lexicography.com

If you buy into it, Christmas is the ultimate good news. The good news is that eternal life is available to us all. Certainly grounds for major celebration. The lights, the decorations, the parties; it is all “too little” if “too anything”. The earliest literature I studied in college, the tale of Monkey, concerned itself with nothing other than the quest for immortality. The biggest question of all.

If, like me, you do not buy into it, are not a believer, the whole celebration, the lights and decorations, are pretty sad when you think about it. A celebration of a lie or a celebration of a nullity. No eternal life, no ultimate justice applied to this world, no anything except of a repeat of last year.

If you are a nonbeliever, not one iota of it makes sense. I decorate a tree and wrap presents, for what? What is my family celebrating? Why do my children get gifts? Why do we put up lights?

When I was young and my children were first born I thought it was unfortunate that I could not take them to church for a sort of “Christianity light”. They would get the good will towards all men, the imperative to be moral good people, the good society. It seemed a disadvantage to me that things got heavy so quickly, with metaphysics and eternal life and sin and doctrine - sort of total brainwashing just to get a few good things in life.

Now I am older, Christmas without the ultimate “good news” is nothing. The lights are empty ritual, not able to withstand the honest question of a clear thinking open hearted child. We do it for no reason, for nothing, is the answer.

Does anyone in the entire United States of America consider sending their children to DUKE UNIVERSITY, where your children will be totaly under the control of the local DA? I mean your children? The local DA ?

I’d send my children to Rutgers before I would turn them over to the local government of some established political cesspool like that.

people who cannot get into nearly as good schools. But the application readers will know that every applicant to Duke is a loser who can not get into the high demand schools.

Just applying to DUKE should make you ashamed

The one thing the entire blogosphere should agree upon is - never DUKE.

No DUKE for our children
No DUKE for us
NO DUKE ever.

Look, they can believe what they want - Duke will soon be gone. Who would send their child to Duke so some political could dance on their jail cell - when we all know a jail cell means repeated homosexual rape. Anyplace is better than Duke for your child - anyplace, really anyplace.

Here’s me at my daughter’s parent teacher conference:

Duke?
I’d rather have her at the local community college. My daughter’s life is not a plaything for politicans.
Those Duke players, what happened to them is bigger than a pre cancerous mass. Their lives are finished, finished. Not their fault and not in their control - it was a game in bigger fields with more power and money than I deal with. I would just like to find a college and a town where locking up a student is not the way to reelection and power. Never Duke. Duke sacrificed everything for something it wanted more than students - it has that.

I personally would never advise anyone in my extended family to even apply to DUKE I think DUKE is finished not a serious university at all not even able to avoid bankrupcy. Well deserved.

The Duke “no rape” case is instructive. Would you like your children thrown in jail to be raped by hardened criminals so that some politician who has a good life at the public tit gets his boost up to more power and greater glory?

They may arrest and handcuff parents who drive their children around without child seats, they should have mandatory prison sentences without the possibility of parole for parents who send their children to DUKE.

Never Duke, allow your children to not serve time for a crime they never committed.

It appears now the administration of Duke University is speaking up against the town in this neo-classic town/gown racial farce.

Look, it does not require much thought to see how this should have worked out.

You send your child to a university in a distant place. The place has its own politics, power structure, judiciary, business interests, all independent and insulated from you. You, as a parent, have near zero influence in the place. In your home town you may know the mayor, have contributed to the prosecutor’s election fund, know socially at least one local policeman or newspaper reporter.

In University ville, you are nothing and your child is represented by and protected by the pseudo parents, the academy. Not an insignificant power on your side. In college towns like New Haven and Boston, the local University is perhaps more powerful than the local government. Certainly has more money.

Now suppose the University decides that its job is not to protect its students (who are but visitors to the local community) but to weigh the race and economic class of anyone who has a dispute with a student.

An attractive person (to them) with a dispute with rich, white males garnered the support of the University Faculty on the side of the town, the black, the poorer. Good for them. That is what they believe is important in determining if a harsh physical crime has occurred. Every parent ever considering sending their tender naive children to DUKE UNIVERSITY need only note what their child will expect. A University that hates its students as much as our Mainstream media hates the culture that makes their lives possible.

You have to understand that in disputes between town and gown or white and black, initially no one knows the merits of the various claims. The town has its institutional protections, the local police, the local prosecutor the local judge. The student has only the University, if it decides to advocate for the student. I don’t claim that the student in a town/gown dispute is always in the right; but should not someone stand up for the student? Should the University take the side against the student so that no one on the face of the planet with any influence in the dispute supports the outsider?

Any fool that sends their child to Duke deserves the non-support and active attack they are likely to receive from the Duke Administration and faculty - not in some side area like housing or part time jobs; but in the area of total destruction of your child’s life, if it meets the political agenda of the academics at the moment.

More and more web commentators will write about Duke as being a dangersous place to send your children. Soon Duke will be a second rate college.

Language as a Tool for Persuasion

The more that I think about it, the more I believe that language is primarily a tool for persuasion. I do not mean the debating club or the rhetoric class; I mean all, everyday use. Language may imperfectly describe the state of some real referent, but it is extremely difficult to make it do so. That is why the protocols of a lab report or scientific paper are so over-structured. It is an attempt to make a tool, language, serve a purpose, describe reality, alien to the nature of the tool.

Language is like politics, pushing people around. [ that from the amorphism that physics is the science of pushing matter around and politics is the science of pushing people around.]

Geek with a 45 turned me on to this. He said:

It seems to me that when a bad act is discussed in academia, or the media, the offenders are described as part of whatever grouping includes both the offenders and white Christian American men. For example, Christian snake handlers or abortion clinic bombers are identified as Christian, while Muslim terrorists or Aztec human sacrificers are religious. European Americans endangered the buffalo, but when it comes to the extinction of most large North American Pleistocene mammals, (mammoths, saber-toothed cats, the native North American camels and equines, etc.) it’s humans not Native Americans who might have played a part. Abuses by a patriarchy are by men, abuses by a matriarchy are human nature. Humans, not Australian aborigines, may have burned the Australian forests to create a desert continent. It doesn’t work the same way if it’s a good thing; Aborigine art is Aborigine not Human. . . .