Whudda W.A.S.T.E.

While I'm on the subject of Nazism

2009-07-03T07:54:00.003-05:00

I chose my dissertation topic because I get an actual visceral reaction to stories about the Holocaust and Hitler. I'm not Jewish--not that I'd have to be, but it bears saying. It's just that somebody who so embodies evil and brutality makes me, I don't know, want to shoot him in the kneecaps. The reaction is entirely a result of revulsion mixed with fury. My guess is that human's have this capacity in them, probably because the crazy idea in the middle of a neolithic Winter could kill an entire village (a liberal would have killed the Pilgrims in a Massachusetts Winter). I am not entirely lost to the fact that it is probably this particular reaction that is responsible for the worst exesses of human kind. Madness can cause a lot of violence, but righteous fury has defined entire epochs of mass murder.

In any case, I think having worked through my dissertation, I can kind of understand why neo-Nazis become neo-Nazis. I don't agree with them at all, but I do understand just what it is that they think they've lost, what they think they need to fight to recover.

I think what's complicated about it is that the neo-Nazi's desire is actually fairly philisophical but it doesn't really sell itself that way. They sell themselves on losing out to opportunities which the rest of the world can't understand because the loss of opportunity seems well...either unlikely, too infrequent to matter, or the result of some other factor (like the neo-Nazi's crap attitude). We non-neo-Nazis simply don't see this massive race struggle, and even those who do, don't really think that minorities have any chance at all of winning this struggle in America. The richest people are still white and male and the prisons are filled with African and Latino Americans. So...why go through the trouble of getting the hair cut, the tattoos, and making an ass of yourself. Essentially, most non-neo-Nazi racists figure they're in a superior position to the races they abhor and see no reason to make a big stink about it. They may even detest neo-Nazis for being either too stupid to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded them in America due to their skin color, or simply too delusional to understand how things really work.

Having done my dissertation, however, I think I may understand neo-Nazis from another angle. It seems to me that what the neo-Nazi really can't stand is the loss of stable value of which race is only the most obvious visible symbol--like a gateway hate. It goes back to Plato really and the question of what makes the best society. If someone says efficiency, as I think we'd all agree is a pretty good answer to that question, then the simple answer is that if we could all agree on universal values that remained constant no matter what the situation in which they are used, society would have those values to use always. The removal of discrepency in that situation would cause fewer arguments and debates--thus, the society would become more efficient. In this sense, efficiency is the opposite of diversity because efficiency streamlines society--diversity creates more opportunities.

The average neo-Nazi can, then, can be thought of as a person whose main belief about improving society is directly related to efficiency...and efficiency taken to its most extreme is fascism. The point is though that the concentration is always on race, but I think it's fair to say that in these stiuations, racism is just a symptom of some other outrage and in this case, I think the neo-Nazi's outrage is tied to a lack of values that remain constant throughout American culture.

Interesting Facts of the Day from My Dis

2009-07-03T07:41:00.002-05:00

I thought I'd share.

First off, a dissertation is an enormous research project. By now, I've looked at political speeches, political cartoons, wartime posters, and all manner of World War II propaganda films and news footage--as well as documentaries, history books, yadda yadda yadda.

So, here's the interesting fact. When the concentration camps were liberated by Americans, they were filmed. The films acted as newsreel footage. Moreover, the films often did not mention Jews specifically, and when they were mentioned, mentioned them in a list of prisoners in which they generally appeared somewhere near the bottom. The end result of this is that the American public who learned about the Holocaust through newsreel footage were at odds to think of it as a crime committed primarilly against Jews.

Oh crap...I mentioned the Holocaust on my blog. Oh well, here come the Neo-Nazis, I'm sure. Keep in mind, I have to okay commentary and I don't okay fascists. Sorry, free country (still). You can start your own blog if you want and block my comments.

I should point out that the reason that Jews were not mentioned as primary victims in the crime had to do with America's anti-German propaganda which concentrated on the Nazi's imperialism, not their racism. Americans were ill prepared for what they found in the camps and as a result, fit what they saw into the story they'd been telling themselves all along about why they fought. Thus, the prisoners were seen as military and political enemies--not innocents that had been rounded up.

Bad

2009-06-29T08:03:00.003-05:00

Mmmm....

Okay, I'm lost. Every once in a while the world does something that totally baffles me. Michael Jackson was a pedophile. I get it, yes, I really do. I liked Beat It same as everyone else. Thriller? Great video. That was twenty five years ago. Since then, Michael Jackson touched children and then paid them off to avoid law suits. Remember? There were all kinds of jokes and stuff. He got them drunk first on "Jesus Juice."

Pedophile.

So, how do I feel about pedophiles. What, for instance, are my feelings concerning what I might do if someone molested one of my children? What if that person died from a drug overdose? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't call for a period of national mourning.

Rewriting tips

2009-06-29T07:29:00.002-05:00

The hard rewrite: read a section of the thing you need to revise, open up a blank sheet and rewrite the thing from scratch. If you have the time, I recommend this. Note: I can write 10 pages (single spaced) in a day with a minimum of effort. Being able to write quickly is necessary for this kind of tip. The advantage here is that you say things the way you want to say them and lose all the hee-hawing over what you want to say. This is what it would look like if you could organize and write at the same time. The best way to perform this kind of revision is to actually delete the file first draft, preferably through a crashed hard drive.

