POSTED BY MARTIN KICH One of the basic logical fallacies that composition teachers warn their students to avoid is argument by analogy. No one has ever accused California Governor Jerry Brown of being uneducated or unintelligent. But, all too often, Progressives have latched onto their own harebrained ideas about “reforming” education. Of course, political brainstorms…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The results of California’s recent Senate primary have demonstrated that there are 62,830 Californians who are Nazis or very willing to vote for Nazis. In the primary, incumbent Diane Feinstein received 2,031,967 votes, or 44.2% of the 4,600,471 votes, and her challenger in the November general election, Kevin DeLeon, another Democrat,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following item is from Labour Start, which reports on international labor issues: Maxim Balashov, a professor of mathematics, has been working at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) for nineteen years. He also serves as chair of the trade union at his university, known as UNISOL. The bosses…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH When David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory was published in the late spring, it received considerable media attention. Writing for Salon, Erin Keane provided a fairly succinct summary of Graeber’s definition of such employment: The first half of the book is devoted to building a clear understanding of what is…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I am sharing this update from Samantha Parsons, who along with her colleague Ralph Wilson and our own John Wilson, made a presentation on their efforts at the annual meeting in June. I know you’ve been following the court case between students at George Mason University and the school’s fundraising body,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I subscribe to the New Yorker and am very familiar with Andy Borowitz’s satiric pieces. But I did not think to put several of them together as they have been in the following item distributed several months ago by the Progressive Review in its weekly Undernews newsletter: Trump Puts Andy Borowitz…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Discover, Nathaniel Scharping seems to do a very creditable job explaining “What Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper Says (And Doesn’t Say).” I say “seems to” not because I have any reason whatsoever to question what he writes but because I know relatively little about even basic physics and next to…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This short item was published by Gongwer ahead of Ohio’s primary elections in May, and even in a year with more than the usual share of weird election-related stories, this one stands out: Candidate Disavowed: In an unusual move, the Ohio Democratic Party is telling voters not to cast a ballot for…
