NORMAL, IL—According to incredulous sources, local hardware store employee and grown adult human being Rob Peterson, 37, actually expects to be happy in life.

Despite possessing a fully developed brain and a general awareness of the fundamental nature of existence, sources said Peterson apparently continues to believe that achieving long-lasting happiness is somehow possible.

MORE: Grown Adult Actually Expects To Be Happy | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Our postgraduate philosophy education is primarily vital in ensuring the quality of the incoming stream of future teachers of philosophy. These provide the continuing educational resource for very acute and educated people to flow into very diverse channels of administration, business and other branches of employment, including what used to exist as and be known as "public service", before that fell into the hands of people unable to conceive of it as anything other than a cornucopia of opportunities for corruption.

and

[W]e don’t think that you should pay slavish attention to what business people, especially those who believe themselves fit to judge things about which they know nothing, say are their "needs" because we do not have any confidence that without more philosophy than most of them possess, they have the least idea what those needs are.

and

the impact of ideas is not measurable, even by double-blind clinical tests decked out with the best Bayesian interpretations

Blackburn here submits as evidence that the great Cathedrals were built a thousand years after the life of the one who inspired them.  When should we expect to see the “outcomes” from our students’ first experience with philosophy?

Read the rest here.

As Slate puts it, “the FTC put bloggers on notice that they could incur an $11,000 fine if they receive free goods, free services, or money and write about the goods or services without conspicuously disclosing their ‘material connection’ to the provider.”  The worry is over whether there is an expectation of endorsement in such circumstances.

In the spirit of the new rules, let me say the following:

1.  I got my copy of the policy from The Government here [.pdf], for free.

2.  I am materially connected to The Government in the following way:  It scares the shit out of me!  It figuratively and (I cringe to think) even literally has a gun to my head at all times.

With this disclosure, let me get to my review of the new Policy:

This Policy is fantastic!  Amazing!!  Colossal!!  It is perhaps the finest Policy any government has yet produced.  This is a whole new ball game.  This changes everything in Policy generation.  No future Policy drafter will be able to ignore this one!  This is the Holy Bible, the Holy Koran, The Rig Vedas, and the complete works of Shakespeare rolled into one.  It is, LITERALLY, a miracle!  I cannot image another Government—say, Sudan—coming up with anything close to this!  They way they use irremediable vagueness for their own nefarious fully justified purposes is genius!  Bloggers will be eternally grateful.  Two ENTHUSIASTIC thumbs up!

But I have to say, though, I really can’t understand exactly what The Government is so worried about.

But here is what Ron Hogan at Galley Cat is worried about.

[er, okay, I should say that I got some ideas from Jack Shafer at Slate and Ron Hogan at Galley Cat.  I can access their sites for free on the internet.  I am materially related to these blogs in that they are blogs and I read them.  My linking to them should in no way be seen as an endorsement of these smart, insightful writers or their employers.  Just as my linking to The Policy should not be seen as endorsement of the officious bureaucrats who wrote it.]

Some closing thoughts from Jack Shafer:

Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews. But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.

Nobody likes deceptive advertising or fishy bloggers. But I’d rather wade through steaming piles of unethical crap on the Web than give the FTC Javertian powers to pursue shady advertorial. This is one of those cases in which the government’s solution is 10 times worse than the problem.

Such solutions almost always are….  Talk about “steaming piles of unethical crap…”!

I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Read more here.

1.  Obama has not been in office (let alone public life) long enough to even come close to deserving such recognition.

2.  The U.S., whose electorate did try to effect change at the polls, is running on vague hope (sometimes that’s all we’ve got)—but so far there are still lots of troops (and about to be more) in war zones and elsewhere, no movement on multilateralism on climate issues (really, we’re still very obstructionist), no meaningful pressure on all parties concerned to find solutions in the Middle East.  So WE don’t deserve the prize, either.  Not even for “overcoming” our racist past (electing a black president, no matter how significant and historic, will not by itself make us whole).  This was the best light I could put this in, but I haven’t really convinced myself.

