Yet another homeschooled kid turns on the people who kept him away from normal, healthy socialization:

New Mexico homeschooled teen Nehemiah Griego accused of murdering family, planned to keep killing at local Walmart. . . Sources told the paper the teen had long had murder/suicide fantasies.

First Adam Lanza, then this kid.

The motive for the horrific slayings were still unclear, but the paper said the home-schooled teen had had a “minor disagreement” with his mom Sarah Griego Friday night.

Had this kid been allowed to have a normal life, with normal teenage interests, maybe this minor spat with his mother wouldn’t have looked so tragic to him. But if you want to be your child’s entire life, the consequences might be dire.

Here a blogger explains that this family belonged to a fanatical religious sect.

I thought that marrying off a rape victim to the rapist in order to conceal that a crime has been committed was a thing of the past. But that’s not how things are:

A former Brunswick County teacher charged with having sex with a student pleaded guilty last month to a lesser charge after she married the victim, preventing the state from compelling him to testify against her, a prosecutor said this week. . . Shipman was a married Brunswick County Academy teacher when she was arrested in January 2009 on charges of sexual offense with a student, statutory rape and taking indecent liberties with a student.

The boy was 15 years old when this predator raped him. Now she will avoid prosecution for her crime because she has “covered his shame”, as people would say two hundred years ago, by marrying him. The victim’s mother is fully complicit in handing him over to the rapist, as usually happens in such cases:

According to the Columbus County register of deeds office, Ison was 17 at the time of the marriage, and his mother, Susan Wilson, signed the paperwork allowing him to marry.

Rape victims’ families still often see their raped children as a problem that needs to be removed out of sight as soon as possible.

Without the testimony from the victim (who cannot now testify in court since he is “married” to his rapist), this is the extent of punishment the predatory teacher got:

Shipman was sentenced to a suspended 30-day jail sentence, 12 months of probation and $345 in restitution. She was also ordered to surrender her teaching license.

We all know that pedophiles never commit a single crime. If there has ever been a recidivist crime, sexual abuse of a minor is it. I find it impossible to believe that this is the rapist’s first or last offense. Unfortunately, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring her to justice and stop her from raping children, albeit temporarily, has been lost. As for the victim, here is what his life will now be about:

On the same day, Ison, now 19, pleaded guilty on unrelated charges to one felony count of breaking and entering and two counts of larceny, Department of Correction records indicate. He received 24 months probation.

Note that his probation is twice as long as that of the criminal who raped him and turned him into an offender. Now that he is “married” to his rapist, I don’t think this young man is likely to receive any help for the trauma that will allow him to heal. And until that happens, his life is likely to be about crime, addiction, depression, and misery.

P.S. In case you are new to the blog, I have to warn you that I have a very intense reaction to child abuse, so don’t even try to justify this horrible crime in any way.

Academic blogger Z keeps coming out with these insights that are so brilliant they scare me:

After the discussion on competition I realized that the way people get bogged down is that they place competitive projects — getting funded, getting a job, getting a book contract, receiving tenure, getting promoted, winning awards — everything where you compete and are judged or ranked, and win or lose, in their research folder. If you do that, or if you allow teaching related service to crowd your teaching folder, then you are essentially strangling the plant you want to grow. . . This leads us, then, to another of my famous dicta, along the lines of “writing is fun, and publishing is easy” — competition is not part of research, it is part of service.

I always had a vague feeling it was impossible to find any reall joy or motivation in these purely formal things, and now I know why.

The linked post contains a step-by-step plan on how to organize one’s career visually and digitally to prevent service from crowding out everything else.

