Enlightened Immigration Policy

"The one thing we could do for a country like Mexico, for example, is to stop every illegal immigrant at the border, give him a good rifle and a case of ammunition, and send him home. Let the Mexicans solve their customary problems in their customary way."

Prostitution

"Science in our time is the whore of industry and the slut of war."

SNAFU

"When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about."

Anarchy

"I dislike the life of institutions and organizations, and am slow to trust people who willingly live such a life."

As It Should Be

"He was vastly more inclined to learn than to be taught."

Too Much To Ask?

"Freedom to him,was being free of being bossed and of being a boss."

Relativity

If all the politicians died tomorrow, it would be a blip. If all the scientists and engineers died, it would be an apocalypse. If all the poets died, so would god.

  mce

Who, Where, What

"My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place. Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

Fundamentalist Consumerism

"Buying material possessions to secure respect and position in the world is delusional: abundance teaches dissatisfaction."

NRA Racist Mission

What exactly is the function of the NRA? Interesting question. Supposedly it is to protect the Second Amendment. Not so. Its real function is to promote fear. Fear of "the others." That means anyone different, especially people of color. This is a great marketing ploy for the gun industry. Create an endless supply of weapons; those weapons will be bought by scared white people, but will also fall into the hands of criminals (some people of color), which will then encourage more scared white people to buy guns for "home defense," and so on ad nauseam.

The NRA uses the ubiquitous racism of American society to hustle guns to scared white suburbanites and racist militias.

So, essentially the NRA supports White Supremacy and white supremacists love and support the NRA. Think about it. It would be interesting to know what percentage of the NRA's membership is white supremacist and skin head, but of course we never will.

New Pope: Same Snake, New Skin

The election of Pope Francis to head the most obsolescent, bloody, repressive institution in human history is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. While individual Catholics may be fine people, the church itself is an instrument of repressive conservatism. In particular, its teachings on birth control lead to nothing short of ecological disaster. There are far too many people on earth and the Catholic hierarchy encourages more and more. That alone, sex scandals, etc. aside, makes the church dangerous and irrelevant. It is a dinosaur with a voracious appetite for power. Until it changes its stance on birth control, it remains an evil force in the world.

Very Possible Visual

"Keep you doped with religion, sex and TV
and you think you're so clever and classless and free
but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see..."
   John Lennon

Chinese Swine Holocaust Continues

The number of dead swine floating in a Chinese river has now exceeded 6000. No one knows why or how the swine ended up there. Talk about a pig in a poke! Chinese officials are assuring locals that the 6000 dead pigs floating in their drinking water poses no health threat. That's government in action. Speculation is rife that this may be a mass suicide as the quality of life for pigs in China is extremely bad, although not as bad as that of peasants. Makes you wonder what's next? Stay tuned.

   mce

Mass Swine Suicide in China

"BEIJING — More than 2,800 dead pigs have been found in a major river that flows through Shanghai, igniting fears among city residents of contaminated tap water, according to state news media reports on Monday."

Clearly the Chinese can't tell the difference between pigs and lemmings. If I had to live in the Chinese hive, I'd commit suicide too.

MCE

Oh, Brave New World!

Recent ‘Technology in Education’ Articles You May Have Missed

January 29, 2013, 11:18 am

By Kerry Soper

1. “Department chair supports ‘digital humanities’ without knowing exactly what it is”
2. “Hiring committee uses Facebook rather than MLA interviews to vet tenure-track job candidates”
3. “Widely published senior colleague still unable to detect Nigerian e-mail scams without help of college IT guy”
4. “Middle-aged history professor gets Twitter account; makes one tweet before losing login information”
5. “Associate professor diagnosed with mild whiplash after repeatedly checking email during student-consultation hours”
6. “Jaded instructor now suspiciously filters his own essays through plagiarism-detecting software”
7. “Students momentarily distracted by professor’s lecture while managing their Facebook accounts”
8. “Full professor reprimanded a third time by Wikipedia administrators for attempting to create an entry on himself”
9.“Depressed assistant English professor neglects grading to check repeatedly the number of ‘likes’ on her Instagram account”
10. “With help from nephew, art-history professor breaks international copyright law to download UK premier of Downton Abbey”