Your interesting point: No, it isn't. You know those things you say that don't really fit, but you like them, and you can make them fit? f'ing get rid of them. Tangents are for senile professors. Stay on topic! Writers come to believe that every word that they put on the page is sacred. Man, it isn't. Half of it is not witty, and the worst part is it looks like you're trying to be witty, and there's nothing worse than trying to look witty and not succeeding, actually not knowing that you're succeeding is worse. It ruins all the witty things you do manage to say...and the easiest way to not look witty is to just start saying things that don't have very much to do with what you're talking about because you think they sound cool.

Read aloud: No seriously. Read it aloud. Many people say, read it aloud so that you can hear the tough spots in your prose, and I think that's great, but you know what? Read it aloud 5 or 10 times so that it BORES you. That way, you get some sense of what your scenes read like to people who are hitting them for the first time. You may find that you can read a 10 page scene for 5 pages and then you want to skip to the end. Okay, it's too long. Simple as that.

Look, the plain and simple truth here is that editors are mean. Professional editors are ruthless. Send an article to a journal and it is, 9 times out of 10, read by some bitter grad student who can't get their work in the journal and is now forced to read crap by the professor who has given them the job and so they work tirelessly, from the inside, to change things to make the climate better for their work, which sucks.

Commercial editors want nothing that they haven't seen before on a bestsellers list, except that they don't want that. They want Twilight and Harry Potter, but not Twilight and Harry Potter. You need to be both derivitive and original, and they want NOTHING else. Don't fool yourself, these people are out to make money.

Forget about unprofessional editors...people who just happen to be in charge of approving your work. God only knows by what criteria they operate. You can get attacked because you don't boldface and underline main points.

But then, how do good novels get put on the shelf...Nepotism. Remember your Primo Levi, "To He Who Has, All Shall Be Given." Nothing makes success like success. Someone's uncle runs a literary journal and they publish a poem, and Whallah! you're published.

I'm not bitter. That's not the point here. My point is this: there are a lot of good writers out there (too many of them, if you asked me), and a lot of proof that being good has nothing to do with success. I would be more supportive of people who write hack. However, if you're going to try to turn skill into success then you are going to have to know that being good simply isn't good enough. You have to be a monster. You have to be good, striving for genious, with a desire to attack your own work like Godzilla v. Tokyo. Nothing less will do. And even then, you're either going to have to get lucky or know someone.

And you have to be mofo confidant. It isn't that you have something to say, it's that most people have NOTHING to say. If they did, they'd be interested in learning how to say it. You are the sage, the shaman, the bodhisatva if that's your gig. God (goddess, It, Shub-Niggurath the black goat of the woods with a thousand young) has given you the tablets to take down off the mountain, and damn it all, it's your job to write better so that someone will follow your new religion lest they burn eternally. You are responsible for their soul, and no, you didn't get it right the first time.

Hope that helps.

Game Place

2009-06-18T07:00:00.002-05:00

I found a place to play Warhammer 40k on Wednesday nights. My usual Tuesday night game got cancelled when the guy hosting it had an "intervention" by his parents. They think he plays too many games. The presence of hundreds of little bits of terrain probably didn't help.

So anyways, we had cooled it at his place for awhile and I figured I needed to find a new place to play and they played on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, and now you're up to speed (unless you don't know what Warhammer 40k is, but then god bless you, may you stay safe in your ignorance).

So, game night. But here's the thing. The first time I show up, I don't play. Not enough people looking for a game. Just me. Second time, I sign up on-line and the guy nearly doesn't show up. I play, I lose. No biggie (Necrons vs. a Shrike led Space Marine band, really nasty). The third time, the guy says he might not show up, he does, but its too late to play. Last night, no one extra there to play, sorry. F.

But last night I came prepared. I had a 6x4 board ready in my car and I basically donated it to the star. Strangely enough, after my act of altruism, the club seemed to warm up to me. But of course, by now, my regular Tuesday night game's back on. So...

A post that wasn't supposed to be about my dissertation

2009-06-18T06:33:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things by writing for the fun of it. They say that you should always try to do something you love as a job. That way you'll love your job. In my experience, that's the easiest way to turn something you love into work. Right now, I write for my dissertation (work) and I write for my job (work), and even though I'm pretty good at writing, it can still be pure drudgery.

Take, for instance, my dissertation. In my first draft, I had two chapters. One in which I discussed early twentieth century dystopian visions (ideas about how the world was going to hell in a handbasket) and one in which I discussed the rise of relative morality. My argument was that in the hell in a handbasket chapter, most writers saw the problem as loose morality. In other words, people didn't believe in solid rules about right and wrong. Lack of morals ultimately lead, according to these guys, to horrible social orders. My evidence for this was Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's Essay "Politics and the English Language," but the chaper relied heavilly on a short story by Jorge Louis Borges called, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." The other chapter, in which the world basically switched over to valuing context dependent morality used lot's of stuff, but among that stuff (Casablanca, Gertrude Stein, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, O'Connor) I used Borges again--specifically to show that he had "converted" so to speak to the new way of thinking. Borges one way in one chapter, and Borges the other way int he next.

Well, my one reader complained. He said that the dissertation was becoming about Borges and that there should only be one chapter with Borges in it, and even then, there was still too much damn Borges. So, now I'm trying to take two chapters, each about 40 pages in length and turn them into one chapter that's about 30-35 pages in length. To do that, you have to do a bit more than eliminate every other word; you kind of have to refigure a lot of stuff.

