Sleepy Old Bear Diaries

Stunning pictures.

sleepyoldbear — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:39:40 +0000

Pope 1 Sexual Libertarians 0

sleepyoldbear — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:46:20 +0000

Couples who shack up before tying the knot are more likely to get divorced than their counterparts who don’t move in together until marriage, a new study suggests.

Upwards of 70 percent of U.S. couples are cohabiting these days before marrying, the researchers estimate.

The study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, indicates that such move-ins might not be wise.

And it’s not because you start to get on one another’s nerves. Rather, the researchers figure the shared abode could lead to marriage for all the wrong reasons.

“We think that some couples who move in together without a clear commitment to marriage may wind up sliding into marriage partly because they are already cohabiting,” said lead researcher Galena Rhoades of the University of Denver.

Here.

Tim Birdnow has an interesting read on climate change.

sleepyoldbear — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:58:52 +0000

People and empires were on the move during the years of the MWP, and they stopped moving-or moved out-afterward. SOMETHING was certainly happening at this time, and something destroyed many of these great empires.

When the Maunder Minimum struck in 1645, the Earth appears to have cooled globally, and the moment in the sun for many great peoples and kingdoms ended in the darkness of a cold, hungry world. Only the Europeans, who by then were in the midst of THEIR expansion into the world at large, had the tools to take advantage of the situation, and thus Europe colonized the world. Indeed, they likely HAD to colonize the world, or else slide into that abyss reserved for those many civilizations that have passed from our collective memory.

And thankful we should be that the land once known as Christendom did not fade as these many others. Their day in the sun is past, and the coming of the cold wrecked their once proud kingdoms. A warm world is hardly a bad thing.

Here.

Check out this somewhat amusing story on the Cape Breton University Faculty Association web site.

sleepyoldbear — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:31:52 +0000

Here.

Robinson says renewed investments in university research will create jobs and contribute to the long-term economic and social development of the country.

“The government must also invest in the skills and knowledge of people through increased funding to provinces in support of universities and colleges,” he added.

CAUT is also calling on the government to expand access to post-secondary education by providing more student aid.

Now think about it … expansion of the system? Like we don’t have enough people in university now who can’t handle the work load and the intellectual demands? Yeah, right.

How do our Leftist, alternate reality, universities in Canada contribute to social development? Oh … more abortions? more homosex? more divorce? Yeah …

Like the Captain indicates … the education industry is insatiable, and cannot be trusted to seek the rational and the good. As much as I insist upon academic freedom — I am more concerned about other faculty than I am about administration — it is clear that universities require a much higher degree of public accountability.

Time for a radical rethink. Why keep pouring cascades of money into a system which is already over-inflated, and which has clearly run out of an adequate supply of thinking people to teach in it?

Given what appears immediately below, perhaps Captain Capitalism is right.

sleepyoldbear — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:23:42 +0000

Now this is the primary problem with the US education system. It is NOT about preparing youth for the real world by arming them with employable skills. It’s now about two things;

1. Generating money for those who work in the education industry
2. Brainwashing youth for political purposes, namely to vote in the future in the best interests of the education industry.
Or sure, they put it under the guise of “intellectual enlightenment.” That education isn’t all about just making more money (scoff scoff).Hoity toity academics claiming education somehow has a higher purpose than just training the masses to produce. But in the end, sorry boys and girls, reality wins and the reality is that education SHOULD be to train the masses with employable skills so they might have better lives in the future. And here is where the education institution fails miserably and makes itself progressively obsolete and unneeded.

First off look at most conventional colleges and what is required to get a simple bachelors degree. I don’t know about you, but LESS THAN HALF the classes I took in college had anything to do with my degree. Accounting, Finance, and Economics classes were dwarfed by the amount of philosophy, theater, english, psychology, “pre-requisite” crap I had to take in order to get a “well rounded” education.

The rest is here.

Now, Captain, I have to say that this is a rant rather than carefully calibrated comment, perhaps not unaffected by your own unemployment. However, you raise, again, an important point, that the baccalaureate in Arts is of increasingly dubious value. I confront hordes of young students who have been (mis) led into thinking that the good life involves 3 or 4 years of university, but many of them cannot read and understand the degree regulations. They have no idea what they are getting into … they just hold a mystical, religious belief that if they can walk across the stage and receive a diploma, even if with a 62 average, they will get great jobs and make bushels of money. I tried to tell a student this week that his first-year grades indicated that he is not university material … but he is a true believer. He can push his grades much higher and get into teacher’s college or social work.

