born live love die

The article is titled, Why Can’t Mothers Be Intellectuals? and I am left to wonder if ‘Mothers’ is an merely adjective to a word that doesn’t make the mainstream that much.   The article is about Susan Sontag.

Later, upon her return to America, she reclaims custody of her son. In a lucid entry she writes while at the park with him, she describes feeling like her son’s childhood is a “sentence,” much like her marriage, writing, “I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.” She then wonders if she should give David up; he is almost 10. Bracketing these sad lines are the fruits of her ambition — notes for lectures, foundations of the theories that would later define her as one of the great American intellectuals, reminders to bathe more frequently, and another interminable affair with a woman who seems to hate her. She clings to the study of moral philosophy with the hope it will tell her what her feelings ought to be. “Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?” she writes in early 1960. Self-invention, indeed.

Susan Sontag was yet another narcissistic twit.  I guess that is all that is required to be a ‘great American intellectual’.

The people that write these things don’t ever seem to think about the fundamental relationship between rights and responsibilities.  At what point did Sontag actually shoulder her responsibilities?  She was in it for herself.  When you have children, they come first.  Everything else is secondary.

There is a great article in the NY Times about keeping primates as pets.  The interesting thing about the article is that there are no good stories about the animals.  This encapsulates the process.

LOCAL and state regulations determine whether it’s legal to keep a primate pet, but April Truitt, the executive director of the Primate Rescue Center, a shelter outside Lexington, Ky., believes it’s never right.

A primate involves a much greater commitment than a cat or dog — or it should — because primates are social animals that cannot be left alone for long, and that live for decades: baboons for up to 45 years in captivity, chimps for 60 to 70. Once they have hit puberty, primates can become unpredictable and difficult to control. An adult chimp has seven times the strength of a man, Ms. Truitt says, but even a 24-pound monkey has the reflexes and agility to take down a man.

More fundamentally, Ms. Truitt believes, even the smallest monkeys are wild animals that do not belong in people’s homes.

But many prospective owners are badly informed, and, encountering adorable, docile baby primates with an eerie similarity to human infants, they find it difficult to resist.

Animal dealers, Ms. Truitt says, know that.

“The key to the trade is that these animals have to be removed at birth from the mother, put in diapers, put on a bottle and sold before they start depreciating — which they do, quicker than a Cadillac,” Ms. Truitt says. “By the age of 3, maybe 5 or 7, they reach adolescence and their hormones are telling them to do anything but take commands from humans. They are interested in dominating whatever social group they find themselves in. If it’s a human home, they often go after children first, then teenagers, then mom, and by the time they get to dad, we usually get the call.”

And it can get personal.

Chimps do, however, require some sacrifice. The family living room was given over to their cages, and after Mikey, the larger chimp, began bullying Louie, Ms. Harrison made her son give up his bedroom, just off the living room, to Mikey. Her son, relegated to a room in the basement, chose to live with his father instead.

“I didn’t think it was fair for the chimps not to be able to see each other,” Ms. Harrison explains. She starts crying and says, “I destroyed a lot of lives with what I’ve done.”

She also took a lot of hard knocks herself. In a New York hotel for a job with Mikey, Ms. Harrison was letting the chimp groom her teeth, which is to say, pick at them — a not uncommon chimp habit and an example, perhaps, of a chimp simianizing a human.

“All of a sudden I feel a severe pain on the right side of my mouth and then I felt something dripping down my face,” Ms. Harrison says. “And there was all this blood, and I look over at Mikey and here he had my tooth in his hand, roots and all. He had pulled my tooth out with one finger.”

You didn’t need that tooth anyway, right?

Mikey says, “You’ve got too many teeth.”

I’m not crazy about middle school students tokin’ up, but this got a laugh out of me.

Porter Middle School administrators believed a boy was dealing pot on campus. So they allegedly sent a student to buy some.

The sting worked — to a point. The student successfully bought drugs and the administrators at the Granada Hills campus reported the incident to authorities.

