Crossroads of Civilization
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Language, Wired Sisters on Dec 9th, 2011
(and Other Indicia of Hypocrisy) There are, in fact, lots of different parental guidelines for television programs (pay and “free”) and films (made-for-tv and theater), and far be it from us to list them all here. The ones used for pay TV shows are especially interesting: “adult content”, which mostly designates the kind of [...]
Posted in Culture, Ethics, Gods, Law & Legislation, Wired Sisters on Nov 20th, 2011
Google “optical illusions” and you will pull up a huge number of moving and stationary, black-and-white and color, geometric and random drawings that have in common the ability to look first like one very definite image, and then like a totally different one, to the normal human eye. I just finished reading a Dan Simmons [...]
Posted in Culture, Ethics, Gods, Wired Sisters on Nov 2nd, 2011
It was my usual Sunday afternoon visit to my grandfather. He sat by the window of the cluttered, faded West Rogers Park apartment, looking out over the park as a cloud of dust and noise blew toward us from the softball game. I picked up my glass of iced tea from the stack of Yiddish [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Lifestyle, Politics, Wired Sisters on Oct 7th, 2011
Back when I was an English teacher, one of the best writing tips I gave my students was to write the last paragraph of an essay first, and the first paragraph last. Remember Benjamin Button (recently played by Brad Pitt)? The guy who was born old, grew younger every year, and finally faded into infancy [...]
Posted in Ethics, Law & Legislation, Politics, Wired Sisters on Sep 23rd, 2011
I spent nearly twenty years teaching a course on “professional standards for mental health workers,” which was essentially a course on professional ethics. While we spent a lot of time talking about medical ethics, because historically all professional ethics start with the Hippocratic Oath, we also looked at the ethics of other professions or quasi-professions. [...]
Posted in Family, Health & Health Care, Wired Sisters on Aug 28th, 2011
What I mostly did, at least during August, was get my right hip replaced. The old model had been stiff, painful, and a damn nuisance, for somewhere between five and eight years. Eventually, it forced me to the routine use of a cane, which (impelled by vanity) I put off for as long as I [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Family, Law & Legislation, Wired Sisters on Jul 7th, 2011
I’ve been engaged in a four-day Continuing Legal Education marathon, so I haven’t paid much attention to the Casey Anthony trial (unlike the OJ trial, which I actually used as material for the college English classes I was teaching at the time.) But last night I got seriously overdosed with it on the news and [...]
Posted in Commerce, Community, Gods, Law & Legislation, Wired Sisters on Jun 20th, 2011
Many years ago I used to work with a Jesuit, who told me once that after his first month of hearing confessions, he no longer believed in original sin. “Nothing original about it,” he told me. “Just the same thing over and over.” We know, from centuries of observation, that the market economy is basic [...]
Posted in Culture, Wired Sisters on Jun 2nd, 2011
Recommended Reading I have a client who now resides in a nursing home and is in the early-to-middle phases of dementia. She is also a sci-fi fan, so whenever I clean out my bookshelves, I take the proceeds to her. I am discovering that, while that improves the quality of my life, it doesn’t necessary [...]
Posted in Culture, Wired Sisters on Jun 2nd, 2011
I am a beneficiary of affirmative action. These days, so they say, I should be ashamed to admit it. It implies, after all, that I was not otherwise qualified for some benefit I obtained only because of being some kind of “minority.”
Posted in Community, Culture, Education, Law & Legislation, Politics, Wired Sisters, Woman on May 29th, 2011
I am a beneficiary of affirmative action. These days, so they say, I should be ashamed to admit it. It implies, after all, that I was not otherwise qualified for some benefit I obtained only because of being some kind of “minority.”
Posted in Commerce, Community, Culture, Gods, War, Wired Sisters on May 29th, 2011
Recommended Reading I have a client who now resides in a nursing home and is in the early-to-middle phases of dementia. She is also a sci-fi fan, so whenever I clean out my bookshelves, I take the proceeds to her. I am discovering that, while that improves the quality of my life, it doesn’t necessary [...]
