The Bomber as School Reformer by Sol Stern, City Journal 6 October 2008

Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”

Funny: imaginary campaign ads based on School House Rock, from The Volokh Conspiracy (Orin Kerr).

Love this headline:

Palin to Meet World Leaders, Bono

I could stare at stuff like concept ships (concept spaceships) all day.

And build them out of lego. Sigh.

Interesting article on some of the details of Obama's "community organizing".

This is an interesting quote

The first and most fundamental lesson Obama learned was to reassess his understanding of power. Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: "You want to organize for power!"

Galluzzo shared with me the manual he uses to train new organizers, which is little different from the version he used to train Obama in the '80s. It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: "power analysis," "elements of a power organization," "the path to power." Galluzzo told me that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky's gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists. But Galluzzo's manual instructs them to get over these hang-ups. "We are not virtuous by not wanting power," it says. "We are really cowards for not wanting power," because "power is good" and "powerlessness is evil."

The other fundamental lesson Obama was taught is Alinsky's maxim that self-interest is the only principle around which to organize people. (Galluzzo's manual goes so far as to advise trainees in block letters: "get rid of do-gooders in your church and your organization.") Obama was a fan of Alinsky's realistic streak. "The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people's self-interest was met," he told me, "and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in."

This is quite an effective ad against Obama's candidacy. All voices of Democrats, and Obama himself from 2004 saying he didn't think he was the kind of person to be ready to be president four years hence.

I was very struck by this moving "geeklist" from a Crohn's disease sufferer. Its a unique look at how a community of affiliation (boardgamers) are using the tools of the internet to reach out. Wow.

I know of two sufferers of this disease myself, and the dialog he posted is very illuminating.

Call me depraved, but I found Cracked.com's The (Mentally Ill) Idiot’s Guide To Amazon.com to be pretty funny, especially the wishlist part.

Cracked.com is pretty hit or miss, but the hits are good.

When "narrative" becomes an excuse - Reformation21 Blog

God's word is more than narrative. It is divine revelation.

Yeah, so?

Its divine revelation in the form of narrative. Its revelation of a narrative, and in a narrative. (Plus other stuff, I think everyone grants)

"Would-be" theologians are apparently undermining the normative authority of scripture by appealing to narrative (who?)

Duncan doesn't give me enough here to do anything but suspect a false antithesis.

Peter Leithart was discussing hermeneutics, in reference to Jorge Gracia’s Theory of Textuality. Gracia uses the example of the playing of games to illustrate how an author can "intend" one thing, but a different or wider meaning can result. A player might not (often doesn't) know the full import of his move for the game as a whole.

Intriguing.

Also interesting because I've noticed in playing games with my kids (see Ticket to Ride, left, for the latest...) that they can become quite bothered by the fact that what they intended by the move isn't actually the result of the move. She "meant" to take my Knight, not leave an opening for my Bishop to take her Queen. Often times the kids want their full intentions realized in the play of the game, and when that doesn't happen, it can be frustrating.

Feral cities - The New Strategic Environment from Naval War College Review.

Inneresting.

I'm sure all my fellow TMBG friends already knew this, but apparently, TMBG recorded a "simlish" translation of their song Take Out The Trash. Simlish is the pidgin nonsense language that the characters in Maxis "The Sims" game speak when interacting.

Pretty geekily amusing.

"Took a la treesh!"

Comic-con 08: This Is What Ender's Game Will Look Like From Now On is io9's report on the Ender's Game comic, coming from Marvel in October. Apparently it will be different than the book.

Really interesting quote From Lawrence Dennis

"Any charter of liberties becomes necessarily an absurdity after a few years, for no plan of public order and means to its realization can long, be appropriate to changing conditions."

People are talking again about what Obama said (in addition to the need to deal resolutely and decisively with terrorists) about the roots of the 9/11 attacks

The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

Fair enough.

But is that consistent with his understanding of poverty he expressed in Dreams of My Father (see below)?

There he claimed poverty in inner city Chicago is the worst, because of the lack of "discernible order" in the life of the poor (order provided by tradition and networks of middlemen and bribe takers). Wouldn't the kind of traditional societies like those of the Arab world fit the model of those that provide "discernible order"? But the terrorists didn't and haven't come from Chicago, they came from a place where there was tradition.

I continue to be concerned with the statist impulse. The statist assumes he knows enough about social order to manipulate it. But nobody knows enough to do what he think will actually come to pass. Thus the governing impulse that humbly says we can't know the "roots" or "climate" that produces something (I'm becoming more leery of the climate metaphor) and instead we deal with the matters at hand is bound to be more effective and in tune with reality, avoiding the inevitable "unintended consequences"

Post Apocalypse. TIME writes on the phenomenon of mean blog commenters.

Thoughts?

I continue to be fascinated by the anonymous writer for the Asia Times "Spengler". Of interest to me is a recent article where he draws out the influence of the anthropological background of Obama's mother on Obama

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.

The anthropologist Obama is on display in a quotation from Dreams of my Father that Spengler references here

As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her.

The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betel nut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms ... I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld [the Chicago housing project where Obama engaged in community organizing]. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.

That's quite revealing. As Spengler comments

The coherence of traditional society imposes a structure on life, a structure so rigid that such societies cannot adapt to change and must crumble before encroaching empire. In return for the sanctity of individual rights, Americans are freed from the constraints of traditional society and made responsible for their own actions. For an American presidential candidate to refer to traditional society as the model for the solution to American problems has no precedent. It is one thing to denounce American errors while upholding American principles. Never before has America considered electing a president who prefers the alternative, and that might just be the most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since its Civil War.

Back in the original article, though, American's "freedom from constraints" have a downside

Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.

Environmentalists want to do whatever it takes to make sure we don't harm the environment.

Cheap oil leads us to waste it and not invest in alternative energy.

Oil prices are "mysteriously" high, and "speculators" are blamed, and politicians want to investigate to find who's responsible.

What if a well-funded cabal of environmentalists is buying up all the oil futures, paying higher and higher prices just to make sure the price is high. And they will just take the oil off the market and store it somewhere.

Did you hear about that Buddhist couple who're never more than 15 feet apart? Well, we tried it. - By David Plotz and Hanna Rosin

Here's a "radical feminist" argument for why heterosexual marriage should receive a place of legal privilege in comparison to whatever tolerated legal arrangements the US makes for homosexual relations.

In entering in to heterosexual marriage, women must assume greater personal risk than women who have lesbian relationships or men who have gay relationships.

The qualification and quantification of the risk could take various forms.