But although Los Angeles Police Department officers are investigating the suspected marijuana dealer, they also are scrutinizing the three administrators who allegedly orchestrated the buy, said Michel Moore, an LAPD deputy chief, on Wednesday.

It is a felony to ask a minor to buy drugs.

I’ll be humming “Smoking in the Boys Room” today.

Microsoft got a patent on putting a cmputer in a car.

Really.

A vehicle computer system has a housing sized to be mounted in a vehicle dashboard or other appropriate location. A computer is mounted within the housing and executes an open platform, multi-tasking operating system. The computer runs multiple applications on the operating system, including both vehicle-related applications (e.g., vehicle security application, vehicle diagnostics application, communications application, etc.) and non-vehicle-related applications (e.g., entertainment application, word processing, etc.). The applications may be supplied by the vehicle manufacturer and/or by the vehicle user.

They are suing Tom Tom for patent infringment, and this is the first patent listed in the complaint.   They are 6,175,789, 7,054,745, 6,704,032, 7,117,286,  6,202,008, 5,579,517, 5,758,352,  and 6,256,642.  Why they were granted a patent for putting a computer on a car dashboard is beyond my ken.

7054745

A method and system for generating driving directions composes computer-based instructions that emulate a human driving perspective. Language-based instructions guide a driver along a route that encompasses a sequence of roads and intersections. An algorithm applies rules based on human perception to route components. The algorithm diagnoses road name changes so that instructions are clear and concise.

7117286

In accordance with one aspect, a portable computing device determines a type of an appliance in which the portable computing device is docked. The portable computing device identifies, based on the type of the appliance, a user interface configuration for the portable computing device, and configures the user interface of the portable computing device in accordance with the identified user interface configuration.

Basically, the computer reads some id bits from the doc and configures the interface?

Anyone for patent reform?

Watching the political associates of President Obama file into the House chamber.  It has only been a month, but damn! these people are getting stuff done!  Not like the last four years, where Bush, et. co., just sat on their thumbs.

Keep it up, people, there’s lots to be done.

It is easy to hate Hollywood because it is such a fat target to hate on.  Mickey Rourke is on the red carpet at the Oscars and the interviewer remarks about the medallion hanging around Rourke’s neck.

“She’s the love of my life. She made it until six days ago. She left me at a time where, after 18 years, she knew I’d be all right.”  Rourke was speaking about his dog who had died a few days earlier.  Let’s be clear about something: the love of Mickey Rourke’s life is Mickey Rourke.  Here is a better picture of him, showing the results of years of bad plastic surgery.

On the other hand, he didn’t refer to his dog as “my bitch”, so maybe there’s hope for him.

Kids learn outside of the classroom also.

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.

And access to recess can be used as a means of discipline.  Bad idea.

Also, teachers often punish children by taking away recess privileges. That strikes Dr. Barros as illogical. “Recess should be part of the curriculum,” she said. “You don’t punish a kid by having them miss math class, so kids shouldn’t be punished by not getting recess.”

JMan can sometimes have the attention span of a cat, but I know that he has to move sometimes.  I’m in favor of finding other means of discipline.

This is the kind of story that makes me want to get on a plane, fly to New York, and start poking people in the chest. The story is about a sofa:

The place, which occupies three floors of the house, seems reasonably priced, even at $4,750 a month. With three fireplaces, old wooden banisters and an ample backyard, it had been the well-loved home of a family that moved to New Hampshire and began renting it out.

The sofa was originally priced at $28,000, but they got it for $1000.  These people pay almost $5,000 a month in rent.  They are paying for a 5 year old minivan, every month.  One floor of the place has stuff in it that is too fragile for the kids to be around.  The kids?  Oh yeah, his three kids, and from the picture, young children.  What’s the story there?

This is the story of a bunch of narcissistic people, and that is okay.  Be as narcissistic as you want to be, just not around me.  Oh, except for the kids.  Dan’s rule #1: when you have kids, check your narcissism at the door.  Narcissistic parents and kids don’t mix.

