10:33 – Barbara is cleaning house. I’m working on taxes.
Other than bottles and caps, we have most of the raw materials inventory we need to carry us through autumn. I’ll need to place more large orders in three months or so to carry us through the end of the year, but we have enough in-hand and on-order to build several hundred kits.
Apropos of nothing, I was just at the Amazon site and saw their big ad on the Fire TV thing; like Bob, had we not already just got the Roku 3 we probably would have got this, ignoring the hard-learned dictum of never buying the first iteration of anything electronic. If just for that voice/remote/search feature; I loathe having to type characters one by one on remotes and smartphones. We’ll take another look next year and see if the price comes down, too.
While I was there, again apropos of nothing, I took a look at their “100 Books To Read In A Lifetime” link; just as I figured; a total of THREE books from before 1900. Truly amazing, but all too typical. And it was Austen (think PBS specials), Dickens (same) and Wharton (same again, plus lush movies, too). As the very late Ezra Pound used to say, “it would take a bile specialist” to have to explain, for example, that most of the books listed on there are utter dreck and pop stuff. OK, maybe I’m a literary “elitist” but gee whiz, let’s take a whirl in OFD’s time machine and look at just a few missed opportunities here:
20th-C: Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag” trilogy; Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
19th-C: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Scarlet Letter.” Dostoevsky, Dickens…
18th-C: Austen, “Tom Jones,” “Barry Lyndon,” “Vanity Fair,” The Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers…
17th-C: “Paradise Lost”
16th-C: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sydney, Spenser….
15th-C: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Castiglione…
And so on, back through Norse sagas, Beowulf, “Confessions,” “The Consolation of Philosophy,” Ovid, Virgil, Homer, et. al.
So my proportions would be pretty much reversed from the Amazon list, maybe three titles from post-1900. We’re screwed if the literary heritage we pass on to future generations in what’s left of Western civilization is down to the “Poisonwood Bible” and Lemony Snicket.
I’ll shut up now and go on about my business…
I’m sure Amazon will make them work if there’s a problem.
I agree that most of the books on that list are dreck. Furthermore, I take issue with the premise. A hundred books? In a lifetime? Even 1,000 would be far too few. A hundred a year would be reasonable.
O be still my beating haht!
“Even 1,000 would be far too few. A hundred a year would be reasonable.”
I took it as a given that there is an issue with the premise but due to today’s limited attention span and probably ADD in the United States of Amnesia, 100 is probably super-optimistic. Ten would be a more reasonable expectation for the most fundamental, basic understanding of our heritage and traditions and how we are the way we are.
Homer, Thucydides, Bible, Virgil, Ovid, Beowulf and Norse sagas, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Founding Documents, Hawthorne, Twain. I’d keep nothing from that Amazon list, except maybe Dickens and Austen. And Dickens is kinda tedious; he’s another one of those 19th-C authors, like Trollope and Balzac, who churned out books like we spew posts on FaceCrack and Twitter. I’d even recommend Dostoevsky and Tolstoy over Dickens. I mention Thucydides because he not only talked the talk but walked the walk; an Athenian general who got shafted in the end but wrote an amazing history of the wars; the Hobbes translation will put you in the driver’s seat but it will be hard to say whether it’s Hobbes or the general speaking.
There are various modern translations of the ancient guys, with differences in quality and everyone has his or her favorites; I’m a “hyper-literate” drone so I like the English translations done by Arthur Golding, Pope and Dryden. And of course those dudes who sat around for a couple of years and produced the KJV. For Shakey, you could reduce it to just his history plays and a few sonnets and come off very nicely, but to miss the comedies would be a tragedy. And nothing beats seeing and hearing them live.
Not addressing any of the other points, I’ll mention that I learned of the Anti-Federalist Papers only a few months ago, and only by chance. I’d been poking around Librivox and found them. It’s astonishing but true that the editors of The Great Books of the Western World saw fit to include the Federalist Papers but not the Anti-Federalist Papers as part of “the Great Conversation”.
While I was there, again apropos of nothing, I took a look at their “100 Books To Read In A Lifetime” link;
Got URL?