A consistently brilliant reader Musteryou uses the example of whiny woman-haters to explain how one can avoid a mid-life crisis:

I have a theory that one only really experiences a midlife crisis if one has not been living authentically. For instance, if you have been living according to an ideology that has promised obeying its rules will ultimately bear fruit, you might suddenly feel let down in mid-life when this doesn’t happen. That’s it not the fault of feminism, though, which (as Farrell’s quote also points out) allows women to actually make an authentic identity for themselves. The unmaking of men comes about because they have bought into all sorts of nonsense in the first place. “Stop allowing your life to be determined from the outside and instead develop an inner life of your own,” should be the advice given to whining males. Above all, stop trying to steal feminism’s inner light. If it’s not your own light, you’re just going to make everything so much worse for yourselves. Growing up means learning how to establish an identity on one’s own terms. Oprah cannot do it for you. Smashing feminism can’t do it for you. Sometimes it takes baby steps.

I have the same theory of a mid-life crisis. If you take care to figure out what it is YOU want your life to be like, you will experience no need for a crisis once middle age approaches. A mid-life crisis is a problem of those who dedicated their lives to living according to the pattern suggested to them by others. A consciously constructed existence that answers only to an internal mandate will not enter into a crisis.

“If you really do want to go to college, work for 6-7 years, and save like mad. If you get a decent, hard cert and start a “real” IT job at 21, you should be able to save something like $70,000 by the time you are 26. Then go to college all you like.” The only problem with this suggestion is that employers are increasingly reluctant to hire even receptionists with nothing but a high school diploma. I also thought that was unfair until I had to deal with a completely dense and uneducated receptionist last week.

It turns out I’m not the only person who dresses up to work at home.

A history of arcades and a history of blaming criminal behavior on games. A really great article, folks.

An example of a really horrible, annoyingly weepy teaching statement. Teaching statements are usually a huge waste of time, so my personal advice is: be as concise and functional as you can. At our department, we just skim them looking for the word “communicative.” If the word is there, the applicant advances to the next stage. If not, the applicant is kicked out of the context.

Is there a better way to let the world know you suffer from a severe erectile dysfunction than this?

There are atheists, and then there are brainless atheists. I find them as idiotic as religious fanatics because they have the same tendency to screech stupidly in a fit of a narcissistic rage.

All really brilliant people (like me and this blogger, for instance) hated school and loved college. Although we experienced them in different countries. I’m sure there is an explanation.

The problematic nature of the “pregnancy is not a disease” mantra. I agree with this blogger and I have to add that “pregnancy is the most natural thing in the world” bugs me to no end. Humanity abandoned all pretense at doing what nature intended with our bodies such a long time ago that insisting there is anything natural left is highly stupid. In terms of pregnancy, nature intended that a woman would start getting pregnant every year from the time of the menarchy and die in childbirth by the age of 25 when she would already be a total physical wreck. I don’t think you know anybody who lives this way, do you? It’s also curious how nobody is proposing to treat our teeth as nature intended (i.e. let them rot and fall out by adulthood.)

“If wedding preparation is the time an adult woman is allowed to indulge, then perhaps her engagement marks the beginning of a phase of socially acceptable material-driven self-centeredness.” Is that the reason so many women obsess over the stupid wedding ceremony? Is it because they don’t feel they are entitled to be the center of the universe throughout their entire lives? Poor idiots.

“And speaking of marriage-then-babies: I have yet to come across a married couple where the baby has only the woman’s name.” I’m certainly not a baby but I used to be one. My sister, too. We have our mother’s name, and our parents have been married for 37 years. And I can bet you anything that you do not have a better or a closer relationship with your father than I do with mine.

Toilet paper and pathos.

I made his salad yesterday and it was very good. (Radishes, cucumbers, apples).

A religious fanatic was screeching about Christianity while sexually abusing her own daughter. Why am I not surprised?

A good post on women’s bodies as public property. I would like to add to the blogger’s list 1) the endless advice that pregnant women get from strangers as if it were other people’s duty and right to manage the pregnant women’s bodies, and 2) people always trying to touch pregnant women’s bellies. Ask any pregnant woman and she will tell you how weird it was to feel that being pregnant somehow demolished the personal boundaries and put her body into public circulation and use.

