Stephen Colbert's TV character, "Stephen Colbert" sometimes rants at guests to demand a response to whether they would want Saddam Hussein still in power in Iraq, "'Yes' or 'No'! 'Yes' or 'No!"… Read full post »

Back to Basics #24

              This will be a quickie, so to speak, recommending four works of importance about the environment and politics:

                  &n… Read full post »

            I spent forty years teaching college undergraduates and living in college-student neighborhoods; and for thirty-five years I lived down the block from a consolidated high school.

            So if… Read full post »

Back to Basics  #23

                  I'll open with a statement of faith: I believe in free will.

                  I feel that I make real choices, and… Read full post »

            On the NPR show On Point this morning, what sounded like a Republican Party operative presented the talking point that President Obama and the Democrats engage in class warfare in pitting poorer Americans against the wealthy, the job-creators w… Read full post »

            I spent some forty years teaching English, including expository writing, loyally following Strunk and White and George Orwell in encouraging plain style, simple writing — and as much as possible sticking to English.

  … Read full post »

Back to Basics #22

I hate and detest that animal called Man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. […] I have got materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale ["Man is a rational animal"] and to show it should be… Read full post »

Back to Basics #21  

        Among other things to commemorate the Orwellian year of 1984, I wrote out a "macro" to send to editors every time I came across… Read full post »

Back to Basics #20 

            Toward the end of 2011, on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, a caller complained that some topic was never covered in the media, to which Ms. Rehm responded by quoting one of her husband's favorite adages, "Nev… Read full post »

Back to Basics #19

                  My friend Tim — not his real name — was a big, 20-something, incandescent white White guy, who stood out in a crowd; and in a crowd it was that we had the conversation relevant for this blog… Read full post »

Back to Basics, #18 

          My last couple of blogs were essays, fairly long and roundabout; this post will be more direct.

            Carl von Clausewitz, who knew about such things, said that war&nbs… Read full post »

Back to Basics #17 

            I recently praised traditional-style conservatism, of the sort that nowadays puts its adherents — e.g., me — on the Left. Here, however, I'll start by admitting that I was born and… Read full post »

            The idea of a "War on Christmas" is a bit more ludicrous than the idea of a monolithic and Liberal (Mainstream) Media, but both ideas sprout from the spoiled-rottenness of people who nowadays pass for conservatives generally and Christian conservatives m… Read full post »

Back to Basics #16 ("Unless It's Necessary to Change, It's Necessary Not to Change" ["If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It."])

         Writing in 1946, in his introduction to a reissue of his great anti-utopia, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley complained, "For the last thirty year… Read full post »

                  A combination of first and last names on a web page added up to "Richard Erlich," so a very energetic but not too bright algorithm (?) sent me a Google Alert for a Truthdig.com item, "Buzzkill: Study Exposes Teen Sexting Myth" (… Read full post »

         I'm writing this blog post in the busy time between Thanksgiving and the various solstice celebrations — let's call it "Advent, American Style" — and I was thinking about some lines I recently used from the New Testament Gospels according t… Read full post »

"There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch" (etc.): Back to Basics #15 

Book 3 of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) is titled "TANSTAAFL!", and Robert A. Heinlein's novel was my introduction to the term. "The 'free lunch' referred to in the acronym" — pronounce… Read full post »

Back to Basics 14

            In a CNN/Tea Party debate on Monday, 12 September 2011, libertarian Republican candidate Ron Paul was posed by Wolf Blitzer with a hypothetical case where, in an Los Angeles Times summary,

 … Read full post »

         I’ve written on clutter and Kroger’s/Ralph’s before. The immediate occasion for this round of my cogitations on stimulation and clutter and such wasn’t the downscale rococo of Ralph’s but the very “moderne” var… Read full post »

         “There are two kinds of people in the world,” a very old joke runs, “Those who divide the human world into ‘two kinds of people’ and those who don’t.” So let’s say that one continuum of people runs on the… Read full post »

         Sometimes when we clearly help people, we can also do them subtle harm.

         Here’s a relatively noncontroversial example, since no one was hurt (nor helped):… Read full post »

(Back to Basics #13)

         In a much-reprinted story, The Associated Press reported that Georgia and other states are cutting back on courses in the Bible in the public schools. I can understand the need for cutbacks in hard times and appreciate that the Bi… Read full post »

"The schemes of these utopian Luddites will lead to chaos or even anarchy."

^{(Back to Basics #12)}         

Okay, none of my students ever actually turned in to me the line, "The schemes of these utopian Luddites will lead to chaos or even anarchy!"/… Read full post »

I'm planning a full-length blog in my "Back to Basics" series on the theme of "time is all we have," but I'm going off-line for a week (17-24 October 2011) and figured I'd better throw this in now.

The back-to-basics point is that one whole hell of a lot… Read full post »