Now, I am more than able to kill some of the more mundane information. After all, facts that astounded me when I began my dis are now kind of pedestrian. Some of it is just plain wrong. So, I cut all that stuff out. But still, I have to make a fundamental shift in the tempo, and in many cases, the point of my use of Borges. So, basically, I'm forced to rewrite the whole thing. I import blocks of text as needed, but more often than not, those just serve as inspiration for what I'm likely to write after that.

Anyways, I sort of promised I wouldn't write about that crap, and I did. Sorry.

stuff

2009-06-16T12:25:00.002-05:00

A dissertation saps all will for all activity save the most flippant. I have lost all capacity to do anything that qualifies as "productive" because, like an abused animal, I want nothing more than to escape the gauntleted fist that keeps smacking me about. To wit, writing has been utterly difficult for me this last year. When I write anything, I feel guilty that I'm not writing the dissertation. When I write this blog, even now, I feel like I'm selfishly wasting time on what essentially doesn't matter at all. Who am I that anyone should read anything I write. I'm not dying of cancer. I'm not converting to Buhdhihsm (can't spell that. There's an H in there somewhere) and so to tell you my condition or my thoughts is so utterly mundane as to make the act of it worthless.

Hi all. I, like so many others, lead a rather dull life. Its not even interesting for being miserable because, unfortunately for you all, I'm also rather content...blah.

Likewise, I cannot read. Reading smacks too much of something I should be doing and so I pick up book after book, which I don't read, and won't read. Like the soldier who becomes a gardner from having seen "too much," I too, want to get away from the horror. Why don't people write good books that are easy to read?

So...here is what I actually have been doing.

I am now the proud owner of a Necron, Dark Eldar, and Ork army for Warhammer 40k. I am painting these. I am making scenery for 40k which isn't selling very well on Ebay. I am trying to start up a Dungeons and Dragons group. I am editing my finished first draft of my dissertation. I am trying not to care that no member of my dissertation committee has read anything I've written since I started handing them stuff to read almost a year ago. I am playing quite a lot of Left 4 Dead. I am playing quite a load of Boulderdash Treasures. I am eating Chili. I make very good Chili. I have all the songs from The Philidelphia Chickens stuck in my head perpetually.

AIG stock

2009-05-12T06:27:00.003-05:00

Okay, what's the difference between a purebread dog and a mutt? The price pretty much. Now, new question. If mutts are cheap, how much would you pay for a mutt that was immortal? You know, a dog that wouldn't die.

AIG is immortal. I realize that this is a strange place for stock advice, but AIG won't die. In fact, AIG is pretty much insured against death by the U.S. government. It won't die, unless they die. The government, right or wrong, has thrown in their lot with an insurance company and said, "you are too big for us to let you collapse."

My thought is that a company that cannot die is infinitely better than a company that can. So, while the media and everyone else concentrates on the fact that AIG is horrible and all that, they've entirely missed the point. You can buy stock in an immortal insurance firm for around $2 a share. If the company can't die, then it will still be around in 5 years. What do you think the price per share will be then?

New frontiers with my novel

2009-02-03T08:21:00.004-05:00

I haven't blogged in a while. Mostly, I've been writing (or should I say re-writing) my novel.

So, here's the skinny. My novel is about a kid who takes and overdoses on a designer halunicinigen and so is put into a permanent state of delirium. The main theme of his delirium is that he starts to see the movements of his world in the kind of "rending of the veils/religious epiphany" manner befitting an acid or shroom trip. Most notably, he sees and falls in love with the angel of death.

Now, meanwhile, in the very real world, a gang war has begun between the kid's boss and that boss's boss. Many of the acts of which the kid either interprets, or invents, so as to mirror language concerning the end of the world. This culminates in the kid having to choose to betray God in order to save God, or to be loyal to God so as to provide assistance to the devil. It is a scene I have been trying to figure out for about 8 years.

Now, I admit that this is already an enormous undertaking and incredibly esoteric and weird, but upon re-reading the novel, I've discovered that, out of nowhere, I was writing fantasy. While I still liked the writing, it lacked any and all gritty reaslim. It just didn't have the punch. So, I'm working through it. Over Christmas I made it through about a third of it (it's nearly 400 single spaced pages right now) and I really like how it's shaping up. The wife is thinking about Breadloaf and, for the first time in a long time, my confidance in my writing (which was once overwhelming) is coming back.

Richard Powers says that writing a novel is like digging a tunnel through a mountain from both sides. It's hard to get it to link up in the middle. I think he's right. Just as you get the biting cynicism to work, you realize that you're writing a farce, and that's no good. In any case, wish me luck. I've always believed that the realistic is the most powerful so long as we can admit how weird reality is. Kafka is a realist and all that.

Doing math with the pre-doc

2008-12-29T13:13:00.002-05:00

To fully appreciate a Ph.D. program, one must do math.

In order to graduate, I have to take 9 classes as well as two years worth of a foreign language. 13 classes.
Taking two classes a semester (full time for graduate school), that means I have six and a half semesters worth of classes. Let's say 3 and a half years.

On top of that, I am supposed to take a semester doing a qualifying exam (because I came in with a degree in English and not in American Studies). Add another half year to read the twenty five works for the QE and you're at four years (actually, it took two years to get them to okay my stuff for the QE but I did other things while I was waiting).

You're not done. You've still got to take the comps. That's 75 works. Give it a year, and that's 5 years. A semester to write and get your dissertation proposal worked through and you're at 5 1/2 years. Now to writing...no matter how fast you write, someone has to get around to reading it... so a year and a half. Good. Seven years.

