Inauguration Day


Thanking Milo for standing up for freedom of speech, 
even as protestors try to shut down his talk at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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“Satan, be gone!”

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This is the last post I wanted to write, but it has become clear that if I do not write it, I will never write anything else. So here goes. This time last year I was preparing my file to submit to my department in expectation of being promoted to full professor. I probably don’t need to say any more, you can all check my title on the department web page now—go ahead , I’ll wait—although as one benefit, as part of the review process I did have to write statements about my research and teaching which I have posted on my academic home page as introductions to my method and goals. I got the news—I kid you not—on Friday the 13th. In April. Seven months ago. Since when, I have been living a lie. Or a half truth. Or...oh, fuck it, it sucks. Because it is nonsense, of course. I deserve to be promoted to full professor. I have published a second major monograph  with a prestigious academic publisher (our standard in the department, barring an outside offer from another u...
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Gut Reaction

President Obama is a bully and a show-off who thinks that he is the only one who knows how to make tough decisions. Governor Romney has a pleasant voice and kind eyes, and he listens when other people are talking.
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And then the demons attacked...

One said: "You're wasting your time. It is going to take too long to work through this text. It is foolhardy to embark on a translation when somebody else might be doing it." Another said: "Whatever you do with this text, it will not be relevant enough. It is certainly not worth spending so much time on. You are not asking a big question, just doing a study of a single text that nobody read(s). Studying this work is not like an analysis of Chaucer. The text is not a part of our larger culture, just an oddity or example." Another said: "Somebody else could do it better. Saiani already has, it’s just in Italian. You probably can't even do it, your Latin isn't good enough to deal with John's technical vocabulary, never mind his poetry." The first one said: "You will never finish. There's no way you are going to make any headway on this project working only two hours a day every other day. Somebody else is certain to fi...
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The Sworn Book of Professor Peterson

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Peterson : I’m an odd sort of Christian, I suppose, for a variety of reasons.... There is an idea of the Eternal Soul, and it tends in Christianity to remain somewhat gendered, although there is an idea that it’s the Logos that is redemptive for males and females...and Logos is symbolically represented as masculine. I think that’s because the masculine spirit, so to speak, is freer in some sense than the female spirit, because it’s more tightly tied to the necessity of procreation and so forth. It’s something like that....  Societies have posited for a very long period of time that there’s something about human consciousness that transcends the limitations of the finite self. And you also mentioned the use of psychedelics, and obviously that was part of your experience of discovery. There’s a reasonable amount of evidence, and most of it was compiled by a man whose name, if I remember, was Wasson, who was an amateur mycologist, a student of mushrooms... R. Gordon Wasson . And he c...
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Robin Hood, the Pareto Principle, and the 47%

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It sounds like such a good idea: the wealthy should help support the less fortunate by paying their "fair share" in taxes.  But what does that mean, "fair share"? Consider the following chart from the National Taxpayers Union website: Now, I am no math whiz--unlike my son who is already deep into vector calculus as a high school junior, I didn't even know such mathematics existed until I was a sophomore in college--but it seems to me that there is very little in the data provided here that would upset Robin Hood.  We hear all the time how the top 1% are depriving the bottom 99% of their "fair share" of their earnings, but it looks to me like there are some disparities here worth noticing.  To whit: as the Pareto Principle would predict, the top 25% of earners pay 87.30% of all of the federal income taxes* in the country.  The top 50% pay 97.75% (leaving the next 3% to make up the rest, thus bringing us to the infamous 47% who pay no federal inc...
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