Back to the energy comments; Most of these “Energy” people only consider 1 item from petroleum, gasoline!!! None of these people never think of where their “Aspirin” comes from; http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm… Another un-thought thought, that even amazed some of my “Shell Engineering” friends; the products that make gasoline HAVE TO COME OUT OF PETROLEUM!!! during the fracturing process… Where, on this Earth are we going to store all the of these unwanted products??? In the beginning, these products that made gasoline were burned-off… So, without the internal combustion engine to burn gasoline in, what are we going to do with these products???
Me???? http://www.carolinarhodeisland.com> I’m Bobby Phillips… Read some of my “childhood memoirs”…..
Amazon’s “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime”:
http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8192263011
If you hate typing with the Roku remote, install their free app on your smatphone, then you can type in your searches with the phones keyboard. There is also a web page called Remoku that allows you to control your Roku from a web browser. Both of these programs access your Roku via your Wifi network, no IR line of sight required.
The new Amazon box looks pretty good, there is a Plex app already available for it, so local content can be easily streamed.
For the more adventurous there is an Android box or a PC with XBMC installed. There is a lot of interesting content available with this system.
Personally I have a Roku and a HTPC, Home Theater PC, with XBMC as well as a few other programs and apps for displaying content. I run Windows 8 on the PC because the new menu system actually works really well on a TV. A Harmony remote and a Media Center Remote receiver allow me to control most everything without needing to resort to a keyboard or mouse. One of the new dedicated Android boxes would be easier, and cheaper, one of these days….
Jim
The Federalists won, and they and their progeny in the halls of academe got to write the history textbooks and the ‘great books’ series here and there. So while one may have heard of Patrick Henry, it’s doubtful they know of Elbridge Gerry of Maffachufetts, unless you also mention ‘gerrrymandering.’ If even then. Hell, not even the Wiki mentions him, but to their credit they do list Mercy Otis Warren, also of MA, who wrote probably the best history of the Revolution.
Lynn: I dunno what it is with the long URL’s Amazon has but here:
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=Bks_5p_B5_100Bks?ie=UTF8&node=8192263011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-3&pf_rd_r=18PCBW9P262RHAVVYVXV&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1769223602&pf_rd_i=283155
What a joke.
On the media stuff; I also have the Windows 8 PC running with 16GB of RAM; for the Roku on the tee-vee I added the PlayOn app and MyMedia to get stuff off it. I don’t like typing on phone keyboards, either. I have big fat fingers and I type really fast with all of them and my thumbs on regular keyboards and have done so now for 45 years.
I generally am all hard-wired here; I do not use the wireless net for any of the media. We don’t watch much anyway (neither one of us here at the same time very much) and I won’t spend a whole lotta time learning a new app just to do this. I have looked into several of them and just don’t have the time to wrestle with setup and all the tricks. When Mrs. OFD ain’t here, I will watch most stuff on the computer, which is hooked up to a good sound system.
Spooky bit of synchronicity today.
Logged on because I’m sure RBT will get a kick out of this: http://tinyurl.com/mjxb7fz
As I told the friend who sent me the link, it makes me think of Thomas Hardy.
You know summat? I might have to listen a few times before I can place it.
OFD, I don’t even want to see the list because it might scare the dickens out of me. Any more snide comments about him and you will be force-fed Wilke Collins until recanting. Speaking of Milton, M Gilleland mentioned him today: http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-duty-of-reader.html
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=Bks_5p_B5_100Bks?ie=UTF8&node=8192263011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-3&pf_rd_r=18PCBW9P262RHAVVYVXV&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1769223602&pf_rd_i=283155
Not a joke but there is no Mark Twain there which invalidates the list for the USA. Of course, Mark Twain is politically incorrect nowadays.
However, “Goodnight Moon” and “Where the Wild Things are” are there which does somewhat validate the list.
But, nothing from Heinlein. In fact, the list seems a little “young”.
Back to the energy comments; Most of these “Energy” people only consider 1 item from petroleum, gasoline!!! None of these people never think of where their “Aspirin” comes from; http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm… Another un-thought thought, that even amazed some of my “Shell Engineering” friends; the products that make gasoline HAVE TO COME OUT OF PETROLEUM!!! during the fracturing process… Where, on this Earth are we going to store all the of these unwanted products??? In the beginning, these products that made gasoline were burned-off… So, without the internal combustion engine to burn gasoline in, what are we going to do with these products???