Myself, I came in with a foreign language (lose a year of classes) and we're back down to six. My comps? Finished them in a semester rather than a year (read a whole bunch during the summer). Five and a half! Yeah.

But of course, I've only been funded for five. That's right, next year, no money. No childcare. No health insurance. And boy oh boy, I'm going to have to pay tuition. Now, quick question. Who thinks that it was designed like this? Who thinks that perhaps the powers that be decided to make you fight it out the last year trying to figure out how to write a dissertation while taking care of two kids who, if they get sick, can't go to the doctor. What kind of evil monster would design the program like that.

Well, never fear. They didn't design it on purpose. They just didn't think about it at all, and have not managed to fix the system after numerous years of complaints. They don't have the time to care about your petty life problems. Now, big question: which would be worse, their having designed a system that pulls you through the ringer on purpose, or their having designed it because they couldn't care enough about the students to make a system that actually works.

My graduate advisors suggestion: take a semester off (back up to six years now) and apply for fellowships to pay for year 6.

A thought about a circular conversation I had

2008-12-21T13:38:00.003-05:00

The American intellectual begins arguments from an extreme state of paradox, and it is for this reason that America does not respect intellectualism nor does it foster it. The first thing that happens in an intellectual argument in America is that the two intellectuals take sides because, despite all reasoning to the contrary, we believe that there is always a pro and a con in the debate. Arguments of definition or nuance simply aren't worthwhile. Often this results in two sides arguing vehemently against each other, though both believe exactly the same thing. My friend Jason calls this a coffee shop debate.

This is not the paradox. The paradox for the American intellectual relies on the first move in the debate which is to claim that the expert sitting opposite knows only a hair's breadth more about the subject then the average slightly above average intelligent man or woman on the street. That their expertise is little more than a bit of a head start. In this way, one may sit down with a doctor of philosophy, having never read Sartre, and begin immediately to discuss the worth of Being and Nothingness. They've read the book, you haven't, but what does that really mean? This rather gross overconfidence is, I think, fallout from the understanding that we can educate people through television, that nifty notion that was popular for about a year in the 50s. Thus, while we no longer believe that watching a whole bunch of television is going to make anybody smarter, we figure that our "general knowledge" derived from rather public sources (and not from a moment of serious study on the subject) is nearly expertise. We may even think it expertise, only not validated by some meaningless bit of paper called a diploma.

So, the argument begins by telling the other side that you know nearly as much about their subject matter as they do, and well...you disagree. Step two is to offer why the thing you know about is far more applicable to the question at hand, all the while assuming that the other side has no skill in this secondary area of knowledge, even though you've already assumed that every one of reasonable intelligence pretty much knows most everything already. They're a professor of philosophy, you've seen I Heart Huckabees--whose to say who knows existentialist thought more?

Thus the American intellectual operates prima faeci from the assumption that intellectuals know much about everything and that the intellectual with whom they are speaking knows nothing about the area from which the counterargument is derived.

I posit a solution. Unless we have reason to believe our claims bolstered by expertise, maybe we should assume that what we are saying is without real weight, that perhaps we should not always be so concerned that we be taken seriously, especially when there is nothing serious about what we know in an area. It's good to know things, but if some small kernel of knowledge is somehow absent from our massive domains of knowledge, maybe that's a good time to listen rather than to argue from a point of ignorance.

Because ultimately, if everyone's an expert, and everyone disagrees then there can be no way to utilize expert knowledge so as to achieve results.

Last day, hooray!

2008-12-18T08:14:00.002-05:00

So, last Saturdy was my last day at the worst place I ever taught. I will no longer be signing up to teach their classes. I did not get fired. In fact, they do not know that last Saturday was my last day. It doesn't really matter though; as far as I can figure, the person who was my boss left (stories vary as to causes and culpability) leaving a vaccuum so deep that it took my two emails to establish my next level up, and this person has had little to nothing to do with the program since its inception. It's like when a nuclear strike knocks out the entire chain of command and you have to answer questions like, "well what if the secretary of agriculture is dead too?"

In any case, my job did not immediately end. I still had to grade final papers. Some of which were okay, but a few of which had margins that were...hillarious. One person had a 3" margin at the bottom of her page, and a 2" margin at the top. One moron sent me her stuff electronically so that I could reformat it to the proper font size/margin size. Her paper turned out to be more than a page short. Mind you, this was the five page term paper for the class. Can you imagine the level of incompetence that you have to have to short change the only paper you have to write.

I tell you, theories about universal constants are becoming more and more appealing to me. Statements like, "there's only so much love in the world," etc.. In a very practical way, once you've decided that everyone deserves an education, you have to accept that what you, at least partially saying, is that illiterate moron con artists should get college degrees just like everyone else. There's only so much education in this country. That last job was evidence of what happens when you spread it a bit too thin.

Woes of incarcaration

2008-12-18T08:10:00.002-05:00

The other day my child said this exact phrase, "the pig let me out of my cage!" I'm hoping that's from a story book and that my child is not preparing himself for a life of crime...plus, I'd like to think that if my child were to refer to the police in a derogatory manner, he'd say, "dirty screw," like a '20s gangster.

A tough day for sympathy

2008-12-13T10:39:00.002-05:00

Don't get me wrong, I love unions, but at a certain point, the union isn't helping the worker--they're fucking them.

So, Chrysler will go out of business and all these card carrying morons will be out on the streets. Great. Maybe, you all should play ball. Just a thought. Better than raman noodles.

