CapitalistImperialistPig

For the last three decades, the United States has had an aggressive program to increase inequality among Americans. It has been fabulously successful. Can we stop now?

One hundred and five years ago, Archibald Garrod reported one of the most consequential results in the history of biology: the link between gene and protein. This is remarkable mostly because enzymes were newly discovered and the nature of the gene was as yet unknown.

Well known tough guy sportswriter Buss Bissinger, recently confesses to a $600,000 Gucci habit and reportedly checked into rehab. Now I don't know Mr. Bissinger, having read just enough of his work to be unimpressed, but his tale of Italian excess is ... uh ... peculiar. It started three years ago. I have never fully revealed it, and am only revealing it now in the hopes that my confession will incite a remission and perhaps help others of similar compulsion. If all I buy is Gucci, I will be fine. It has taken a while to figure out what works and what doesn't work, but Gucci men's clothing best represents who I want to be and have become—rocker, edgy, tight, bad boy, hip, stylish, flamboyant, unafraid, raging against the conformity that submerges us into boredom and blandness and the sexless saggy sackcloths that most men walk around in like zombies without the cinematic excitement of engorging flesh. I own eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, fort...

Pope Francis annoyed traditionalists by including women prisoners in his ceremonial penitential foot washing. Several outraged Cardinals complained that they hadn't changed their socks in weeks just in the hope of being picked themselves. Meanwhile, Rep Don Young (R - AK), ceremonially washed the backs of several Mexican tomato pickers for his own penance.

I tend to consider some subjects fluffy: history, sociology, philosophy, political science ... essentially anything that doesn't sets of intellectually challenging problems. If you have a good memory and are reasonably glib on paper, you can hope to cruise through such a course even if you are hungover when the class meets. I call them HO classes for short. The other kind of class, obviously, is a PS class: especially physics, engineering, computer science, mathematics, and so on. There are others that don't fit those molds, of course: foreign language, music performance/composition, fine arts, theatre, dance ... call them AF classes. Because computer scientists started the MOOC revolution, computer science classes are the best represented ones, and because those originators were into artificial intelligence, that subject is also very well represented. On edX, the most serious MOOC platform, MITX is the heavy lifter, with a solid and spectacular offering of courses in Physi...

In Europe and the northern US. Eli assembles the evidence that decreased Arctic ice is a major player: dat Wabbett The evidence comes from models, observations and the way they match. Eli is careful to point out that the case is not yet iron clad, but the ring appears to be closing. That nasty drought in the Southwest and South Central US is there in the pictures too. Might get a little hard to sympathize with drought stricken farmers in those states that keep electing climate deniers to Congress. Our special attention, though, ought to be directed to North Carolina, where the State has actually made it illegal to take climate change into account in coastal planning. Next big hurricane - let's not be too quick to bail them out - financially, I mean - I'm not advocating the kind of "let the Democrats drown" approach Rove and Bush took to New Orleans.

Academics are starting to notice the threat posed by the MOOC. See, eg., here , here , here and here . The fear, I think, is well founded. The response, at this point, much less so. There is a lot of denial, bargaining and anger at this stage of their grief. Jonathan Rees, a history prof at CSU Pueblo, is the original voice here. Getting back to my original subject, did you ever notice that you never hear anything like this from superprofessors? Just once, I want to hear a superprofessor say (or write): “My MOOC is a pale imitation of the class I teach on campus.” or "The fact that I have a 90% drop out rate in my MOOC partially reflects the fact that many of my students find me boring.” Why don’t you hear/read obvious statements like these? Ego, again. Here is another theory. Maybe they don't believe the first statement. Maybe they didn't intend to teach their on campus course on a MOOC. At least one Prof has noted that his class at Standford had many stude...