Crack the biggies, reformulate the shorties and make it into diesel / jet fuel. Bring your hydrogen and your steam! Diesel is the premier fuel in the world nowadays and is priced accordingly. All of the new refineries worldwide are biased to make 60% diesel now and the rest are being retrofitted. Unless they are smaller than 150,000 barrels per day, those refineries are being shutdown.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-02/bp-to-close-bulwer-island-refinery-brisbane-jobs-axed/5361296
BTW, all of the chemical / plastics plants in the USA that have not shifted to natural gas as their feedstock are hurriedly doing that or shutting down. The price differential is just too high at almost twenty to one.
One more try …
Of the dozen (or two) documentaries on “peak oil” that I’ve seen, many of them available on YouTube.com, “FUEL” was the one I liked the best — because Josh Tickell not only clearly explains the problems, but offers us numerous solutions to the problems. Josh is a “systems” thinker, and looks at the big picture. He is also a visionary and is able to think outside the box. He spent over 11 YEARS making this documentary.
You can watch most of it for free on YouTube.com. I was impressed enough that I bought the DVD and have been sharing it with all my family and friends.
Here’s the YouTube.com link to get you started …
Fuel Film – part 2 of 11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD0uyplIcHY
Then follow the sequential links to see the rest of it. Each piece is about 10 minutes.
Here’s the Amazon.com link …
(Read the reviews (38) — 4-1/2 stars out of 5 !!)
http://www.amazon.com/Fuel-Josh-Tickell/dp/B003CAKXAC/
Here’s the IMDB plot summary …
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1294164/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
Director Josh Tickell takes us along for his 11 year journey around the world to find solutions to America’s addiction to oil. A shrinking economy, a failing auto industry, rampant unemployment, an out-of-control national debt, and an insatiable demand for energy weigh heavily on all of us. Fuel shows us the way out of the mess we’re in by explaining how to replace every drop of oil we now use, while creating green jobs and keeping our money here at home. The film never dwells on the negative, but instead shows us the easy solutions already within our reach.
– Written by Rebecca Harrell (Josh Tickell’s wife)
And here’s the IMDB synopsis …
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1294164/synopsis?ref_=ttpl_pl_syn
“Fuel” begins by showing us we only began using oil 150 years ago. It points out that nearly everything we do requires oil. The problems with oil are introduced, and Bush is shown saying “America is addicted to oil”.
Enter Josh Tickell. Environmental science student, activist, author, film buff, and more than anything, a man with a score to settle. We follow Josh through his formative years, his first science fair project, his education in Germany, and his personal discovery of biodiesel. Josh travels the country in his “Veggie Van”, a diesel Winnebago he runs on biodiesel he makes on the road from used fryer oil. He encounters some minor publicity and recognition, and is seen more as an oddity than as a prophet.
We learn how Rudolph Diesel, Henry Ford, and John D Rockefeller worked against each other in the early days of the automotive industry to secure their places in the world.
We meet Josh’s mother. She’s sick, as are many others living in places like Louisiana, where oil is refined. Josh interviews a slew of experts, learns that reproductive problems, cancer, and a host of other ailments affect those living in oil producing areas.
Josh’s travels around the world to talk to oil and foreign policy experts are cut short by news that his family in Louisiana have fallen prey to Hurricane Katrina. He learns that his anger at the oil companies is getting him nowhere, so he goes back on the road and tries to learn more and make new partners. He decides to move far beyond preaching the merits of biodiesel, and spends most of the rest of the film teaching about other alternatives to oil, as well as some old issues like public transportation.
Josh goes to New York and contemplates 9/11 and how the events of that day changed our perceptions of the world. He looks at the war, huge gas price swings, and our new state of fear and dependence. New York biodiesel workers show us how we can create green jobs that pay well, help America, and create a deep sense of pride.
We meet comissioner James Generro of New York, who is dedicated to weaning his constituents off of oil, and Jay Inslee, the congressman from the first congressional district in Seattle who challenges us to reach like we did during our quest for the moon. Many other celebrities speak from their hearts about the need to embrace change and move forward. None of them point fingers of blame.