But let's face it, the real reason that I could give a crap about the UAW is because my car costs too much...and that really is all she wrote. My car shouldn't cost so much. Why does it cost so much? Because of the UAW and the way that the union has driven up prices so that they protect their own and not me. Oh, so now they want ME to bail them out. How about this: no. No, thank you. I mean, I don't really know how else to say this. You guys got health care, maybe you should have stopped there.

2008 will go down in history as the year that stupid people tried to make everyone else pay. I'm betting these morons are also buying houses with sub-prime rate.

turned in for college credit

2008-12-13T09:26:00.002-05:00

Here's a sentence from a paper that was turned in for my English class. Enjoy!

"In the beginning, the kids do not accepts her intentions at all, because when she ask them what do they know about the "real" money, they think that she treating like a retards."

A brief respite--Bush genius

2008-11-25T10:28:00.002-05:00

Okay, the Bush family are the smartest people in the world. No lie.

During Sr.s stay in the White House, he decided that the money people were paying for the stuff his family produced as their business (oil) was just plain too low. So, he raised the prices.

Okay, so the prices are up up up, and then his son gets into office and what does he do? He raises the prices as well.

Now, when there is no possibility for another Bush presidency and when the prices are so damned high that people are actually burning cooking oil in their cars, Jr. decides to lower the prices to save his family business. While he has control, he raises the prices, when he loses control, he lowers the prices so as to stay in business despite the fact that its destroying the planet.

The guys like a James Bond supervillain.

pointless worthless useless majors! part 5

2008-11-20T08:13:00.003-05:00

A note on worthlessness: I think that I should point out that a major does not simply fall into this category because I don't like it. I would like to suggest that, if it affords you a large salary upon graduation, it is worthwhile for some to get a degree in staring at the wall. Given this extreme example, I would not pick on staring at the wall as a useless major. It carries monetary value. It is not worthless.

Likewise, I do not pick on majors that do not have a job analog. There is no job in the world to which the English major is aiming unless it is English professor, and I think that, too, is contestable. No. But it doesn't necessarily make the major worthless. If a major teaches skills that are usable in a real world setting then I am prepared to call it worthwhile, especially if that particular skill set has proven itself valuable in the workforce. So, for instance, those skills in analysis and writing that are the hallmark of the English major gave proven themselves time and time again as invaluable in the world out there, including the corporate world, and as such the degree has use.

So, the worthless majors are the ones that are unlikely to get you a job and don't teach you anything that will help you get jobs not directly related to the degree with which you graduated. Likewise, they offer you no growth as a person making you the kind of personal success that translates into professional success. If the major doesn't make you feel like an expert in a field, it just doesn't have that kind of worth. So, I'm measuring worth on three different criteria: worth financially, worth in giving you skills that are valuable across a wide variety of jobs, and worth in giving a feeling of accomplishment that allows for confidence and success. If a major gives ANY of these things, I do not consider it worthless.

That being said...

Forensic Pathology!

Perhaps you don't know but the university is a business, and like any good business with the ability to grow in new directions on a moment's notice, it responds well to the market. In other words, when it sees an army walking towards the university wanting a degree in computer science, it doesn't get on the bullhorn and say, "hey listen, if you all have Comp Sci degrees, you'll flood the market." No, the university hires more professors--preferably adjuncts who the university can lay off just as soon as the boom drops.

I'm not knocking the computer science degree by the way, just illustrating a point. One can still get a job in comp sci, after all. The mastery of computerized logic is still worth something in terms of conquering a mountain of material. I'm just saying that when a job becomes trendy, the university will make a department for it and engineer a major as fast as possible.

So, has anyone seen the show CSI? Whether you know it or not, the show CSI has sent many a young person scrambling into departments that basically ought to have the CSI logo over their classroom doors. The university, likewise, scrambles so as to find instructors in CSI kind of stuff and it begins. Classes and classes devoted to the study, the ins-and-outs of analyzing crime scenes and corpses and...aren't there other majors for that? Never mind! It's CSI. "I'm majoring in CSI Miami." "Not me, I'm majoring in CSI Boise." It's as if they are attending a renaissance fair where people really believe that they ARE in the Renaissance...or that the guy over there really is in Star Fleet.

I'll admit, I have no idea what they study. They remind me of criminal justice majors who have refashioned themselves as intellectuals (without all that pesky deep thought). I asked one once what she thought about metal detectors in high schools and she told me she didn't care. "...but...but...aren't you...like criminal justice?" "No! I'm forensic pathology!" Great.

But what about criteria 1, you suggest? What about all the money these people will be raking in? My answer: what money? There's no money. CSI is a fiction. How many semen centrifuges are there in the country? How many machines are there that detect saliva on glass from fifty feet away. We have cameras everywhere watching us, a camera on every street light, who needs these kinds of machines to figure out who was where? And even if we had them, what do we need all of these people for?

Let me try it another way. Astronomy is a major, right? Okay, do you know how many astronomers does the world hire every year. Five? Six? I assume that more criminal pathologist are hired than astronomers, but probably not by much.

So, why doesn't the university say, "look, what you want is to go to grad school as a coroner, or you want a major in criminal justice?" And here is the funny part: the university doesn't do that because the people wouldn't immediately recognize these things as the degrees that lead to CSI-kind of work. They wouldn't sign up for these things. They need a major that's actually immediately recognizable as CSI or they don't know to sign up for it. How's that for smart?