3.  And, again, there are many other people who put their very lives on the line every day to make peace in a war-loving world who deserve this award.  Naomi Klein suggested this guy should win, for instance.  Tariq Ali suggested Noam Chomsky and Mumia Abu Jamal (talk about a politicized award, though…).

4.  There is no question that Nobel Peace Prizes are highly-politicized.  So my complaint is not simply that it is, but that this one will turn out to be a wasted political award.

You can hear Naomi Klein and Tariq Ali discuss the award on Democracy Now!

Best I can do for an explanation.  If this is right, I humbly—yet very skeptically and vigilantly—accept. Let’s see if we can earn it, now.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

–Nietzsche

Well, another summer come and (almost) gone.  What did I do on my summer vacation?  I climbed a mountain.  I swam in the sea.  I wandered the desert.  I gazed into an abyss.

No, I don’t just mean the Grand Canyon.  I mean the abyss of Facebook and Twitter.  And this abyss has been gazing into me.  It gazed into me as I climbed mountains, tangled with wild animals, watched sunrises and sunsets, sweated by the Saguaros, dodged lightning, feted my children’s successes, did my job, aired my grievances, expressed my hopes, cracked a few jokes.  I know I left out a bunch, but since I know the full context of all my postings it feels like nothing got left out at all.  Yes, it is true that I often don’t have the faintest idea what my “friends” are talking about in their posts…most are just in-jokes of various degrees of levity or angst.  I don’t have the context.  You had to be there, I guess.  But by posting my own inscrutabilites, I have this sense I’ve sent it all out there into the e-byss of virtual relationships (perhaps an oxymoron, that).  Now why would I have done that?  Why would anyone?

Facebook turned “friend” into a verb (“friending”).  By their count, I have friended or been friended by a mere 53 “friends”–the page with the list more modestly calls these “connections,” now.   My FB friends include:

• 1 wife/soul-mate/love-of-my-life/BFF
• 0 ex-wives (imagine that!)
• 2 blood relatives (my parents)
• 2 step-kids
• 15 step-relatives
• 2 ex-girlfriends, who, though well rid of me both then and now, really seemed to have meant that old “we’re just good friends” line…at least virtually
• 2 women (but they were girls back then…) who I would have liked now to be calling ex-girlfriends (I mean that in a good way…) but who would probably have known this back then, thus explaining why they kept a wide berth at the time; i.e., to avoid being referred to decades later as an ex-girlfriend of mine
• 1 woman (but she was a girl back then) who would have had NO IDEA that I’d have liked to have included her in the preceding category–she kept an even wider berth
• 1 ex-girlfriend–I guess that’s the right designation–of my stepson (for some reason)
• 11 professional colleagues, some close, some more distant…one of whom apparently counts for TWO of my friends (c’mon, H-H…pick one profile and stick with it!  I’ll be accused of padding my numbers…)
• 1 son of a colleague (that is not an epithet, btw)
• 3 pretty good pals from my youth (whom I more or less hadn’t seen or heard from since youth)
• 11 various and sundry acquaintances from high school days and just after

Of the “friends” I know (I admit I don’t really know all of them–even most of them, truth be told), there isn’t one I don’t at least think I like.  I’m glad to be “friended” to all of them (if that’s how you say it).

Having so few friends/connections makes me “unpopular.”  I confess this does not bother me in the least.  At one time, perhaps it would have, but this is not that time.

I have twittered this summer, too.  I have two “followers.”  I like the sound of that: FOLLOWERS.  Anybody can have friends, but to have FOLLOWERS!  But I digress.  My followers consist of one of my FB friends (to protect reputations and fallout from my fading yet opportunistic memory, I decline to say from which category), and  my brother, who is not my friend, FB-wise.  I noticed, too, that I picked up a couple of faux-”followers” who glommed on when I tweeted about someplace I visited in Arizona (hotels and tourist services).  I found that a little creepy, really.  I like to know my followers.