I don’t normally copy entire blog posts because it feels like cheating.  But I found this gem and I can’t find any way to cut it down in size for commentary.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Hendrik Hertzberg:

One of the signs that a political movement may be approaching terminal decline is when its more excitable elements begin to see “fascism” where none exists. A common hallucination is that liberals and other democratic-left reformers are actually fascists, whether they know it or not.

This was routine in certain precincts of the left for much of the twentieth century. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties the Comintern and its franchisees took the line that social democrats and the like were “social fascists.” During the Johnson and Nixon years, loony lefties deployed the fascist label not only against Republicans but also against Democrats and other weak sisters deemed insufficiently this or that. Remember “The Fascist Insect That Preys Upon The Life Of The People”? That was everybody outside the two or three ill-furnished Bay Area apartments rented by members of the “Symbionese Liberation Army.” On the loony right, the equivalent of calling liberals fascists used to be calling liberals communists. That custom lives on among Republicans in the relatively benign form of accusing Democrats of being akin to “European socialists” or just “Europeans,” or wanting the United States to be more like “Western Europe”—a theme I touch on in this week’s Comment. But these accusations lack punch, somehow. The problem is, too many Americans have actually been to Western Europe, and it didn’t scare them. Lately the right has picked up where the Comintern left off. “Liberal fascism” (the title of a book by Jonah Goldberg, of National Review) is “social fascism” updated by ideologues for whom Rush is the new Russia. The meme seems to be catching on. Consider Michael Ledeen, the well-known philosopher-skulker of the shadowy right. He explains to readers of Pajamas Media that “what Obama et. al. are doing” is not socialism, because socialism requires “the abolition of private property.” (Never mind that by that definition, not a single European socialist is a socialist.) What is it, then, that Obama et. al. are doing? Class? Anybody? That’s right: “It’s fascism.” Nobody dares call it that, though, Ledeen complains, because “lots of the people writing about current events” like what Obama’s doing. Therefore, they “wouldn’t want to stigmatize it with that ‘f’ epithet.” And what is fascism, according to Ledeen? Better cover the children’s ears: it’s “an expansion of the state’s role, an increase in public/private joint ventures and partnerships, and much more state regulation of business.” That’s it. Nothing about that other stuff—stuff like blood-and-soil nationalism, dictatorship, leader-worship, jackboots, militarism, goose-stepping, concentration camps. That’s why there was no essential difference between F.D.R. and Mussolini. Ledeen:

Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t cure America’s economic ills any more than Mussolini’s Third Way did. In both countries, however, its most durable consequence was the expansion of the ability of the state to give orders to more and more citizens, in more and more corners of their lives.

Nor is there any essential difference between Mussolini and Obama. Both, after all, favor “regulation of business.” Now, I don’t want to make a Ledeen-like mistake by insisting that today’s rightist crazies are exactly the same as yesterday’s leftist crazies simply because both have equated liberalism with fascism. There is at least one important difference. Jonah Goldberg is an editor and writer at National Review, the leading journal of supposedly mainstream conservatism, and his writing has appeared in equally respectable venues. Michael Ledeen served in the Reagan Administration as a consultant to the N.S.C. and the Defense Department and as a “special adviser” to the Secretary of State Alexander Haig; during the Bush Junior years he was a powerful inside influence in pushing for war in Iraq and elsewhere. He has meanwhile occupied comfortable perches at conservative think tanks, most prominently as the “Freedom Scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute. By contrast, the lefties who cried “fascism” were marginal cranks, without the slightest influence in the Democratic Party or any Democratic Administration.

Rich white guys on Wall Street have been making boat loads of cash without risk and paying very little tax on it.  Republicans want to get rid of taxes on capital gains altogether; President Obama is at least moving some people out of the capital gains tax bracket back to the income bracket, where they belong.

The president will propose to tax the investment income of hedge fund and private equity partners at ordinary income tax rates, which are now as high as 35 percent and could return to 39.6 percent under his plans, instead of at the capital gains rate, which is 15 percent at most.