Thank God I didn't teach at the university when Chips was popular. Can you imagine all the people majoring in Motorcycle?

pointless worthless useless majors! part 4

2008-11-16T15:21:00.002-05:00

Liberal Arts!

You will notice that I have no respect for a major that is essential the dummied down version of another version--say, for instance, accounting and economics. The reason for this, I think, should be obvious, but if not, let me point it out from a practical point of view. If there are two people applying for the same job and one of them has studied the Real subject and the other has studied the remedial version, which would you hire? I mean, there's more, of course. Those who take the stupid version are basically admitting that they can't take the intelligent version and this basically says that they themselves are either lazy or stupid (or heaven help us, both). So that they're diploma is basically a sign that they aren't up to snuff and that they still think you should give them respect (which I don't).

That being said, is there any sin greater than a degree in liberal arts? Mind you, I'm not saying a degree in A liberal art, but a general degree--that is to say, they just couldn't hack it in history, English, etc., so they've instead taken the beginners course in a bunch of disciplines. Why? Well, the liberal arts degree is generally designed for people who want to teach grade school. Of course, you might ask, why not major in child development or child psychology? I agree. Either of these degrees would be much more useful in the teaching of young students. Instead, these people take math classes...so that they can teach math to 8 year olds...that's third grade...can you imagine getting college credit for mastering 3rd grade math? If you can, you might be a liberal arts major.

Speaking from experience, liberal arts majors are beyond incompetent. They walk into the easiest literary class all doe eyed and just sort of incapable of saying anything at all. Meanwhile, the business majors run laps around them...the BUSINESS MAJORS! Evidentally, unless its "The Puppy and The Happy Boy," the liberal arts people are f'ing lost. Here's an example. The other day for class, I had everyone read "Young Goodman Brown," "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died," "The Tyger," and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." I then gave a quiz of four questions. Two on Hawthorne, one on Dickinson, and one on Blake. Alright, most everyone did well so it wasn't like this thing was too hard. The liberal arts student began by complaining aloud that she did not know any of the answers. This was my fault (evidentally). Afterwards, she came up to me to ask how she could make up the quiz, because, of course, it was up to me to give her something so that she wouldn't have failed the quiz despite her having, in fact, just failed the quiz.

Why? Why would she expect me to just keep giving her assignments until we finally struck on one that was easy enough for her to pass? Because she's a liberal arts major and basically expects her college to be a lot easier than everyone else. She wants to be graded with a handicap.

So, out there in the world, the liberal arts major is afforded no respect, but what's worse, there's this whole other group of people whom the regular world seems to want, unfairly, to lump together with these know-nothings. That's my major beef with the liberal arts people. It would be one thing if they were simply stupid, but they make others look stupid, as well, by association.

I think this last part is unfair, but I want to add it anyway. This doesn't necessarilly reflect on the Liberal Arts as a major, but it does reflect on its pracitioners. I haven't met a single person getting a degree in liberal arts that didn't suffer undeserved arrogance and the personality of a sand crab. It makes sense that the discipline would attract these people as it affords them a job despite their crappy outlooks, and children who will look up to them for being able to multiply by five. Still, there's a serious character flaw in every liberal arts person I've met.

On the other hand, most people I know who actually end up working with children seem to be very decent human beings. This leads me to believe that at some point, somebody prevents the asshole contingent in this discipline from going on into the profession. Whoever you are, God bless you, but seriously, could you start that process a little earlier?

pointless worthless useless majors! part 3

2008-11-15T09:23:00.002-05:00

Pre-law.

Oh that's funny. Now this one is perhaps not as obvious as the others so I have to pull rank a bit as someone who can speak from experience.

Okay, so what is pre-law: it prepares you for law school. So, without law school, pre-law means nothing. In fact, if you meet someone who graduated with a degree in pre-law, then the person you are talking to is, by definition, a failure. They have failed to become lawyers. It's as simple as that.

By the way, I'm not knocking lawyers--this is about majors. A college graduate with a pre-law degree is not a lawyer at all, but something mal-formed--quasimoto.

But, you ask, weren't all lawyers pre-law at one time? There's the rub. The answer is a resounding no. Actually, law schools generally swell with the ranks of political science majors (generally considered a useless major), philosophy majors (ditto), and would you believe it, English majors. You see, law schools are looking for people who are able to think, argue, write and show signs of having some initiative. People who get pre-law degrees are simply majoring in "job"--in other words, they could care less about what they learn, they simply want a job. Their fear of failure is palpable on their personal statements. Whereas an English major is inherently a risk taker (as no one can figure out what job they are training for and, thus, believe their years in college to be a total waste)... ironic because English majors make up the LION'S SHARE of people in law school. We English Professors refer to this as "going to the dark side."

Now here is a good sign that the people who rank majors (other than myself) have no idea what they're doing. They will say that you can do nothing with a philosophy or English major, but they're wrong. I write letters of rec for these people all the time, I know where the English students are going. Pre-law is simply the reader's digest version of other real majors.

pointless worthless useless majors! part 2

2008-11-14T10:50:00.002-05:00

Accounting!

Okay, so do they now teach a seminar on how to keep your clients from buying Turbo Tax. I mean, really. Quickbooks. How do they still get people into this discipline?

First of all, a math major teaches people to do math. Accounting teaches people to add up numbers in a column...with a calculator...or an excel spreadsheet. How about also breathing for beginners and how to keep your hair growing? What's to learn here?

