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  • Jen: I like the Han Solo quote. Stole it for my Facebook page. :)...
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A Slate article about The Clash swerves into Marxian territory with a paragraph on the use of education to protect position.

The postwar expansion had been accompanied by an idea of relative social mobility that expanded educational opportunity meant talent would be identified and rewarded, regardless of one’s social position. The reality was, however, that England was still, in relative terms, class stagnant. And when its economy stopped expanding at the generous postwar pace, the meritocratic ideal came under enormous pressure. Jobs in the professional elite were now increasingly being filled by the children of the professional elite, a pattern that continued into the ’80s and, some data suggests, intensified in the ’90s.

It’s hardly a new concept; C student Prince Charles would never have been accepted to Cambridge any more than G.W. would have waltzed into Yale. Lower down the food chain, the purpose of courses like pre-law and pre-med in the States is as much to heighten the financial barriers to entry as to educate.

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Suddenly, everyone is celebrating dumb ideas. A pair of British students will spend their summer in the US breaking stupid laws according to a story in the Guardian.

Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course.

In the far more conservative - and landlocked - state of Utah, they will risk the penitentiary when they hire a boat and attempt to go whale-hunting.

If they manage to outwit state troopers in Utah, and perhaps federal agents on their trail, they will be able to take a deserved, but nevertheless illegal, rest when they have a nap in a cheese factory in South Dakota.

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Yesterday I was at an academic conference. I’m not an academic so it was a new experience when I listened to the sessions. It is hard work listening to a succession of people read congested prose in a nervous monotone. I’m sure I’ll eventually encounter someone who understands that when you have an audience, you are telling a story. If the ideas expressed are creative and insightful, why shouldn’t the presentation reflect that?

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Like most endeavours in life, art is a triumph of publicity over talent. Have you ever looked at a piece of modern art and wondered how anyone could fall for that bull? There are times when it is obvious that the underlying artist “statement” is “I’m a charlatan, you’re a sucker”.

There are lots of great artists around. Why should we celebrate the grandiosity of narcissist hacks? I suppose it could be a good thing…

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One look at the expression on the
doggie’s face says it all. Though I think this one is even stranger.

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We are notoriously bad at personally assessing risk, frightened to death by mad cows and airline flights, yet content to roam the cell-distracted roads and blase about our diet. In a midwestern suburb, a man bought gas masks for his family because a few people were exposed to a virus on the east coast, over a thousand miles away. What are the real chances of being exposed to a mad cow?

Perhaps there is an evolutionary advantage to tolerating unavoidable daily risk and being extra cautious of the new and unknown.

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I found some more good stuff about happiness at biopsychiatry.com. While most of the site seems devoted to exploring better living through chemicals there are several archived newpaper articles that are very interesting.

”The average person says, ‘I know I’ll be happier with a Porsche than a Chevy,’ ” Gilbert explains. ” ‘Or with Linda rather than Rosalyn. Or as a doctor rather than as a plumber.’ That seems very clear to people. The problem is, I can’t get into medical school or afford the Porsche. So for the average person, the obstacle between them and happiness is actually getting the futures that they desire. But what our research shows — not just ours, but Loewenstein’s and Kahneman’s — is that the real problem is figuring out which of those futures is going to have the high payoff and is really going to make you happy.

”You know, the Stones said, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ ” Gilbert adds. ”I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem is you can’t always know what you want.”

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via boingboing: A Michigan artist is going to jail for painting a Michaelangelo-derived mural with a bare bosom. I’m sure Larry Flynt can see the irony.

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An old article in Wired Magazine discusses the Amish approach to adopting technology. Apparently they’re not the Luddites of the popular viewpoint.

Amish settlements have become a cliché for refusing technology. Tens of thousands of people wear identical, plain, homemade clothing, cultivate their rich fields with horse-drawn machinery, and live in houses lacking that basic modern spirit called electricity. But the Amish do use such 20th-century consumer technologies as disposable diapers, in-line skates, and gas barbecue grills. Some might call this combination paradoxical, even contradictory. But it could also be called sophisticated, because the Amish have an elaborate system by which they evaluate the tools they use; their tentative, at times reluctant use of technology is more complex than a simple rejection or a whole-hearted embrace.

The article points out the implications for those of us that live less questioningly in the modern world. Is technology a tool that we use or is the slave your master?

How often do we interrupt a conversation with someone who is physically present in order to answer the telephone? Is the family meal enhanced by a beeper? Who exactly is benefiting from call waiting? Is automated voicemail a dark hint about the way our institutions value human time and life? Can pagers and cell phones that vibrate instead of ring solve the problem? Does the enjoyment of virtual communities by growing numbers of people enhance or erode citizen participation in the civic life of geographic communities?

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John Perry Barlow, rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist and cyber-philosopher is also notorious for his 1996 screed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.

But he also has an essay The Pursuit of Emptinesss that I find very compelling. The thrust of the piece is that the pursuit of happiness is an impediment to happiness.

Here’s what I believe. I believe that extolling the pursuit of happiness was a toxic stupidity entirely unworthy of my greatest American hero, Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, it is a poison that sickens our culture more wretchedly every nanosecond. I wish he’d never said it.

It produces a monstrous, insatiable hunger inside our national psyche that encourages us ever more ravenously to devour all the resources of this small planet, crushing liberties, snuffing lives, feeling ourselves ordained by God and Jefferson to do whatever is necessary to make us happy.

And yet the American people are miserable. Or so it would appear.

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