StickWithANose

“Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that—well, that’s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you’re told,” Samuel Bowles

In my morning class, I finished off a series of lectures on the foundation of sociology that focused on the key concepts of Marx, Weber and Durkheim: alienation, the iron cage and anomie respectively. After class, a student approached me with a deceptively simple question for which I had no answer. She explained to me [...]

I was not alone in condemning Google in 2006 for agreeing to censor search results in order to gain access to that long-time fetish of corporate America: the Chinese market. For a supposedly new kind of corporation bandying about the slogan “don’t be evil“, the agreement to censor search results cut to the core of [...]

First up, Pirate Hominids!
Low Down on the Jobs Report
Neanderthal Body Paint?
Labor Push-back on Health Care Reform
Six Questions on Yemen
Anthropology at War
China is not a super-power
Watching Timmy Cry…

From Angry Bear
Starting with the $200-500K category, the share of earnings from labor begins a marked decline. By the time you hit mid-six figures, average earnings from income, dividends, and capital gains become high enough to provide middle-class or better incomes without (necessarily) working. Tax returns in the upper-six-figure bucket, on average, show more income [...]

First time tragedy; second time farce. From the BBC’s the Power of Nightmares:

A sociology professor of mine once said: ‘Societies are either progressing or are in decline. There is no stasis.’ His point was that the time-consciousness of Western modernity is defined by dynamic transformation in which each moment in time is, in effect, a present-history. Being all reflective on this New Years day, this educative moment [...]

It would appear as though Obama’s channeling of Uncle Milty’s now infamous Shock Doctrine is coming to fruition. State budgets may be collapsing nation-wide, but Tennessee’s budget forecasts are simply terrible. With Arne Duncan dangling billions in front of state legislatures, the Obama administration is wrestling concessions from states like Tennessee over charter schools and [...]

Even through the fog of a X-mas cold, Stick finds in his bountiful heart a need to share with you all a happy holidays! See you next week…