Let's put this into perspective: during the glory days of the British empire, accountants were able to keep their country strong while balancing against foreign markets in a global economy with unreliable reportage. They managed to perform this function with such success that they were able to vault England into the position of world superpower. Had it not been for atomic energy and a persistent bombing campaign against England, the union jack would probably still be flying over half of the world. That being said, they did all this without a degree in accounting. It was a job: people took a vocational course in it and then they went to work..

Now, let's imagine what the world of accounting that has done bolstered up by their rank of college-trained professionals. Savings and Loan, Enron, and now total economic collapse. Do they train these people to be communist fifth columnists or something. Untrained=global empire. Trained=international incompetence.

Why? Well, it comes down to what these people learn. First, they needn't learn much. They use programs the same as we do. You pay your taxes without a class in TurboTax, these people get that class...and, therefore, need that class. That means that they require a crutch that you do not. They're worse at this than you are.

Math classes? Yes, the backbone of accounting is clearly math, but how much math do you need. Let me try it this way. I took Business Calculus in college to provide support for a friend of mine. I missed half the classes and solved all the problems using Algebra. I passed the class. Later, when I took actual calculus in a Math department (first semester calc), I knew nothing despite having passed a class in calculus already. I actually did better than half the accounting students who were in business calc who showed up every day.

The real reason that this discipline is problematic is because its participants are almost totally without courage or belief in themselves. While most people go to college to expand their minds, these people show up to put numbers in a row. They believe that accounting is essentially like majoring in "job"--and they want a job, and here they are. If you say to them, why don't you study something you enjoy so that you can work a job that you like, they will inform you that they like nothing...nothing at all. Sometimes they like drinking or pleasing their parents. Backbone? None.

Maybe I'm picking on the future accountants, but if I am, I think I'm justified for three reasons. First of all, they take four years to learn something that a computer can help anyone do in less time and with less mistakes. Second, those who have held these degrees have bathed themselves in so much failure that they've devastated the nation's economy. Third, accounting itself is a subset of economics, which means that economists learn accounting AND the science of economics whereas accounting majors only learn accounting, and yet, it still takes the same amount of time to learn these things; accountants are economists who simply weren't up to snuff.

pointless worthless useless majors! part 1

2008-11-14T10:24:00.004-05:00

If you look up worthless majors on the Internet, you will most likely come up with a top 10 list that will suggest to you a few things. First of all, it will let you know that if you are in the humanities, you are wasting your time and money, and if you are in say business, you are on the right track! I think that it was devised over at Fox News, but regardless.

I think that the list is the result of shoddy reporting and bad research (much like the rest of Fox News). So, I figured I'd update it to suggest today's changing economy. I, however, am not putting these things in order. It's hard to say which of them is worse.

All of this is based on experience. I teach general education and have been in college (as a student and as a teacher) for quite some time. I know, first hand, of which I speak. I know what really works and what doesn't...and I know what these people do when they are in their classes and when they are in mine.

So, my first pointless useless major is Psychology
Unless you go to grad school, psychology is totally without value. You cannot work in the mental health profession with a psychology degree, or at least, you are in competition with people who haven't studied psychology for the lowest echelon of jobs. When you realize that you are in competition with people who have degrees in sociology and that they have equal standing as you in the mental health care job market, it begs the question: what worth do people in the working world place on the psychology degree.

The problem is this at the undergraduate level, psychology is basically the major for people who have serious mental problems and who want to learn to self diagnose. Colleges is now so easy to get into that total psychotic breakdown isn't really reason for you not to graduate on the dean's list. A psychology classroom houses at least two vocal students who are basically looking for twice a week therapy from their teacher and who preface their every comment with: "as an anorexic bi-polar who cuts, I'm wondering what this lesson means for me." If you are not psychotic in a psych classroom, then what you are really learning is tolerance for the mentally disturbed, but you and they will get the same grade.

My basic feeling is that this major could be worth something if their were a litmus test attached to the entrance exam. If the major could weed out the psychos, someone might see the value of the discipline, but as it stands now, hiring a psych major is a crap shoot. Will you get the guy who was really interested in helping the mentally disabled, or will you get the guy who can't stop washing his hands.

Lastly, the real question is: what do people in psychology learn? At this point, the medical profession of psychology is totally pharmaceutical. What does it matter then to learn what skitzophrenia looks like if you don't also learn what to do about it? After all, I know how to handle the mentally ill and I don't have a degree. The thing that seems to be missing is essentially the ability to treat the illness, something that a psych student doesn't get either until grad school. The discipline is scientific enough that you can't trust a psych major to be a good writer, but it's not scientific enough that you can count on their being good at math. A psych major in a classroom generally acts as though they are studying something far more authentic than English, but as to the warrant for their arrogance, I've yet to see it, and when they study literature, they generally get as far as diagnosing the characters (Humbert Humbert is a pedophile, Benji is autistic, the New England Nun is obsessive compulsive, etc.) but don't seem to have the where-with-all to go much further. And they get mad that their diagnosis isn't enough, because it is in psychology where the bar is too damned low.

What about the paisley?

2008-11-14T10:11:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I got tired of not having labels or a blog role or any of that stuff. So, I've changed my template. Same blog. Less paisley.

Obama for beginners

2008-11-04T07:38:00.001-05:00

I know that many of you are having trouble voting for Obama. If this helps, look to the middle syllable of his name bam (pronounced bomb). No need to fell like less of a war monger now. So, go out there and vote!

inheriting the future

2008-11-01T07:04:00.003-05:00

So, why the economic destruction? Good question.