The film ends by asking us to work toward energy independence, cleaner air, cleaner water, good jobs, responsible auto production AND purchasing, and to become politically active toward those ends. Josh speaks directly to us and reminds us that we have choices, voices, and real power.
The film ends by asking us to work toward energy independence, cleaner air, cleaner water, good jobs, responsible auto production AND purchasing, and to become politically active toward those ends. Josh speaks directly to us and reminds us that we have choices, voices, and real power.
I’m sure that the government can easily and rationally change all this without lowering our standard of living here in the USA. I’m sure. Sounds like we need a five year plan. But this guy might disagree with you:
http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/
I might point you to the Affordable Care Act as a new government program that is doing so well. There have been no problems and everyone’s lives are so much better because of it. Except mine, where my cost of health insurance that I buy for 13 people has increased over 20% in the last couple of months. So, I took a 5% increase in cost and raised our deductibles over 200% instead.
And Solyndra and many other so called green energy companies are doing so well. And I remember the gasoline shortages of 1979 here in the Houston area that were caused by Jimmy Carter’s White house taking over distribution of petroleum products. No, my life was not impacted by that whatsoever.
Anytime I hear ‘Peak Oil’ I know what’s coming. It’s always about the evils of oil, big oil companies and how we all need to switch to green energy. It’s never about the reality but the agenda. Full of misinformation and lies.
Right now California is on the verge of killing the coming oil boom. The anti-fracking crowd is out in force.
Here may be one of the best replies I’ve seen.
http://www.bakersfieldcalifornian.com/opinion/hot-topics/x953661207/Theres-no-substitute-for-science
A brief visit to these organizations’ websites will enlighten even the most ardent skeptic. The education, training and employment resumes of the major staff members should send up red flags.
The staff members of the Center of Biological Diversity have resumes that list backgrounds mainly associated with environmental law — not ecologists or environmental scientists, but lawyers.
I try not to judge a documentary using the preconceived notions of others. I’ve found that I might miss out on a good story, and also lose vital information that I need to know to be more fully informed. I stand by my recommendations. Your judgements reveal your biased misunderstandings. That’s ok, and I won’t waste any more of your time — or mine. Ignorance can be bliss. More often it leads to total disaster. Which can unfortunately very well detrimentally affect us all.
Here’s another. They can use Shafter in the byline but it’s still Bakersfield
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-monterey-shale-20140407,0,1931485.story
Blissfully reading away.
Books to read… Apparently, there is some evidence that the very art of reading is changing. Where we learned to read sequentially, the Internet is training the new generation to skim and jump about, picking out facts in whatever order seems appropriate. A very different type of reading.
What I then find contradictory: Both of my kids would rather watch a YouTube tutorial than hunt for the right page in a handbook and read instructions. This seems odd to me, because you cannot usefully skip around in a video – you pretty much have to watch it sequentially, from start to finish. Whereas – give me a handbook, and watch me skip to the bits the answer my particular questions.
In any case, I find it an interesting hypothesis: How will the art of communication change as a result of digital media?
This is only indirectly related to the “100 books” question; I am supposing that new habits will make some types of literature difficult for young people to enjoy.
I haven’t read even a fraction of the ones y’all mentioned. Shakespeare was fun, some of the ancient authors were interesting, some philosophy was fun (but Nietzsche was depressive). I suffered through one Dickens book, and that was one too many. 1984 and Brave New World – depressing but important. Lots of the other stuff I read in high school (Death of a Salesman, Night Flight, etc.) was just crap; whoever declared it to be literature probably also enjoys root canals.
A common cultural heritage is important, but who picks? 1984 is referenced all the time, clearly important. I haven’t heard a reference to Willy Loman (had to look up the name) for decades, and can’t imagine why he would ever come up. Shakespeare – for the Anglo Saxon world, yes, but now that I am in a German-speaking area, few people know the references. They reference Goethe, or other authors I have only a passing acquaintance with. On the other hand, seemingly silly things like “Roadrunner and Coyote”, or Disney cartoons are surprisingly important and cross many cultural boundaries.
re Nietzsche: keep in mind that the syphilis was rotting his brain long before he stopped writing. The widely quoted “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” is a perfect example of the product of a rotting brain … which killed him.