Captain is correct … there is too much of the odour of con job when it comes to university. And it will be clear enough to readers of this and other blogs that the indoctrination being foisted on young undergraduates who are incapable of thinking for themselves (heaven forbid! They might come to view their instructors with suitable contempt!) is contrary to experience and common sense.

O tempora! O mores!

I agree fully with those who think that it is time to revisit and review and redefine what it is what we call post-secondary education.

What can one possibly say about this?

sleepyoldbear — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:12:25 +0000

By Clay Waters (Bio | Archive)
July 10, 2009 – 17:29 ET

New York Times columnist Judith Warner’s latest web column, “Dangerous Resentment,” sees “archaic, phantasmagoric” hatred in the case of Montana State professor Bridget Kevane, arrested for child endangerment for leaving five pre-teen kids (three of them her own) at a mall so she could get some rest. In a piece for a parenting magazine, Kevane painted herself as a victim of the country’s hatred of educated women, and Warner channeled Kevane’s piece for her column, the original title of which was, judging by the URL: “Don’t Hate Her Because She’s Educated.”

Actually, Kevane provided another reason to dislike her, though Warner took her side in the controversy:

Two years ago in June, Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University, drove her three kids and two of their friends — two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 — to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her.

And then she drove home for some rest.

About an hour later, she was summoned back to the mall by the police, who charged her with endangering the welfare of her children.

Warner is taking all her case facts from Kevane’s first-person account in Brainchild — the magazine for thinking mothers. (There’s elitism worth hating right there. Does that imply most mothers are unthinking?)

Warner argued that “Kevane’s error in judgment” didn’t add up to anything like child endangerment. Fair enough. But then she goes off the rails in “phantasmagorical” fashion:

The issue I want to take up today, however, is not that of tricky choices, or over- or under-involved parenting, questions that have already been discussed with much gusto elsewhere. What really sent my head spinning after reading Kevane’s story was the degree to which it drove home the fact that our country’s resentment, and even hatred, of well-educated, apparently affluent women is spiraling out of control.

This is a rehash of the self-satisfied liberal canard trotted out to defend Hillary Clinton, et al.: That males, especially conservative males, just can’t handle strong, educated women.

One can’t help noticing that Warner is only getting one side of the story: Kevane’s, straight out of the elitist parenting magazine. Given that this victimized “well-educated” woman is having her story told sympathetically and in a one-sided way by a journalist (?) for the New York Times, perhaps the environment for them isn’t really all that unfair.

Then came the really kooky part. When pinning the blame, Warner came around, as she has done before in her columns, to the threatening anti-feminist bewitcher that haunts the dreams of all properly educated liberal women: Sarah Palin.

This simmering resentment is common and pervasive in our culture right now. The idea that women with a “major education” think they’re better than everyone else, have a great sense of entitlement, feel they deserve special treatment, and are too out of touch with the lives of “normal” women to have a legitimate point of view, is a 21st-century version of the long-held belief that education makes women uppity and leads them to forget their rightful place. It’s precisely the kind of thinking that has fueled Sarah Palin’s unlikely — and continued — ability to pass herself off as the consummately “real” American woman. (And it is what has made it possible for her supporters to discredit other women’s criticism of her as elitist cat fighting.)

Warner sees Victorian-era sexism alive and well today, which hardly explains the puzzling fact that she is getting paid by a major American news organization to publish psychobabble.

The idea that women with “major educations” are somehow suspect, the desire to smack them down and tell them “to be quiet” is hardly new. At the end of the 19th century, as increasing numbers of women began for the first time to pursue higher education, a campaign began, waged by prominent doctors, among others, against these new unnatural monsters, whose vital energies were being diverted from their wombs to their brains. In the last quarter of the 20th century, feminists were routinely delegitimized as brainy elitists ignorant of and unconcerned with the plight of ordinary women.

And guess who’s helping to smack women down and put professors of Latino literature in jail? Yep.

This is why Palin — in her down-home aw-shucks posturing — is the 21st-century face of the backlash against women’s progress. This is why Kevane could be threatened and humiliated in front of her kids, menaced with jail time and ultimately railroaded into cutting a deal with the prosecution, once she realized she’d never be popular enough with local jurors to have a shot at making a successful not-guilty plea in court. (Paradox of paradoxes, as part of her deferred prosecution agreement, she was sentenced to even more education: in the form of a parenting class.)

