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Tonight was the big Cal teach-in before tomorrow’s day of walkout/protest/demonstration scheduled for all University of California campuses….Back in the day, a teach-in was teaching: faculty who knew something about an issue tried to explain it, sometimes just propagandizing but preferably illuminating complications and subtleties of the state of affairs (Vietnam War, racial injustice, etc.) triggering the state of protest. Tonight, not so much; the six speakers were earnest and lively, but the critical thinking of which we’re supposed to be a veritable factory had mostly left the building.
Archive for the ‘Handbasket, world going to hell in’ Category
September 24th, 2009
September 21st, 2009
On Wednesday evening I attended a “teach-in” sponsored by the local chapter of student “government” at Berkeley, the Senate of Associated Students of the University of California. A half-dozen faculty (not me) offered ten-minute perspectives on current events, which are heading to a university-wide walkout on Sept. 24; Friday the Senate voted unanimously to support [...]
August 30th, 2009
Once again, southern California is prey to wildfires, an environmental hazard that has become commonplace as the earth has heated up. But I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
April 30th, 2009
Our coblogger Bob Frank was interviewed…that’s not exactly the word I want here…on Fox Business News by a blowhard named Stuart Varney about his interesting ideas that luck matters in life in addition to brains, hard work, and the other Horatio Alger stuff (Alger’s heroes always had an amazing and consequential stroke of luck along [...]
December 25th, 2008
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in
I was going to post on the continuing collapse of newspapers, a cloud way closer than the horizon and plenty bigger than a man’s or even Kong’s hand, but this piece, alerting us to something way scarier than an asteroid on a collision course, puts today’s bad news, and smidgens of good news, in the [...]
November 28th, 2008
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in
People are stepping up, thank the lord; we may be on our way out of the economic meltdown. On Long Island, a crowd of patriots pushed down the doors of a WalMart and trampled to death a wretch trying to hold them back until opening time (probably an Al Qaeda operative programmed to sabotage our [...]