The national literary heritage stuff is kinda interesting; obvious examples are Dante in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, Shakey in the Anglo world (but really international by now), Goethe in Germany, and the Russians have a group centered around the turn of the 20th-C. Joyce and Yeats for Ireland, Burns for Scotland, and the American guys are Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, etc. But I was intrigued to learn that Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon language is big in Japan.
In high skool we got mostly crap, and I am given to understand that the same crap is still in public high school syllabi, i.e., “Silas Marner,” “Great Expectations,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “A Separate Peace,” etc., and that tired and depressing old short story chestnut from Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery.” In my time they threw in “Soul on Ice,” “Manchild in the Promised Land,” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” important titles in a mostly lily-white Boston ‘burb. Think they were reading Chaucer or Shakey or Milton, or even Whitman or Dickinson in Roxbury? And of course Twain was rayciss. For this we can thank our Glorious Sixties teachers and skool administrators, who are only now retiring and dying, apparently.
I remember reading the Ox Bow Incident in high school. One of the questions on the the test was “In your opinion what was the author’s purpose of the story?”. My response was “To tell a story he liked.”. The teacher marked my answer as wrong. I then asked the teacher how my opinion could be wrong and what made their opinion any more valid than mine. Teacher then gave me an F on the entire exam even though I would have gotten a B. Talk about vindictive.
That’s nothing. Ellie Greenwich, who wrote a TON of girl group songs of the early ’60’s, was attending Queens College for music. She released her first record at that time. A prof there criticized her for recording it, so she left Queens and finished at Hofstra. Fortunately, that incident did not deter her. Aside from girl group songs including “Leader of the Pack”, she and her husband, Jeff Barry, wrote most of Neil Diamond’s early songs — which were better than his later ones, IMO — and all of The Archies songs.
Here’s a rare recording by Greenwich. It charted for only 1 week at Billboard #51 on 17 Oct 1964. There is no group The Butterflys. It is all Greenwich overdubbing herself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ3kiNg-XuE
Unfortunately, we could not just leave one high school for another when some teacher disses us. I always told my high school teachers that I thought what they read into stuff like Melville’s Moby Richard was pure made-up bunk. Guy wrote “a story he liked” — plain and simple. He would write a story he did not like?
That’ll learn ya, Ray, huh? In fourth grade I asked my teach, Miss Crosby, why we didn’t have history class; she told me to go home and write a history of the world and bring it the next day. Which I did, after many hours of struggle and angst and tears well into the night. I brought it in the next day and gave it to her and she tore it up in front of me and the class without reading it and dropped the pieces in the wastebasket while only a couple of jokers in the class guffawed, then stopped, as the rest were nearly as shocked as I was. She sneered at me the whole time as my face burned and no doubt turned scarlet.
From then on I have immersed myself in the history of the fucking world, morning, noon and night and have long since lost count of the many thousands of books, and articles I’ve read.
Then I saw in grad school the stuff my fellow students and the profs would dream up out of thin air from various “interrogations of the text.” Basically neo-Marxist, relativist claptrap, where the absence of evidence is itself evidence, naturally. Every piece of “text” ever produced is all about race, class and gender, and the power relationships concerning them, etc., etc. Western civilization is a gross and rank obscenity and white people are a cancer on the earth, etc., etc. You can imagine my standing there as a white, Catholic-Christian, married (breeder), paleoconservative war veteran.
And now it turns out, as I expected, that there are no jobs and no tenure anymore, so all of that pain and struggle and expense and decade of study would have amounted to nothing.
Good interview yesterday at Big Blue; possible second one next week or the week after, they said. Two more possibilities on the fire now, also.
OFD: Wow, what a pathetic excuse for a teacher. It’s good that she just made you more stubborn.
Any tips for which translations of the Norse sagas to read? I’ve been interested in those for a while, but I don’t know if it’s worth it without my having any appreciation of the original language.
Edit: Oh, and good luck with those interviews!
Thanks much! It gets tiresome at my age to keep having to hassle with this stuff but it’s the only game on right now.
The Penguin paperback editions of the sagas are pretty good; for more:
http://sagadb.org/
http://www.squirrel.com/asatru/translations.html
That’ll learn ya, Ray, huh?
Oh, it started early in my school career.
One of my earliest memories from school was from kindergarten. The teacher was asking anal questions, I guess to get us to participate. She asked what rolls. I said a cereal box. I was promptly sent to the school office and got my first (of many) paddlings issued over the course of my school time. I was never given a chance to explain.
