviv, following the war that their father has been excused from, are somehow just as fearful as boys their age are in Gaza where tons of munitions are blowing up whole buildings and filling their streets with rubble.

I will never again ponder why this insanity continues.

Pretty feckin’ whacko:

President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as “Delphi” to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities. That’s according to a four-hour briefing delivered to Republican state senators at the Georgia state Capitol last month.

On October 11, at a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus convened by the body’s majority leader, Chip Rogers, a tea party activist told Republican lawmakers that Obama was mounting this most diabolical conspiracy. The event—captured on tape by a member of the Athens-based watchdog Better Georgia (who was removed from the room after 52 minutes)—had been billed as an information session on Agenda 21, a nonbinding UN agreement that commits member nations to promote sustainable development. In the eyes of conservative activists, Agenda 21 is a nefarious plot that includes forcibly relocating non-urban-dwellers and prescribing mandatory contraception as a means of curbing population growth. The invitation to the Georgia state Senate event noted the presentation would explain:

How pleasant sounding names are fostering a Socialist plan to change the way we live, eat, learn, and communicate to save the earth.

Now, someone please explain to me why sane Republicans have difficulty understanding why they lost the election.

Obama and the End of Decline

Hmmm… Truthdig seems to have lost my comment (as well as a number of others)…

Those who know me understand that I’m the worst person in the world to talk sports with, but this story on All Things Considered caught my ear and lead me to the above video.

Anxiety is not about being shy in the same way that depression is not about being sad. Those of us who have overcome stage fright or our introvetness by sucking it up cannot translate our experience to that of people like Royce White.

Tom Peters writes:

BIG change is always driven by a LITTLE group.

7:55 P.M. Interior Minister Eli Yishai on Israel’s operation in Gaza: “The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years.”

We know how this worked in Vietnam. Why do we think there is a difference anywhere else in the world?

Via my Facebook self:

A principled man whom I admire posted this link with the note that “#21 makes me :'( .”

I replied:

Good morning,

If only our own media published photos of the innocents injured, maimed and murdered by our own Hellfire missiles launched from our own Predator drones at first responders treating the injured we created and the mourners at the funerals of the men, women and children we murdered.

Rage directed at the government of Israel is good. Rage directed at our own government is better. Rage directed at our own inaction, when it leads to action, is best.

Do all you can to make today a good day,

Jeff

This morning I’m working on how to be best.

Suggestions?