Resist The Empire

"The most revolutionary thing anyone can do is follow one's heart."
      Derrick Jensen - Walking On Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution

Education v.1

"The most important piece of technology in any classroom is the second hand of the clock. The purpose is to teach millions of students the identical prayer: Please God, make it move faster."
  Derrick Jensen

Keep this in mind the next time you show a Powerpoint presentation.

   mce

Talking About Revolution

Currently, 60% of Spaniards under 25 are unemployed. This is a bomb waiting to go off.

High unemployment in Weimer was a huge cause of Hitler's ascendency.

Spain has a violent history of both Anarchy and Fascism. Youth unemployment at this level will feed all kinds of extremism. Kids will not long accept the fact that they have no future.

Throw in Basque and Catalan separatist movements and it only looks worse.

Look for bad things to happen in Spain soon.

It will only take a spark.

mce

What Is Anarchism?

I am often asked this question when I refer to myself as an anarchist. As most Americans are among the most politically and economically illiterate folks on earth, it is difficult to answer. Still it is important to try. Capitalism is currently very weak, as a result of rampant, unchecked globalization. Formerly, owners and corporations pulled the strings, but now even they are at the the mercy of the usurers. Cracks are forming everywhere within the capitalist system, largely as a result of its inability to deliver the basics (e.g. a living wage) to all but a minority of people. This is the so called "New Normal." Thus, this is a time to look for alternatives. Anarchism is one such alternative.

Below is a pamphlet in PDF form which should open on most computers that does a good job of explicating the basics of anarchism. I don't agree with all of it, but with most.

Warning: If you are close-minded, unimaginative or just plain too stupid to follow an argument, you will want to skip this.

The Single Academic Word I Hate The Most

adjunct |ˈajə ng kt|
noun
1 a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part : computer technology is an adjunct to learning.
• a person who is another's assistant or subordinate.
2 Grammar a word or phrase used to amplify or modify the meaning of another word or words in a sentence.
adjective [ attrib. ]
connected or added to something, typically in an auxiliary way : other alternative or adjunct therapies include immunotherapy.
• (of an academic post) attached to the staff of a college in a temporary or assistant capacity : an adjunct professor of entomology. [as n. ] both adjuncts and tenured professors tend to inflate grades .

For Christ's sake get rid of the word adjunct.

For those of you haven't thought of it, adjunct is demeaning.  It's like saying nigger instead of black, or spic instead of latino, Or chink instead of asian.

Why not just part-time and full-time faculty? Why make it demeaning? If it weren't for adjuncts a college education would cost 30% more and probably have 30% fewer students.

I am by far more qualified and experienced than most of my colleagues to teach college classes, and yet I am somehow a second class citizen. In fact, if it weren't for the savings colleges extract from adjuncts (now about 70% of the teaching force and growing), most tenured faculty wouldn't have jobs.

Lose this stupid,  demeaning description.

You need us more than we need you. Either become aware of that or risk the fire next time.

Happy New Year,

Mike

A Short List of Words that Should be Murdered in 2013

 Below is a short list of words and phrases that suck so much they must be murdered before 2013. Feel free to add any you like.