The hatred of women — in all its archaic, phantasmagoric forms — is still alive and well in our society, and when directed at well-educated women, it’s socially acceptable, too. Think of this for a second the next time you’re inexplicably moved to put an “elite” woman in her place.

What if you’re quite explicably moved to put a deluded “elite” female columnist in her place?

—Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times.

Source here.

So, Katie, what do you believe? Does anybody care?

sleepyoldbear — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:00:11 +0000

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori says it’s “heresy” to believe that an individual can be saved through a sinner’s prayer of repentance.

In her opening address to the church’s General Conference in California, Jefferts Schori called that “the great Western heresy: that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.”

The presiding bishop said that view is “caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus.”

According to Schori, it is heresy to believe that an individual’s prayer can achieve a saving relationship with God. “That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy.”

Here.

Feminist ideology 101.

sleepyoldbear — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:42:47 +0000

I really would like to see Stillman devote his intellectual pursuits to such courses.

Here.

A year ago the biggest issue in education after budgets was whether “Intelligent Design” should be taught in the nation’s schools. Opponents called it a form of “creationism” and the press dubbed the ensuing legal battle as the biggest clash between faith and science since the Scopes Monkey Trial. In a stinging rebuke to the religious right, a Pennsylvania judge ruled that “Intelligent Design” had no place in classrooms because it was “a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” thus violating the separation of church and state.

Yet at that very moment professors in American universities were teaching a form of secular creationism as contrary to the findings of modern science as the Biblical claim that the God had made the world in seven days.

The name of this theory is “social constructionism,” and its churches are Women’s Studies departments situated in universities across the United States. The feminist theory of social construction maintains that the differences between men and women – apart from obvious anatomical ones — are not biologically determined but are created by a patriarchal social structure that is designed by men to oppress women. It is “patriarchal society” that turns naturally bi-sexual infants into male and female personalities by conditioning them from birth to adopt gender roles – the one aggressive, masculine and destined to command, the other passive, feminine and slated to obey.

Sometimes Rousseau might have been crazy … but not always.

sleepyoldbear — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:32:05 +0000

From the Confession of a Savoyard Vicar (embedded in Bk 4 of the Emile):

I conceived that the weakness of the human understanding was the first cause of the prodigious variety I found in their sentiments, and that pride was the second. We have no standard with which to measure this immense machine; we cannot calculate its various relations; we neither know the first cause nor the final effects; we are ignorant even of ourselves; we neither know our own nature nor principle of action; nay, we hardly know whether man be a simple or compound being. Impenetrable mysteries surround us on every side; they extend beyond the region of sense; we imagine ourselves possessed of understanding to penetrate them, and we have only imagination. Every one strikes out a way of his own across this imaginary world; but no one knows whether it will lead him to the point he aims at. We are yet desirous to penetrate, to know, everything. The only thing we know not is to contentedly remain ignorant of what it is impossible for us to know. We had much rather determine at random, and believe the thing which is not, than to confess that none of us is capable of seeing the thing that is. Being ourselves but a small part of that great whole, whose limits surpass our most extensive views, and concerning which its creator leaves us to make our idle conjectures, we are vain enough to decide what that whole is in itself, and what we are in relation to it.

But were the philosophers in a situation to discover the truth, which of them would be interested in so doing? Each knows very well that his system is no better founded that the systems of others; he defends it, nevertheless, because it is his own. There is not one of them, who, really knowing truth from falsehood, would not prefer the latter, if of his own invention, to the former, discovered by any one else. Where is the philosopher who would not readily deceive mankind, to increase his own reputation? Where is he who secretly proposes any other object than that of distinguishing himself from the rest of mankind? Provided he raises himself above the vulgar, and carries away the prize of fame from his competitors, what doth he require more? The most essential point is to think differently from the rest of the world. Among believers he is an atheist, and among atheists he affects to be a believer.

Here. And that goes not just for philosophers.

Retirement … just what sort of life do I want?

sleepyoldbear — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:54:53 +0000

Just found this interesting publication, thanks to David Virtue.

I have been having pertinent thoughts for a long time … Would it not be better to keep one’s shoulder to the wheel as long as one has mental and physical health sufficient to the task? Not a matter of making money but of using one’s abilities for some purpose greater than one’s own leisure.

Here is the essay, Rethinking Retirement.