The joy of raising children

I just ran across this video, and I was outraged. It’s totally fake. It is so wrong.

She has hidden herself in the pantry to stuff herself with snack foods. I could empathize with her plight, but I was just saying to myself, “Where’s the vodka? The whisky? The tequila? This is a bullshit response.”

But maybe that’s what the video for a Truth Bomb Dad would look like. No tiaras. We replace them with alcohol.

Shameless plug

If you need a laugh next week, and you live near Bellingham, there’s an opportunity:

By the time Wed., March 7 rolls around, you’ll have gone a few days without mirthful medicine, so make plans to attend the inaugural “Menace on the Mic” Standup Comedy Night night starting at 9pm at Menace Brewing, 2529 Meridian St. The 21-and-older event will feature a few of the aforementioned comedians and others, including Charlie Myers, Matt Benoit, Timmy Riney, James Miller, and Ryan Cuddihy. If you need a beer or three to help with your healing, drink up. More info: http://www.menace-industries.com

That fellow with his name correctly spelled in there is my nephew, who has apparently decided that a career in academia, for instance, is too full of frustration, heartbreak, and struggle, and is taking the easy path of trying to make it in standup comedy. At least it’s a job with beer.

Why are you praising Dick’s Sporting Goods?

Dick’s announced that they will no longer sell AR-15s, and all I’m seeing is cheers and huzzahs for the company.

My first thought was, “Why was a sporting goods company selling assault rifles in the first place?” There’s something just plain wrong with that.

But now I learn that they’ve pulled this stunt before. In the wake of the Sandy Hook murders, they announced then that they would stop selling these specific murder-tools (cheers, huzzahs), and then a year later they quietly resumed peddling instruments of death (silence, cluelessness). This is a stunt. A ploy. An advertising gimmick. And oh, but they are receiving lots of free advertising right now.

Fuck ’em.

Silent Bob is modest about everything except what goes on in his head

Kevin Smith had a major heart attack, and he talked about it from the hospital.

It’s all so familiar — I went through exactly the same procedures, although in my case it was more preventive than to deal with an immediate crisis. A lot of his responses sound familiar to how I felt at the time, except for a couple of things. The doctors were telling him he was dying, but his major immediate concern was keeping his underwear on, out of modesty. Nope, not me. I did not care. Strip me naked, I don’t mind, just fix me up. He was, obviously, responding with the notorious Kevin Smith motor mouth — he’s telling stories non-stop. Not me. I just go quiet under stress. That’s why he’s the raconteur, and I’m not. In the aftermath, he was quite happy that people who feared for his life were saying all these nice things about him. When I was in the hospital, mostly what I got was gloating hate mail from Christians and atheists; just recently I told my wife that when I die, she ought to just avoid the internet for a few weeks because it will be nothing but hatefulness aimed at my corpse, and as collateral damage, my family.

Otherwise, one thing that did bother me was he mentioned the response to Chris Pratt saying he was going to pray for him. OK, atheist world, there is a huge difference between people with power mumbling “thoughts and prayers” as a substitute for taking action to correct a problem, and a person who has no responsibility for action saying, as a gesture of good will, that they will pray for you. I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t believe for a moment that it would actually help, but it’s just a believer trying to be nice.

I know from experience that it actually is a heck of a lot nicer than the believers who cackle about how you’re going to burn in hell, or the unbelievers gleefully telling you they don’t know whether they want you to experience brain damage or die in pain.

With all due respect, why don’t we get rid of business schools?

The Chronicle has a challenging proposition: Business Schools Have No Business in the University. The author makes a good case, and I agree with him. Business schools are incoherent, have no consistent curriculum, and I suspect that even most of their graduates would agree that the skills to succeed in business are ones you learn in real world practice. The sole reasons they exist are to give rich people a certificate of intellectual accomplishment — a kind of Wizard of Oz game — and to give them a place to send their kids that aren’t too challenging and give them the pretense that they’re fit to step into Mom or Dad’s shoes. There’s no better example of this function than our president.

Unable to truly create a profession of business, business schools more often function as finishing schools for the new junior executive. The finishing-school role that business schools have always played can be summarized this way: Donald J. Trump went to Wharton.

Depending on your point of view you are either nodding your head in affirmation or crying out “cheap shot!” So let me hasten to say that it is entirely unfair to blame Wharton for Trump’s pathological narcissism or his gargantuan vulgarity. After all, Newt Gingrich received a Ph.D. in history, and I don’t want the historical profession to be blamed for him.