Professional (debased to mean simply anyone who does work for money)
Fiscal cliff (legislative irresponsibility)
Kick the can down the road (avoid making a decision)
Double-down (be obstinate)
Job creators ( the rich)
Takers not makers (the poor not the rich)
47% (parasites who are not rich, as opposed to rich parasites)
Passion, passionate (as in: he was passionate about M & M's)
Spoiler alert (revealing the end of something)
Trending ( leaning toward; planning)
Boneless wings ( chicken pieces with hot sauce)
Guru (expert, maybe)
Superfood (healthy food)
Epic ( as in: that dessert was epic. Really?)   
Occupy (a word that now means nothing at all)
Mommy porn (50 shades of Grey)
Baby daddy ( unmarried father of a child)
Amazing ( when was the last time you were really amazed?)
Love and Hate (I love ice cream, but hate peas. I think you mean "really like".)
Baby bump ( showing, as in pregnant.)
Blowback (reaction)
Birther (moron)
Tea Party (morons)
Ginormous (very, very large)
Man Cave (Den)
The New Normal (eight dollars an hour and no benefits)
Shared Sacrifice (political phrase meaning you (not I) are about to be screwed).
Thank you in advance (I expect you to do this.)
Wordsmith (write, writer, edit.)
Terrorist (Was George Washington a terrorist? By current definition, yes.)
Collateral Damage (murdered civilians)
Any noun turned into a verb for which a perfectly good verb already exists.

And of course, there so many more).

    mce

One of my only current heroes

I couldn’t help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to.
And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0.
To understand what an important defector Lanier is, you have to know his dossier. As a pioneer and publicizer of virtual-reality technology (computer-simulated experiences) in the ’80s, he became a Silicon Valley digital-guru rock star, later renowned for his giant bushel-basket-size headful of dreadlocks and Falstaffian belly, his obsession with exotic Asian musical instruments, and even a big-label recording contract for his modernist classical music. (As he later told me, he once “opened for Dylan.” )
The colorful, prodigy-like persona of Jaron Lanier—he was in his early 20s when he helped make virtual reality a reality—was born among a small circle of first-generation Silicon Valley utopians and artificial-intelligence visionaries. Many of them gathered in, as Lanier recalls, “some run-down bungalows [I rented] by a stream in Palo Alto” in the mid-’80s, where, using capital he made from inventing the early video game hit Moondust, he’d started building virtual-reality machines. In his often provocative and astute dissenting book You Are Not a Gadget, he recalls one of the participants in those early mind-melds describing it as like being “in the most interesting room in the world.” Together, these digital futurists helped develop the intellectual concepts that would shape what is now known as Web 2.0—“information wants to be free,” “the wisdom of the crowd” and the like.
And then, shortly after the turn of the century, just when the rest of the world was turning on to Web 2.0, Lanier turned against it. With a broadside in Wired called “One-Half of a Manifesto,” he attacked the idea that “the wisdom of the crowd” would result in ever-upward enlightenment. It was just as likely, he argued, that the crowd would devolve into an online lynch mob.
Lanier became the fiercest and weightiest critic of the new digital world precisely because he came from the Inside. He was a heretic, an apostate rebelling against the ideology, the culture (and the cult) he helped found, and in effect, turning against himself.

