PDANet is not as good as I thought. It is partially because of the characteristic of this Ad-hoc technology of connection. Other than that it is connecting quiet good for a while then stop connecting after a certain period. I wonder if there is another replacement technology of this.
Edward Murrow is the one that brings down the McCarthy. This is because Murrow is feeling threatened by McCarthy too. Morality is also the basis for the anti McCarthyism too. The red threat is simply a trumped up pretext to grab more power.
Susan Jacoby is on the move again at Ohio University at Columbus Ohio. She is the firebrand critic of today social spin on all aspects of the society. The education system, the business movement, the political spin, the religion spin of Darwinism, the electronic-computer industry effort to hypnotize the young generation with games at the expense of all else.
The only problem is that the topics she touched on are all over the maps. This is confusing especially when the issues are conflicting with each other and she offers no solution as what to think of it. Critical thinking skill is a personal virtue. This is simply the question of why it is so of every issue. Accepting nothing for granted is the basic principle that governs the so-called critical thinking.
This is the kind of thinking one often has very time reading something new in every field of the academic.
It is a natural reaction of the mind when seeing something new or paradoxical. This is very different from the experts’ testimony of author of political writings. They offer a very laser shape focus on a certain issue and knock it down with as much evidence s and arguments as possible.
The only thing I find refreshing is the attack of Ann Ryan philosophy on Objectivism. She claims this is just a bunch of hog wash by another atheist even though she is also an atheist. She states that there dumb atheist as well as dumb conservative. She however, praises Barry Goldwater’s book “Conscience of conservative”. Flat tax is not as good as progressive tax to flatten out the level playing field in society. She asserts that no matter how high a tax rates the fat-cats subject to, there are still plenty of after tax left over for them comparing to the working poor.
The fact that people can have two conflicting concept and also accepting them at the same time is a phenomenon of brain that she has to accept it. Many people know that the statistic of divorce is 50% in US and people still rush into marriage anyway. The same goes with Darwinism and believe in God at the same time. The typical one is the NIH genome project director.
Joseph Lowndes has a new book entitled “From the New Deal to the New Right” is an interest book that traces the current development of the Conservative movement. This is nothing new except a few names that are not familiar to me of the New Deal period. The name Bill Buckley is the familiar name so does Ronald Reagan. However, Barry Goldwater is never mentioned during this short interview on the book show.
Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and the Nikki Giovanni also a black female scholar and poet were on Bill Moyer Journal show. Last night is for Lightfoot. She is a writer with many new ideas. The one that sounds most revolutionary is that learning is what takes place within the 4 walls of a class room in a university, and education is a long term life long process that takes place in the real world every day. She says that one thing she had to unlearn is to do thing as quick as possible and most efficient in manner.
She feels now that learning is a slow process that comes naturally in life. The rushing through the learning process is very harmful to the thought of many people. This is a kind of industrialization of learning. After retirement there is no need for this kind of organized learning any more.
“The third chapter” is the title of the book about learning after retirement and in real life outside an institute or organized learning.
The idea of death is never crossing her mind. Even though she thinks that life is so short. She would like to say in the current depression era, one actually has to be more innovative in working with fewer resources and generate better outcome or same outcome as before. This sounds contradiction to her previous assertion that simply learning in a slow pace and let nature takes over as one goes forward.
Smell the rose is something she never experienced before. So many examples are given in the book as a new paradigm in the retirement age. Instead of sitting idle and let the time takes over one life. This actually is a very active and beneficial period of one life after retirement. One can still contribute a lot to the society. She used to feel old when doing mentoring to young people. Now she feels totally different on the issue of mentoring young people.
She has actual more than 40 stories in the book as examples of how to live a life that really make a difference. Writing is not only a hobby; it actually makes new connections of old facts. Life event is interesting on itself.
“All of us at this point, to some degree, are on a search for meaningfulness, for purposefulness. And we want to find what this next 25 years, this penultimate chapter of our life, is going to be about. And we’re ready for something new. For a new experience, for a new adventure, and I think all of us, to some degree, experience some burnout. Burnout is not about working too hard. Or working too diligently or being over committed. Burnout is about boredom. And so, I think in some ways this is about sort of moving beyond the boredom to compose, to invent and reinvent the path that we’re on.”
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist who examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationships between culture and learning styles. She has pioneered portraiture, an approach to social science methodology that bridges the realms of aesthetics and empiricism. Lawrence-Lightfoot has written a number of books, including I’VE KNOWN RIVERS, which explores the development of creativity and wisdom using the lens of “human archaeology,” THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PORTRAITURE and THE ESSENTIAL CONVERSATION: WHAT PARENTS AND TEACHERS CAN LEARN FROM EACH OTHER. In 1984, Lawrence-Lightfoot was awarded the prestigious MacArthur prize fellowship, and in 1993, she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie prize for research that makes the “most valuable contribution to scienc
e” and “the benefit of mankind.”
In March 1998, she was the recipient of the Emily Hargroves Fisher endowed chair at Harvard University, which, upon her retirement, will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot endowed chair, making her the first African-American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor. She also has an endowed professorship named in her honor at Swarthmore College. She enjoys long-distance swimming, tennis, dance, the theater and symphony, playing the piano, and traveling abroad.
Giovanni even gives a speech during VT massacre memorial and healing conference in Virginia Tech University. They are living on emotion rather rational. This is a major difference from the writing such as Susan Jacoby. She is more cerebral than cardinal. There are little connections between these two groups of female writers. There is little writing lately from so-called feminist writers lately on CSPAN.
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