And yet Trump exemplifies exactly the kind of man for whom business school was invented. Deeply and transparently insecure, Trump has reminded his supporters over and over that he went to Wharton and that that means he’s really, bigly smart. Trump sees his Wharton education as giving him social status and intellectual credibility. At the turn of the 20th century, one function of the new business schools was to give the sons of the new industrial titans a respectable patina, to launder the wealth they had received from their fathers by scrubbing it with a college degree. And so it is for Trump.

But there are reasons to keep them around.

  • Money. Money money money money money. Money money.

    The business school at the University of Chicago became the Booth Chicago School of Business after David Booth dropped a whopping $300 million to have his name emblazoned on the building, and that was in 2008, while the rest of the country was reeling.

  • To be fair, I think vocational programs should get more respect, and business school really is a kind of vocational certification program. I think the students would be of greater use to society if they learned welding, but we have to give them choices. It can’t hurt if a young man or woman graduates with some evidence that they’ve learned some of the skills needed to be a middle manager.

  • Capitalism must have its own metrics to institutionalize their practices, and maybe business schools, if they had the competence to do so, could act as bottleneck to regulate the proliferation of pointless management personnel. It would also be so sweet if they actually forced their graduates to learn some ethics. But now I’m wandering off into fantasy land.

Most of those reasons are hypothetical, though. As the article concludes, business schools are failures.

It is hard to shake the conclusion that business schools have largely failed — even on their own terms, much less on other, broader social ones. For all their bold talk about training tomorrow’s business leaders, as institutions they have largely been followers. “In reviewing the course of American business education over the past fifty years,” wrote one observer, “one is struck by its almost fad-like quality.” That was in 1957. Despite their repeated emphasis on innovation and “outside the box thinking” business schools exhibit a remarkable conformity and sameness. Don’t take my word for it. That Porter and McKibbin study from 1988 found “a distressing tendency for schools to avoid the risk of being different … A ‘cookie cutter mentality’ does not seem to be too strong a term to describe the situation we encountered in a number of schools.” Finally, while honest people can disagree over whether American business is better off for having business schools, they have provided scant evidence that they have done much to transform business into something more noble than mere money-making. Indeed, by the late 20th century, they stopped pretending they could.

Well, failures except for the money part. Let’s get more rich business people to dump big wads of cash on universities. It’s just too bad they too often earmark the money for useless business schools.

I could take up surfing!

I believe that the University of Minnesota, Morris is an ideal learning environment: small classes, good teachers, a real commitment to education. But I also have to be honest and tell you that it has one flaw — location. We really are on the edge of nowhere. I suppose I could spin it and say it has a kind of monastic atmosphere, free of distractions, but I often pine for a place that is a little closer to a real airport, maybe has some public transportation that can take me to someplace other than a grocery store, and has some of the amenities of a larger city.

Now I discover there is a solution. Invent a place! Alireza Heidari is an amazingly prolific ‘scientist’ who has published hundreds of papers and is on the editorial board of countless journals, and he does it all from his institution, California South University.

What? You’ve never heard of it? It’s just down the road from UC Irvine; it takes up 50 city blocks, has 39,000 students, and is one of the top 50 universities in the United States! I don’t know how you missed it.

Well, actually, Heidari has carried out the most extreme job of résumé padding ever. He invented a whole fictitious university, and built an entire web site to document its existence. Although, really, he simply stole the University of Alberta’s website, and through the power of search and replace, changed “Canada” to the US, and “Edmonton” to southern California. It’s a good trick. I’m sure Edmontonians are confused and uncertain whether to celebrate the better climate or be horrified to find themselves under President Trump.

I’m going to suggest to the administration that we edit our web page to say we’re the University of Hawaii, Morris, and relocate the campus to Kauai. I’m tired of being so cold all the time, and we could also fix up our ocean beach deficit at the same time.

Oughta be better than Sharknado

Amazon is going to make a movie of Iain Banks’ Consider Phlebas. That’s going to be tough. Not only would I consider much of it impossible to film, but The Culture isn’t exactly capitalism-friendly, and it will be interesting to see how a mega-corp can develop a movie that is counter to its own ethos without mangling it.

Also, it’s kind of a downer of a story, don’t you know? There isn’t going to be a sequel or a series with the cocky, devil-may-care hero, and I don’t think they’ll sell many t-shirts or video games of Bora Horza Gobuchul.

At least they’re not trying to make Use of Weapons. I don’t think that one would be popular with the happy-clappy space hero crowd.