***

And despite his apostasy, he’s still very much in the game. People want to hear his thoughts even when he’s castigating them. He’s still on the Davos to Dubai, SXSW to TED Talks conference circuit. Indeed, Lanier told me that after our rendezvous, he was off next to deliver the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Ford Foundation uptown in Manhattan. Following which he was flying to Vienna to address a convocation of museum curators, then, in an overnight turnaround, back to New York to participate in the unveiling of Microsoft’s first tablet device, the Surface.
Lanier freely admits the contradictions; he’s a kind of research scholar at Microsoft, he was on a first-name basis with “Sergey” and “Steve” (Brin, of Google, and Jobs, of Apple, respectively). But he uses his lecture circuit earnings to subsidize his obsession with those extremely arcane wind instruments. Following his Surface appearance he gave a concert downtown at a small venue in which he played some of them.
Lanier is still in the game in part because virtual reality has become, virtually, reality these days. “If you look out the window,” he says pointing to the traffic flowing around Union Square, “there’s no vehicle that wasn’t designed in a virtual-reality system first. And every vehicle of every kind built—plane, train—is first put in a virtual-reality machine and people experience driving it [as if it were real] first.”
I asked Lanier about his decision to rebel against his fellow Web 2.0 “intellectuals.”
“I think we changed the world,” he replies, “but this notion that we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves is irresponsible.”
For instance, he said, “I’d been an early advocate of making information free,” the mantra of the movement that said it was OK to steal, pirate and download the creative works of musicians, writers and other artists. It’s all just “information,” just 1’s and 0’s.
Indeed, one of the foundations of Lanier’s critique of digitized culture is the very way its digital transmission at some deep level betrays the essence of what it tries to transmit. Take music.
“MIDI,” Lanier wrote, of the digitizing program that chops up music into one-zero binaries for transmission, “was conceived from a keyboard player’s point of view...digital patterns that represented keyboard events like ‘key-down’ and ‘key-up.’ That meant it could not describe the curvy, transient expressions a singer or a saxophone note could produce. It could only describe the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin.”
Quite eloquent, an aspect of Lanier that sets him apart from the HAL-speak you often hear from Web 2.0 enthusiasts (HAL was the creepy humanoid voice of the talking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s prophetic 2001: A Space Odyssey). But the objection that caused Lanier’s turnaround was not so much to what happened to the music, but to its economic foundation.
I asked him if there was a single development that gave rise to his defection.
“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.)
“Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’
“And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”
His explanation of the way Google translator works, for instance, is a graphic example of how a giant just takes (or “appropriates without compensation”) and monetizes the work of the crowd. “One of the magic services that’s available in our age is that you can upload a passage in English to your computer from Google and you get back the Spanish translation. And there’s two ways to think about that. The most common way is that there’s some magic artificial intelligence in the sky or in the cloud or something that knows how to translate, and what a wonderful thing that this is available for free.
“But there’s another way to look at it, which is the technically true way: You gather a ton of information from real live translators who have translated phrases, just an enormous body, and then when your example comes in, you search through that to find similar passages and you create a collage of previous translations.”
“So it’s a huge, brute-force operation?” “It’s huge but very much like Facebook, it’s selling people [their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying habits, etc.] back to themselves. [With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.”
The way superfast computing has led to the nanosecond hedge-fund-trading stock markets? The “Flash Crash,” the “London Whale” and even the Great Recession of 2008?
“Well, that’s what my new book’s about. It’s called The Fate of Power and the Future of Dignity, and it doesn’t focus as much on free music files as it does on the world of finance—but what it suggests is that a file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there’s this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. [Meanwhile], it’s shrinking the overall economy. I think it’s the mistake of our age.”
The mistake of our age? That’s a bold statement (as someone put it in Pulp Fiction). “I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”
The connection Lanier makes between techno-utopianism, the rise of the machines and the Great Recession is an audacious one. Lanier is suggesting we are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder. Nanobytes of Big Data that diminish our personhood, our dignity. He may be the first Silicon populist.
“To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It’s somebody’s value that’s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it’s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it’s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes—and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.”