Don’t let university libraries die because if you do, this will happen: “At my university we have not bought books for about fifteen years and we do not have access to very many journals. They have fired the bibliographic instruction librarian, too. People are taught not to look at the MLA or other very comprehensive bibliographies because we do not have most of what is in them.” This is just horrifying.

University of Toronto seems to believe that freedom of speech consists in inviting insane people to blab incoherently on campus.

Talented people can make even a post on pubic lice fascinating.

I love quinoa and always have at least 3 varieties of the grain at home (regular, red, and black.) But now it turns out that it’s not such a harmless food preference after all:

There is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fuelled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture.

Of course, I don’t want people in Peru to eat junk. But I don’t want to eat junk either. Is there a chance quinoa will start being grown locally? Does anybody know how it works?

The article is from The Guardian, which means, obviously, that this can all just be a hoax that the tabloid has invented to boost readership.

Folks, I need help figuring out what Ellen DeGeneres says in a small clip on Allegra. Here is the clip:

At 0.44 –1.15 Ellen says: Here is what I’m going to do to prove it to the people. I’m going to put a little pollen in there, put a little pet dander in there, a little dust mites, I’ll put some weeds in there, this is some of ??Cher’s?? hair, and I don’t know what that is, I think it’s his  , I’m not sure, this is going to be some fire ants – I’m kidding, it’s scorpions.

Do help, I need this for a work project and I have no idea what she is saying.

I’m very happy because I finally managed to convince (almost force, to be honest) a student to conduct her graduating project on Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Before you decide I have gone insane and turned to spoiling my students’ literary tastes, let me explain what the alternative was.

The student had been insisting that she wanted to write her research project on a Hollywood movie The House of the Spirits. Got it? A Hollywood movie. In English. To graduate with a Spanish Major.

And you know the absolutely worst part? This student is a native speaker of Spanish.

I’m really bugged by Spanish-speaking students who enroll in our program because they think they can get an “easy” degree out of it. The way the program is set up, they can keep taking endless language courses (which they need like I need another Kindle), wasting their time, aggravating the non-native students, and persecuting the teacher with their exaggerated sighs of boredom. After 3 years of this, you can’t get them to read anything or do anything labor-intensive as much as you try.

Which brings me to the same old point: we need to stop spawning these stupid language courses and start doing something different.

Arguments that universities are being run according to the business model annoy me hugely. Our administrators are folks who failed in both business and scholarship and are now trying to impose their faulty practices on us. The result is a pseudo-business model described beautifully in the following brilliant post:

So what’s the problem?  Why can’t this be solved in a business- like manner?  BECAUSE THE FREAKIN’ PROVOST HAS ALL THE TUITION MONEY!  Yes, in a real business model the academic unit that earns the credit hours should get the tuition money.  Then we could decide which services the department needs and wants to pay for.  Custodians? Sure. Grounds maintenance? Why not?  Administrators could submit their reason for existing, and we academics could decide if we want an assistant to the vice provost.  Provost?  Let us think about that one awhile.  So our university is being run on a phony baloney business model where the person with all the fiscal resources turns around and tells you everything is your responsibility but they withhold the resources you earned and need to take responsibility.

What can I say if our department functioned for 5 months without a departmental secretary? Students suffered, faculty members suffered, the Chair nearly collapsed with exhaustion. How difficult can it be to hire a secretary in a geographic area with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country? And do you think anybody punished the completely useless HR department for this mess-up? Ha ha. In our pseudo-business model, paper-pushers are not accountable to anybody.

Another HR person sends out a hysterical letter threatening to fire everybody including the Dean for no reason whatsoever and insults everybody in a very egregious manner. Then she claims she is being discriminated against by people who ask why she thinks she can fire faculty members and Deans, and we all have to apologize. Can you imagine a business where some dime-a-dozen clerk has a public meltdown insulting the CEO and then the CEO ends up apologizing?

So please, let’s not insult business by attributing these insane qualities to it.