My students seem to think that ignorance and incapacity are immanent characteristics like height, eye color, or the shape of one’s ears and have to be accepted by everybody with no criticism or comment.

Time and again this semester I have tried to guide them towards improving their performance only to hear an indifferent, “Well, I’m just not good at spelling,” “I’m not good at interpreting poetry,” “I’m not good at remembering instructions,” “I’m not good at writing essays.”

They seem to believe that once they said this phrase, all further discussion of their performance should immediately stop. Capacity and incapacity are God-given qualities that a mere mortal can in no way modify.

I tried suggesting that the purpose of a college education is precisely to enrich one’s set of skills and store of knowledge but I’m not getting through. Students seem convinced that college exists so that they can come here, display the skills they already have, receive praise, and move on to another sphere of life. There, they will exhibit the same skills they had before coming to college, receive praise, etc. Existence is not about learning and improving but, rather, about exhibiting your pre-fabricated and unchanging uniqueness to as many people as possible in order to get the greatest number of accolades.

The concept of a self-made American has been substituted by the idea of a God-given one.

As somebody who still remembers the time when making a phone call involved sticking your finger into a dial and rotating it like you see in the picture that follows

I was absolutely shocked to see that a free app I downloaded onto iPod Touch 5 to make book lists (nerd thing) grabbed the bar code of my book and immediately had all of its information. The app somehow knew when it was pointed at a bar code (as opposed to being pointed elsewhere) and just grabbed it. I didn’t even have to press any buttons.

I’m so disturbed by this that my knees are trembling. It’s phenomenal how far technology has gone in such a short time. I have no doubt there are endless possibilities that I don’t even realize hidden in the devices I use.

All I ever wanted to say about Facebook activists but somebody has already said it for me.

A Dutch wedding versus an American wedding.

“Together, my partner and I have a median household income in the top 8% of US earners. Yet, like many people, even now we could not truly afford to buy a decent place in most major North American (or global) cities.” Hear, hear! The real estate in this country is unbelievably overpriced, and things won’t change until there are folks willing to saddle themselves with ridiculous 30-year mortgages.

A lot of words just to say that people who send unsolicited naked photos of themselves should be avoided. I once had a colleague who regaled everybody in the office with photos of his penis. I kid you not, he sent out an email to everybody who had the misfortune of sharing an office with him. On the next day, he pestered everybody to share our impressions of the penis with him. The guy turned out to be a sociopath and a criminal who had to flee the country.

Jeb Bush confirms that immigration policies exist to relieve the tension of “we are not breeding fast enough” panic. We have already seen Western Europe succumb to it. Now, it seems, it’s the turn of the US.

“If you’re talking about Snowden — whether he’s a hero or a traitor, why he did it, what should happen to him, etc. — then you’re not talking about the NSA, what it’s doing, and what should be done to corral it. The NSA loves that.” Exactly.

A very good post to read for Father’s Day. It reminded me of this old joke where a little boy says, “Mommy, if Santa brings gifts and the Tooth Fairy brings money, then why do we need Daddy?”

I will never understand the bizarre brain processes of people who see Great Gatsby as “a movie about men.” This person probably thinks Anna Karenina is a “book about women.” Not even my students are capable of such pseudo-insights.

On how Rupert Murdoch valiantly upholds family values.

Greg Mankiw is being criticized for saying “I was raised in a middle-class family; neither of my parents were college graduates. My own children are being raised by parents with both more money and more education. Yet I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age.” He is absolutely right, though. His children’s success or lack thereof in every area of life is in no way dependent on their parents’ money or education. It is dependent on how psychologically healthy their upbringing was. Please only argue about this with me if you’ve had an opportunity to observe the same number of children of very rich people as I have.

I need to show this to my students who persecute me with the endless (and endlessly stupid) “Historically, men always worked while women stayed home and waited on them.” (I’m not sure if my students know the difference between “on” and “for.” Their understanding of English prepositions is horrendously poor. They also love to stick “off of” between random clusters of words.)

OK, why did my WordPress Dashboard suddenly acquire this funereal look?

I didn’t do anything to cause this. Has there been an update?

Updates to apps and websites bug me to no end. Just as one gets used to a certain look, some stupid update kills the experience. For instance, the Apple WordPress app got 2 major updates since Friday night.

Obama says he is justified in meddling with Syria because there is a rumor chemical weapons were used there and there is also a bad, mean dictator in the country. I’m starting to believe that Obama’s real name is Bush. Haven’t we heard this exact same story about WMDs and evil dictators in the exact same context a few years ago?

Also, does anybody see any reason for the US meddling in Syria other than the country’s bizarre need to restore the Cold War-like tensions with Russia? Of course, Putin is delighted because this is a dream come true for him.