Lanier has another problem with the techno-utopians, though. It’s not just that they’ve crashed the economy, but that they’ve made a joke out of spirituality by creating, and worshiping, “the Singularity”—the “Nerd Rapture,” as it’s been called. The belief that increasing computer speed and processing power will shortly result in machines acquiring “artificial intelligence,” consciousness, and that we will be able to upload digital versions of ourselves into the machines and achieve immortality. Some say as early as 2020, others as late as 2045. One of its chief proponents, Ray Kurzweil, was on NPR recently talking about his plans to begin resurrecting his now dead father digitally.
Some of Lanier’s former Web 2.0 colleagues—for whom he expresses affection, not without a bit of pity—take this prediction seriously. “The first people to really articulate it did so right about the late ’70s, early ’80s and I was very much in that conversation. I think it’s a way of interpreting technology in which people forgo taking responsibility,” he says. “‘Oh, it’s the computer did it not me.’ ‘There’s no more middle class? Oh, it’s not me. The computer did it.’
“I was talking last year to Vernor Vinge, who coined the term ‘singularity,’” Lanier recalls, “and he was saying, ‘There are people around who believe it’s already happened.’ And he goes, ‘Thank God, I’m not one of those people.’”
In other words, even to one of its creators, it’s still just a thought experiment—not a reality or even a virtual-reality hot ticket to immortality. It’s a surreality.
Lanier says he’ll regard it as faith-based, “Unless of course, everybody’s suddenly killed by machines run amok.”
“Skynet!” I exclaim, referring to the evil machines in the Terminator films.
At last we come to politics, where I believe Lanier has been most farsighted—and which may be the deep source of his turning into a digital Le Carré figure. As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.
It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.
Surprisingly, Lanier tells me it first came to him when he recognized his own inner troll—for instance, when he’d find himself shamefully taking pleasure when someone he knew got attacked online. “I definitely noticed it happening to me,” he recalled. “We’re not as different from one another as we’d like to imagine. So when we look at this pathetic guy in Texas who was just outed as ‘Violentacrez’...I don’t know if you followed it?”
“I did.” “Violentacrez” was the screen name of a notorious troll on the popular site Reddit. He was known for posting “images of scantily clad underage girls...[and] an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore” and more, according to the Gawker.com reporter who exposed his real name, shaming him and evoking consternation among some Reddit users who felt that this use of anonymity was inseparable from freedom of speech somehow.
“So it turns out Violentacrez is this guy with a disabled wife who’s middle-aged and he’s kind of a Walter Mitty—someone who wants to be significant, wants some bit of Nietzschean spark to his life.”
Only Lanier would attribute Nie­tzschean longings to Violentacrez. “And he’s not that different from any of us. The difference is that he’s scared and possibly hurt a lot of people.”
Well, that is a difference. And he couldn’t have done it without the anonymous screen name. Or he wouldn’t have.
And here’s where Lanier says something remarkable and ominous about the potential dangers of anonymity.
“This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”
“Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat.
“I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam....Look what we’re setting up here in the world today. We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.”
Here he sounds less like a Le Carré mole than the American intellectual pessimist who surfaced back in the ’30s and criticized the Communist Party he left behind: someone like Whittaker Chambers.
But something he mentioned next really astonished me: “I’m sensitive to it because it murdered most of my parents’ families in two different occasions and this idea that we’re getting unified by people in these digital networks—”
“Murdered most of my parents’ families.” You heard that right. Lanier’s mother survived an Austrian concentration camp but many of her family died during the war—and many of his father’s family were slaughtered in prewar Russian pogroms, which led the survivors to flee to the United States.
It explains, I think, why his father, a delightfully eccentric student of human nature, brought up his son in the New Mexico desert—far from civilization and its lynch mob potential. We read of online bullying leading to teen suicides in the United States and, in China, there are reports of well-organized online virtual lynch mobs forming...digital Maoism.
He gives me one detail about what happened to his father’s family in Russia. “One of [my father’s] aunts was unable to speak because she had survived the pogrom by remaining absolutely mute while her sister was killed by sword in front of her [while she hid] under a bed. She was never able to speak again.”
It’s a haunting image of speechlessness. A pogrom is carried out by a “crowd,” the true horrific embodiment of the purported “wisdom of the crowd.” You could say it made Lanier even more determined not to remain mute. To speak out against the digital barbarism he regrets he helped create.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html#ixzz2GC3xRsoh
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