But I was confused as to why my answer was wrong. In my mind I was perfectly correct. We ate oatmeal every morning for breakfast. The Quaker Oats container was round. It did indeed roll, quite nicely in fact.
I should have learned that teachers want the answers they want, not necessarily what is correct. Would have saved me an F on my text over the Ox Bow Incident as I should have said “The author was pointing out the unjust rule of mob law overshadowing the thought processes of a dissenting participant”. Not sure what the hell that means but the teacher probably would have swooned over that answer and had a small orgasm.
I think kindergarten students are pretty young to be asking them questions about anal, but whatever rolls your cereal box.
“…I should have said “The author was pointing out the unjust rule of mob law overshadowing the thought processes of a dissenting participant”.
No, sorry, that won’t cut it in today’s “postmodern” Theory zeitgeist in the college and university humanities department. You fascist troglodyte.
You gotta get race, class and gender in there, with the power structure superimposed somehow; bunch of white guys, at least a couple of them gay, of course, involved of their own free will (outmoded theological construct) but seemingly without it, within a primitive capitalist/agricultural social milieu completely devoid of gentling feminine influences, etc., etc. Use words like “triumphalist,” “interrogation of the text,” “valorizing,” “metanarrative,” “logocentric,” and of course that old standby chestnut, “phallocentricism.” You’ll go far.
I’ve often been tempted to make up an academic paper that used such words and phrases and had (of course) null semantic content, and then submit it for publication.
Someone did that a few years ago and it was actually accepted as a scholarly paper by the morons he sent it to. Now they’re on the watch, so you probably won’t get away with it.
The crap I had to listen to in grad school beggars belief; I have more stories but I’ll string them out a bit as time goes by. One I recall was in a class where a relatively famous professor and academic came in to talk to us, and he was then a member of the faculty there. He rambled on with the usual Sixties-era libtard bromides that most of those guys recite, and then he was brutally taken to task by the youngster grad students around me, mainly for not being radical and militant enough. It was like Robespierre being bitched at by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. “You didn’t cut off enough heads, you fascist bastard, you rightist roader, etc.” Little bastards had him in tears, practically; I initially felt sorry for him and then I thought, fuck him, he opened the gates to these assholes.
This was the guy they crapped on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Poirier
Credit where it’s due, though; he helped to start the Library of America.
You fascist troglodyte.
Busted.
You gotta get race, class and gender in there, with the power structure superimposed somehow;
This was in the late 60’s where I doubt they knew any of those terms. I surely didn’t. But I get your point.
I’ve often been tempted to make up an academic paper that used such words and phrases and had (of course) null semantic content, and then submit it for publication.
Probably get you on the Ellen Degenerate show.
Hmmm. I see that Library of America is a non-profit publisher that started with grants from the Ford Foundation, the government, and so on. I expected their ebooks to be cheap or even free. So I checked de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the Kindle and found it was $18. What a deal.
Just because they’re non-profit, doesn’t mean they don’t have abnormally large expenses. 🙂
You can download de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for Kindle at Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=+de+Tocqueville
Wait, there was democracy in America? Oh yeah—at New England town meetings, which we still have. Otherwise….not so much.
I have about a dozen or more LOM books here; they’re pretty good editions and well-made. And they have a very large selection now, with regular sales; recommended, get on their mailing list.
The average grade on my humanities/social science/BS courses in college was lower than the legitimate average of my STEM courses.* That would have, I’m sure, nothing to do with a teacher giving me a zero on a research paper because my conclusion was unacceptable, or me calling bullshit on the “one and only” interpretation of some poem, or me questioning the research that “supports” common psychological wisdom**. I went into engineering because it interests me, but it worked in my favor that the important courses all had objective grading criteria.
* I wrecked a car and spent some time in the hospital in my junior year, missing exams and homework and a couple of weekly “problem sessions”. Most of the professors just pro-rated the non-missed work, but one screwed up and stuck a bunch of 0s in the spreadsheet, resulting in me barely squeaking a D in that course. I asked him repeatedly to fix it and he repeatedly promised he’d take care of it, but then he went on sabbatical for a year, then he went on sick leave, then he died, and he never got around to fixing my grade. Bastard.