Or is this simply an attempt to jump-start the US economy? (I know it won’t work but the White House seems wedded to this strategy.)

I know how much everybody loves these posts, so here is one more memorable discussion with my mother.

Mother: You should stop watching all these crime dramas on TV. They will stress you out, and that’s no good for the baby.

Me: No, I talked to a psychologist and he says that the harmful stuff is the kind that causes me negative emotions: stress, anger, fear, etc. And crime dramas don’t cause me any negative feelings.

Mother: I don’t know. I think you should be watching nice, happy movies. Like Cinderella or romantic comedies.

Me: Mama, I told you, the psychologist says I should avoid watching things that make me feel stress, anger, fear, etc.

Reader Shakti left this curious comment about an obscure author who made a speech at a high school graduation ceremony that was so bad people in the audience booed him. Here is a part I find curious in the speech:

I have an absolutely clear memory of being 18 and graduating from Roosevelt High School. I remember that many things made me feel happy, and that I pursued those things with vigor, but I also remember that I dreaded adulthood, and even more, old age and death, and that no matter what I was doing, no matter how good were the good times, somewhere at the bottom—underneath the music and the friends, the late nights and the fun—somewhere at the bottom there was always an awareness that this wasn’t going to last forever, and that I would have to get old like everyone else, which might not be so fun, and that one day, I would die, which wouldn’t be fun, either.

This is precisely what we talked about when we discussed the negative mother complex. This gentleman was intensely immature when he left high school (fear of adulthood is a sign of immaturity) and he remained stuck in this infantile mode of behavior. Now all he an do to enjoy life at least marginally is bully young people and try to spoil their graduation ceremony.

The rest of the speech should have been delivered at a psychoanalyst’s office many years ago. Then the poor author would have gotten help for his neurotic condition and wouldn’t need to badger others with it.

I always find it disgusting when instead of seeking professional help, people engage in these nauseating exhibitions of the suppurating sores of their psyche. It would never occur to anybody to remove a bandage that covers a gangrened limb and stick it into people’s faces during a festive occasion, would it? So why is it so much more acceptable to exhibit decomposing, putrefacient souls to innocent bystanders?

P.S. And this is what I will do to anybody who dares to say a bad word about Enlightenment.

Somebody we all know and like (I have no idea what the protocol for quoting Facebook comments is and I don’t want to invade people’s privacy on Facebook) said the following:

I would be more open to the creative potential of digital distance teaching if people who do not accept that I already teach hybrid, with mega-Moodle sites, websites, and blogs, would stop browbeating me about how I should replace myself with someone else’s canned lectures if I am not to be declared a Luddite.

Anyway, there is this and I think I must reform my critique: instead of saying anything that can be interpreted as anti-machine, I will criticize the MOOC promoters for not being pro-machine enough themselves, or not having discovered all of the really advanced potential in machines.

I agree with this statement completely. I use a lot of technology in my courses but I use it exclusively and without an exception to deliver the content that I have created specifically for my students. If I make a video for my students, every word in it comes from me and every slide or sequence has been created by me. These videos cannot be transferred or sold to anybody else because they only make sense within the framework of my courses.

I’m very happy that this colleague has given me a way of pushing back against all the suggestions that I substitute my content with somebody else’s. I mean, if I was hired to teach, then I will teach. And my material will come from my own store of knowledge. Switching on some pre-fab lecture created by somebody else does not qualify as teaching.

So now I will tell the MOOC lovers and the instructional video promoters that they don’t understand technology well enough. There is the kind of cooking that consists of heating up a TV dinner and there is the kind where you create a culinary miracle from scratch with your own hands. I’m into the latter while the MOOCers are into the former.

So Putin decided to do something good and give a unique collection of books and documents called “Schneerson Library” to the Jewish Museum in Moscow. The Library represents a unique collection of Judaica that was nationalized after the 1917 revolution. After decades of state-sponsored anti-Semitism, this was a very positive move in the direction of acceptance of the few Jews who still mysteriously remain in Russia.

Of course, Putin wouldn’t be Putin if he didn’t spoil the moment with something egregiously stupid.

“Let’s remember,” he said in a speech that accompanied the gift, “that the first Soviet government was 85% Jewish anyways. Those Jews persecuted, killed and tortured everybody: the Russian Orthodox people, the Muslims, and fellow Jews.”

This is obviously a lie because out of the 15 members of the Soviet government that nationalized the Schneerson Library only one was a Jew. But the old anti-Semitic trope of the October Revolution being a product of a Jewish conspiracy remains alive. Spain’s fascist dictator Franco loved this myth, so Putin is in a curious company on this issue.