Perfect Objectivity

For all you teachers out there - this is how I do it:

Alan Bloom

Mention The Closing of the American Mind, and there’s a very good chance someone will dredge up Bloom’s attack on students and rock music. Here is Bloom in full flow:

"Picture a 13-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home during his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, life-like electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged masturbational fantasy."

On-Line Teaching; The Road To Serfdom

Chase the following link to an excellent article on this:

The Computer Delusion

Let's Destroy "Credential Hell."

Face it. In the last 40 years it has become necessary to secure a "credential" to take a shit. This has increased unemployment and lined the pockets of the schools. Time for it to end.

Degree or Knowledge?

Anarchy and Education

"I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” - John Taylor Gatto

“Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.” - Lucy Parsons

Imagine that, manage themselves. No credentialed drones to bore them into lassitude and despair. - mce

Mark Twain

"Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty." I would add: massive debt, indentured servitude and unemployment. Except as credentialing factories, universities are dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid, which - one hopes - will arrive soon. - mce

Student Loan Thoughts

Let student loan interest rates rise to market levels. That should make the 60% of students who shouldn't be in college think twice. And for the love of Emma Goldman, do not help your kids pay them off or let them live at home for free while they do.

By the way, do you know how much plumbers and electricians make by doing honest labor? Call some and find out. You can't outsource shit or wires. Just a thought.

My Politics

I am often asked about my politics. The answer is simple: I have none. I am an anarchist, but that is a state of mind, not politics.
The Left, the Right, and the Middle have devolved into fanatics or sheeple. None of them has had an original idea in decades. They are walking corpses.
As for democracy, forget it. The rich ate it de facto well before the Supreme Court institutionalized Oligarchy in the Citizens United case.
Forget that 60s bullshit about being part of the problem or part of the solution. The US is now too dysfunctional and cowed to come up with solutions.
I am an iconoclast, first and last.
There is nothing else left to be.
As I see it, if you don't offend someone everyday, you are not alive. The culture of Nice and Political Correctness are the culture of numbness and death. Offend whenever possible. Make the hooples mad and they might think. Worth a try.

Slight Praise for the Great Cultural Revolution

Mao's Great Cultural Revolution was primarily a disaster, but it had one good idea. All of the elites: doctors, lawyers, merchants, intellectuals had, from time to time, to go and live with, work with, and share the hardships of the peasants. Bravo!
Can you imagine that now? Bankers, professors, politicians, lawyers, businessmen, the whole polluted crew having to eat bad food, work long hours, get dirty, have no cell phones, internet, etc. Half of them would die or go mad, neither a bad thing.
Doubtful, but we can hope.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." »» Thomas Jefferson

In general, Americans have drunk the Calvinist kool aid and believe that work, and ever more of it, is virtuous. Bunk! Capitalism creates slaves. It is not the function of slaves to enjoy themselves. If they take a vacation at all, it is to stay home and paint the house.

Here is a link to an article that takes issue with that notion:

Leisure? We don't need no stinking leisure.

Paidea Proposal Synopsis

Link: A good short synopsis of Adler's Paideia Proposal. So simple. So dead on.
Blog: Wide Awake Minds
Link: Excerpts from Adler's Paidea Proposal

Ezra Pound

EZ was wrong about many things, but he nailed one thing: the corrosive effect of lending money at interest (usury) on the fabric of a culture.

Speaking of the generation returning home after the horror of the trenches, he wrote:

came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Sounds remarkably temporal doesn't it?

~ mce

CCCP

I work for a college that shall remain nameless. This is not because I'm worried about getting fired. I'd love to get fired on a free speech issue and be able to retire early and well on the settlement.

My college is an open admission community college. If you have a pulse, you get admitted. I'm a great believer that everyone should get a shot, so it's fine with me.

It used to be a fun place to teach before the bureaucrats, faux deans and technocrats took over. Now we are about rules, regulations, paperwork and, increasingly, micromanagement.

The college stays in business by having a tiny cadre of full-time, tenured professors and a huge army of adjuncts. In other words, it stays in business via exploitation, the The True American way.

If I'm going to write about the place, I do need some snappy, short way to refer to it. It bills itself as the Community College of Central Pennsylvania.

Eureka! Henceforth I shall refer to it as the CCCP. Somehow this seems both ironic and appropriate. Also, I doubt the former Soviet Union will sue me.

So hello CCCP; you will be hearing more from me.

~mce

Pink Floyd = Greatest Anarchist Song Ever

Emma Goldman - American Saint

Direct Action

"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world.
I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker." — Mikhail Bakunin

Occupation and Anarchy

The thing that brings me joy about the Occupy Wall Street movement is that (at this point) it is a purely anarchist movement. No real leaders or spokespersons and no agenda other than we are poor and we are pissed. Pure direct action; pure anarchy.