Posted in Commerce, Community, Culture, Education, Family, Lifestyle, Wired Sisters on May 12th, 2011
I googled “child labor” recently, and all I could find was stuff on how much of it there still is in the world, and why it’s so bad. Nobody seems to be looking at, or even for, an upside. Okay, maybe this is kind of like looking for the upside of the Third Reich (the [...]
Posted in Arts, Commerce, Culture, Technology, Wired Sisters on Apr 30th, 2011
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Samuel Johnson Arianna Huffington is being sued by some of her former unpaid bloggers. Jonathan Tasini and the other members of his class action against her complain that they created the value of the Huffington Post with their unpaid writing, and she then sold it [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Politics, War, Wired Sisters on Apr 27th, 2011
Posted in Community, Culture, Lifestyle, Nation, Wired Sisters on Apr 12th, 2011
Do you ever get tired of hearing that the U.S. is the only western industrialized country that (doesn’t have handgun control/doesn’t have a national health care program/has an infant mortality rate over __%/imprisons more than __% of its citizens/pick one)? After hearing so many of the pronouncements indicating that we trail the industrial West in [...]
Posted in Culture, Law & Legislation, Nation, Politics, War, Wired Sisters on Apr 5th, 2011
We have never established a rule for when a reply is long enough to become a post, but I suspect this one may reach that limit. It is not merely the “defense” establishment that stays while presidents come and go, but a few other eternal verities. One is that, while
Posted in Culture, Ethics, Nation, Politics, Wired Sisters on Apr 4th, 2011
Maybe it’s the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Or one of the pale imitations that sprang up in WWII. One of the ever-so-alluring melodies of a “good war.” Given half a chance, most of us—and even worse, most of our presidents–really want to be the good guys in somebody else’s revolution, the Lafayette to somebody [...]
Posted in Commerce, Lifestyle, Private, Public, Wired Sisters on Mar 22nd, 2011
This is not the first time the Family Wired has been broke. The most stellar episode was back in the 1970s. In many ways, it wasn’t that different from now. Our income was roughly two times our housing cost, but low enough to occasionally qualify us for food stamps. The differences mostly had to do [...]
Posted in Culture, Gods, Science, Technology, Wired Sisters on Mar 4th, 2011
Well,
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Law & Legislation, Mind, Politics, Wired Sisters on Feb 20th, 2011
Item 1: So far, there’s one consequence of the 1995 government shutdown that I haven’t seen anybody mention. It was the direct cause of President Clinton meeting Monica Lewinsky. Ordinarily, she would never have spent any substantial amount of time in the Oval Office, as a mere intern. But when Congress shut off the money [...]
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Ethics, Law & Legislation, Politics, Wired Sisters on Feb 17th, 2011
In 1959, Vice President Nixon and Russian Premier Khrushchev met in a model American kitchen in a Moscow exhibit, and talked about democracy. The actual specifics of the discussion were rather more subtle than what the public, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, ultimately got out of it. What the US audience heard was [...]
Posted in Community, Culture, Education, Politics, Wired Sisters on Feb 15th, 2011
You’ve prob
Posted in Community, Culture, Ethics, Family, Law & Legislation, Lifestyle, Sex, Wired Sisters on Feb 7th, 2011
The River City Syndrome “Friends, we got trouble Right here in River City, And that starts with T, and that rhymes with P And that stands for….Pregnancy?” Everybody talks about teen pregnancy, but nobody can figure out what to do about it. Newt Gingrich had it figured out 17 years ago or so—take the babies [...]
Posted in Gods, Nature, Wired Sisters on Feb 2nd, 2011
Happy Ground Hog Day to all! Apparently the entire central US, from Oklahoma to Maine, is on the wrong end of a massive snowstorm, just as Australia is bracing for a historically huge typhoon and Cairo and its environs are bracing for actual all-out battle. We are all in the middle of an Irving Allen [...]