** It’s well known that Fraud — er, Freud — made up data to support his theories. So why does anyone care at all about his theories?
I did well in all subjects in high school, until I found out that the class ranking for graduation was determined from statistics that stopped at the end of one’s Junior year. This was before computers, and it apparently once took a super-human effort to compile the GPA’s for about 1,000 students and figure out the class rankings. A couple months into my senior year, I was accepted by my university of choice, and I coasted from that moment on. Worked 25 to 30 hours a week during uni, and had a work scholarship that took another 5 to 10 hours. I should have lowered the class load and taken 5 years to graduate, as I was effectively employed fulltime by the two jobs. But I didn’t. Aced every course in my major; A’s or B’s in all business and science courses, C’s or worse in English, Language, and all the other crap required for graduation that did not matter to me. Even skipped one English term paper, and still got a C. When time is limited, you find out quickly what you will and will not tolerate.
Freud and most shrinks since him are frauds, pure and simple. His theory has leaked like a sieve for the past few years and fewer shrink types bother with it anymore. I blame him along with the other 19th-C fraud and hypocrite, Marx, for much of what is wrong in Western Civ and elsewhere today. Therapeutic “solutions” for every human ill, with human nature being perfectible, as Marx would also have it. Both assholes have influenced education to a huge degree, along with their progeny, Mann and Dewey. And generations have been lost; as the late Joe Sobran once said; “We used to teach our high school kids Greek and Latin; now we teach our college kids remedial English.”
Joe was a literary type, not a STEM person; used to write for National Review until the sainted WFB, Jr. dumped him, along with the late Sam Francis, and eventually Pat Buchanan, too, finding “evidence” of “anti-Semitism” and putting it on his rag’s cover. Now they suck even worse, ditto their NRO web site; utter regime-apologetic, war-drum rubbish.
You underestimate Marx. He predicted capitalism would fall to socialism. That is happening, in case you had not noticed. Walked to work on a street named after Marx every day for nearly 8 years. Gave me great respect for the man.
You can still read something by Tocqueville that is highly relevant to the US as it is today. It just doesn’t happen to be titled “Democracy In America”:
http://yarchive.net/blog/politics/tocqueville.html
I’ve walked on streets named after the Great Eliminator but it did not increase or even give me initially any respect for him. I would have made it a point to pee on Marx Strasse every time I walked it. We have a curious hybrid of capitalism here; socialism for the rich and mad-dog cutthroat capitalism for the rest of us; becoming a kleptocracy like the old Soviet Union run by an elitist nomenklatura. Meanwhile we also have an industrial labor gulag which the regime can expand anytime they want to Article 58 types, like dissidents posting here, for example.
Corporate fascism. As the society and country crumble, we’ll probably eventually look to our very own Il Duce to lead us out of the mess.
I’ve walked on streets named after the Great Eliminator
Who is that?
As the society and country crumble, we’ll probably eventually look to our very own Il Duce to lead us out of the mess.
Will probably be a Prophet named Nehemiah Scudder.
The Great Eliminator was none other than Father Abraham, whose war criminal thugs did some damage down in the great Lone Star State, in addition to their other depredations throughout the South and later in the West.
That Scudder name sounds familiar; we have a rich nitwit lefty Dem up here named Scudder Parker or some such. I assume Nehemiah is some sorta sci-fi character…
Oh, if only there were some near-unlimited source of information, readily available and easily searchable…
whose war criminal thugs did some damage down in the great Lone Star State
The civil war did not have much going on in The Great State of Texas other than the blockade of the Ports of Galveston and Houston which were run often. Afterwards though, Texas got a bellyful of Grant’s carpetbaggers. So much so that the Governor and Lt. Governor are separately elected to this day and just recently changed from two year terms to four year terms. It was not unusual in the not so distant past for the Governor to be Republican and the Lt. Governor to be Democrat.
Our Lt. Governor has zero responsibilities that impact anybody, unless the governor dies. Which has happened twice since I have been alive.
The Lt. Governor in the Great State of Texas controls the Senate. He/she not only is the tie breaker, he/she also controls the agenda of the State Senate. Very powerful if he/she wants it to be.
And he/she is the replacement for the Governor.