The media don't know what to make of this. They expect movements to have leaders and agendas. Clueless motherfuckers.

I don't expect this phase of the action to have much effect. But it will grow and it will become more violent. Also, many Boomer veterans of the sixties who are also screwed will eventually join.

The police thugs in Oakland already showed by their riot that they are hired guns serving the interests of the one percent.

Blood in the streets. That only happens in Europe, right. Maybe not.

The anger seething against the purchase of the government by Wall Street will only get worse.

Every member of Congress and the President are part of the one percent or owned by them. Obamaramadingdong has raised more money from wall street than any other president. That says it all.

There is no political solution for this, only revolution and possible civil war. It is time to begin selectively assassinating specially chosen members of the Congress and the Executive Branch. That just might get their attention, Nothing else will.

Mike Essig

No Gods.
No masters.

Epicurus

"If a little is not enough for you, nothing is."

Noam Chomsky

"The university should be a center for radical social inquiry, as it already is a center for what might be called radical inquiry into pure sciences. For example, it should loosen its institutional forms even further, to permit a richer variety of work and study and experimentation, and it should provide a home for the free intellectual, for the social critic, for the irreverent and radical thinking that is desperately needed if we are to escape from the dismal reality that threatens to overwhelm us. The primary barrier to such a development will not be the unwillingness of administrators or the stubbornness of trustees. It will be the unwillingness of students to do the serious and difficult work required and the fear of the faculty that its security and authority, its guild structure, will be threatened."

The Job

My students have been taught for twelve, long, boring years to be who they are not. My real job is to help them peel back the veneer of all that bullshit and begin to discover their true selves. Everything else is window dressing.

~ mce

Bill Ayers

"A related challenge is to look deeply into the contexts within which teaching occurs—social surround, historical flow, cultural web. While the unexamined teaching life is hardly worth living, the examined life is full of pain and difficulty—after all, the contexts of our lives include unearned privileges and undeserved suffering, murderous drugs and crushing work, a howling sense of hopelessness for some and the palpable threat of annihilation for others. To be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and share, aware, too, of what has yet to be achieved in terms of human possibility, is to be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.
The fundamental message of the teacher, after all, is this: You can change your life. Whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, the teacher invites you to a second chance, another round, perhaps a different conclusion. The teacher posits possibility, openness, and alternative; the teacher points to what could be, but is not yet. The teacher beckons you to change your path, and so she has but one basic rule: to reach."

Noam Chomsky

“Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate them, what we call “education,” they’re going to take control — “they” being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.”

Source: Class Warfare, 1995

Awareness

As a teacher, you must always ask yourself: do I really believe this drivel I am vomiting? If not, shut the fuck up.

` mce

Noam Chomsky

"If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, “You’re an asshole,” which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, “That’s idiotic,” when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.”

Source: Interview by Charles M. Young in Rolling Stone, May 28, 1992

Remember

It isn't what you teach that matters, it's what they learn. You are not the star.

~ mce

In Which The Correct Reaction To Professionalism Is Expressed.

When I hear the word "professional," I reach for my gun.
~ mce

Robert Heinlein

"I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

Robert A. Heinlein - The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

More School Stuff

If we must have public schools, each should have no more than 300 students and they should all be within walking distance of the campus. Moreover, all school employees must live in the district, even janitors.

There can be no more that two administrators per campus and they share a secretary.

Sports (including those fucking bands) are pay for play, not financed by the school. Nor will any special sports facilities be built with taxpayer money.

There must be parity in regular and special ed spending, dollar for dollar. For decades special ed has drained the public school systems and achieved nothing, but swelling its own ranks.

The school day will be no longer than six hours and will not begin before 8 am. Other than in higher math, science and AP classes, no homework may be given. This will encourage teachers to get off their fat, tenured asses and get to work.

Anarchy is based on decentralization. Decentralization is built around communities. Communities are local.

This is a way to begin.

~ mce