On Facebook, I was often invited to take challenges, answer poll questions, pass virtual drinks around, test my knowledge of music or films, check my compatibility with other people’s tastes in music or films, and on and on.  I declined.  Nothing personal.  No, really, it’s nothing personal.  I like personal, and those little Hallmark-y type mechanisms for interacting are not needed among actual friends, so I refuse to make use of them with my virtual friends (if there are such things).

I uploaded a few pictures.  I looked at pictures from my friends.  I like looking at pictures, even if I don’t know who or what I am looking at.  I just enjoy a good picture.  There rarely are any good pictures, though.  Just pictures, snapshots, some a little embarrassing to tell the truth, but mostly just photos of people doing people stuff or places that looked like they needed to be photographed at the time one of my friends was standing there.  But good or bad, I do look at the pictures.   Beats reading, really.

I was just thinking that if I got all of my FB friends in one room for a party, it would be a weird party.  I like weird parties as a rule, so maybe it would be good.  But it would definitely be weird.  It reminds us that you can have lots of different friends, have friends of widely varying personalities, but that you wouldn’t necessarily want to have them all over on the same night.  You can like lobster.  You can like peanut butter and jelly.  But you won’t like lobster and peanut butter and jelly, if you catch my meaning.

Some of the postings from my friends were thought provoking…not just the Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot kind of provocation (“Wha???”), but the kind that actually provoke thought.  Not often, but now and then.  Sometimes the postings were downright hilarious.  Yes…I was LAUGHING OUT LOUD!  But again, not very often.  Some people wrote nice things.  Some people wrote ambiguously nice things, so I chose to take them in the nicest possible sense.  Nobody said anything too mean or negative.  Only the occasionally e-burst of boredom or quotidian frustration.  These things pass.  Nothing of it will mean anything in a few hours, let alone months or years.  FB postings are as ephemeral as water cooler conversations.  Or text messages.  Or tweets.  Or sneezes.  I was once directly asked a serious question–off line, in the email functionality of FB.  The question required effort–I had to watch a video and give my opinion.  I did that.  I didn’t hear anything more about it.  That’s the way it goes.  Even if you have a good question or thought, by the time anyone gets around to commenting, the moment of your own initial interest is probably gone.  As it probably should be.  FB is just something to pass the time.

I am probably violating some code of FB conduct by talking about FB, rather than just talking on FB.  Who wants to be asked why they’re doing what they’re doing?  Who even wants to know why, themselves?

Anyway, the fall semester is at hand.  Back to learning/teaching philosophy (as if that’s not what I’ve been doing all along…).

So the question is this:  Do I continue with Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking activities?  I’ll leave it up to you.  Just leave a comment and a vote.

Oh…wait…I forgot.  I’m BLOGGING.  Probably to myself.

There is a nifty gadget on the site that gives you an up-to-the-minute count of how many stickers have been given away “free.”

As I write this (1:50 pm on 7/11), 203,678 stickers have been given away free.

In the time it took me to type these letters, the number has grown to 203,707.  At the current clip, I’d say about 25 stickers are being given away every minute for “free.”

So, the head-scratching: What is the carbon footprint of this promotion?  The 203,707 “free” stickers will be made out of 29,000 square feet of some kind of paper/plastic material, will be produced on machines (running on coal-generated electricity, most likely at this point in time), and will use some sorts of interesting chemicals for the inks and stickum.  The 203,707 “free” stickers will have, backing paper you have to peel off,  I’m guessing.  That’s 29,000 square feet of waste backing paper that will end up in the landfill.  Each one of these “free” stickers will be mailed–i.e., sent on trucks and planes (mostly not using green technology)–to their recipients.  The recipients will stick them, I’m guessing, on their automobiles (even the best of which burn fossil fuel).  Or on their laptop cases, which use (probably) coal-generated electricity as well.

I’m just asking….

But at least we’ll be able to prove we are green.  We have a sticker.  And it was free!

2:13 pm…204,685…Current rate now looks like 44 stickers per minute…..

"Free" green sticker. Note (and I swear I am not making this up): the filename for this graphic is "pu_sticker." Perhaps they meant "stinker"...?

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