Let's talk about economics. Economics is a method by which wealth is distributed--notice the last word. In economics, we DISTRIBUTE wealth. You can expect, then, that if wealth isn't distributed then the economic system is going to collapse. Really, conceptually, economics is an attempt to transfer power from the dying to the living, generation by generation, except that it no longer requires the physical tranfer of possession from one to the next on a death bed. In theory, trickle down ought to work, give to the elder generation wealth and they will pass it on to the next generation--but this only works through a limited understanding of economics.

A much more complex understanding of economics acknowledges that wealth was never more than work. Money stores up work the way a spring stores up force. Thus the money you have in your pocket represents work that others are requried to do for you. Except, note, that most of the "work" you need done for you is no longer performed by the next generation. The older generation has farmed out these positions--essentially destroying the futures of their children and buying out the children of other countries (essentially the next generation is over there, kidnapped, and bought off with a substandard allowance). I've heard tale that corporate definition adds to this, but I don't buy it. Though a corporation is essentially a person who does not die (and therefore, never gives up their wealth), in the real world, the corporation is owned and that wealth is passed. Corporations complicate matters but they change nothing really.

Now of course, the older generation does not see their wealth as a function of economics so on top of everything else, they've artificially inflated the system. Between 1975 and now we've experienced 305% inflation, roughly 3x. If you buy a house for 50,000 in 1975, it's worth 150,000 now. See the problem? When you ask for $350,000 for the house (a not too outlandish price), you're asking for 700% inflation. Wow! As long as it stays in the housing market though, right? Well, it doesn't. It seeps out through distribution (see noqthe importance of that defintion). The homeowner, having sold their house moves off into the world with their deflated dollar ruining the economic base of the non-homeowner world. Simmultaneously, as economics is this system for passing the wealth on to the next generation, the economic system fails because the next generation cannot purchase a house with their correctly valued money. The older generation wants too much money and have destroyed the younger generations capacity to get ANY money. In the last election, they were calling people who make $250,000 a year middle class. That's makes just about anyone who is my age or younger lower class. Have they just shifted the bar? Partly, but not really. The middle class traditionally own houses. If you don't make somewhere in that neighborhood, it doesn't matter what car you drive, you can't afford to buy a house.

Now, the whole subprime thing is interesting, but not for the reasons we're being told. Subprime loans allowed people who couldn't afford houses (and who would have been able to had the economy been healthy) to buy houses thus creating the illusion that there is nothing wrong--that wealth is being distributed just as it should be.

The fallout from all this is, unfortunately, that an economic system will right itself one way or another. My generation will get those houses one way or another. I don't expect that the baby boomers will come down in price. They will accept nothing less than 600-700% profits off of their initial investments, but eventually, fate or illness will force them to vacate. Of course, given the propensity for economic collapse to elevate a minority, we may see a few people in possession of those houses and revert to the spread of a renting lower class. So, you'll get to live in the house you grew up in, you just won't own it.

The Industrious and their critics

2008-10-31T08:51:00.003-05:00

In recent posts on my wife's blog, she has commented that because of the failing economy, she and I have six jobs between us...this does not include raising two children, working on fellowships and grants, or working on my dissertation. It is strictly a function of a paycheck and the number of sources from which one receives a paycheck. I do three seperate things to make money, my wife does three seperate things to make money...on top of everything else that we do.

Some have commented on the fact that the crowded schedule of my wife and I are due to poor planning. In other words, if we'd just done "the right thing" we would not be in this mess. To this point, I would like to say something I think, somewhat, relevant.

The wrong thing that I have done is to train myself to take up the job of Teacher. Now, I understand your reservations, wanting to be a teacher is of course akin to choosing heroin addiction and so I must confess that I have no one to blame for my and my wife's plight. Had I chosen a more noble profession, say mortgage broker, I would be a much more virtuous and well rounded citizen, but as a teacher I have chosen to be the lowest of the low. Becoming a college professor takes a minimum of 11 years of schooling. Most people take between 12 and 15. At some point, I thought I'd be a computer programmer for obvious reasons (and for just as obvious reasons, I'm glad I didn't) and so I'm slow moving through. During this period of education and training, one works crap jobs--that's the way it goes. If you want teachers, this is what you have to put up with.

Now, for those who have decided that my choice to be a teacher is akin to making a career out of amateur porn, might I suggest that you don't know what in the fuck you are talking about...and yet, you keep talking. And therein, lies the problem with America. Freedom of speech began with the assumption that those with the freedom would be educated enough to use it with some proficiency. No one figured on giving this power to a raving sea of boobs, but unfortunately, our education system, with its concentration on the business major to the detriment of all other subjects (including general knowledge and ethics) has generated an academic class that has studied nothing but the flowcharting of emails, the cost efficiency of Shrinkage lectures, and the economy of borrowing so as to inflate CEO packages. Well, just saying...maybe an English class here or there, might have taught you something about how people aught to be treated and the repurcussions of treating them ill.

As for the morons who cannot help but speak, I want you to sit down, not with me, not with anyone, just with yourself, and ask yourself, what really do you know? That shit you're talking about, have you ever read a book on the subject? Is that opinion that you're fighting for tooth-and-nail informed, or is it just something you cooked up in the fry basket of your head? Is it really worth all of this noise you make? I write about American politics because I'm training to be a teacher in American Studies; what do you know? As for my wife and I and our slacker lifestyles, my god, do you speak from conviction or from constipation? The world is bigger than your wellfare-mom conception of it.