Wit & Whim

Do you all remember Pottermore?  If it does not ring a bell, Pottermore was a Harry Potter fan website while I was in college. It was full of HP related games and trivia, and extra Harry Potter stories, all overseen by the author herself. But that is not why people went to Pottermore. No. Pottermore was where you took the most important test of your young life. Not the SAT. Not the ACT. Not Myers-Briggs, or the Wechsler, or whatever ISTEP nonsense was out there. Pottermore offered to put you through the sorting hat.  It asked you a battery of rotating questions, many of which had clear correlation to personality, and some of which were much more subtle. At the end of the quiz, you received your house assignment. I think virtually all of my college classmates went through this process at the time, and you could not escape hearing about it for a little while. As a child, I pretended not to be able to read well after I had acquired the ability--because kids can be real dicks, rig...

First round of new classes began today. German for Teachers is going to be much better for than was Business German. The focus of the class will be on pedagogical methods, just taught in German, and mixed well with a study of the theory of German grammar. I also have a week to write a three page German paper. "Whyfor," you might ask. Why so early? The answer is money. The German Heritage Society gives two grants for $1000 dollars for books and tuition in the next semester; one must first write a three page paper on Germany's place in Europe, so I will be working on that tomorrow. I did not feel so lost upon beginning this class as I did last fall, I understood almost everything said and read, and even if my accent and pronunciation are still abysmal, at least I can parrot back everything in English. Arabic 150 was an even better beginning. I remembered just about everything, including things I'm not sure that I remembered for the final. And not only did some of the mo...

There is no element more important to society than the family. A strong family is necessary to teach children morals, moderation, virtue, and care for their fellow man. The strongest familial education is one that includes religion, which is the ultimate arbiter of perspective; that is, we are each but a small part of the whole, and our greatest good comes from outside the self. The family must be strong for a nation to have longevity, because there must be a structure in place to educate people to be good citizens, to place value on something other than the individual. Many might say, there was not such a strong emphasis on the family in early American writings, and I would respond that it was because the family was extraordinarily strong. They did not speak of the necessity to strengthen the family because it was a non-issue. There is no question in antiquity of the need for strong families. Augustus primary reforms and laws were aimed at restoring and strengthening the family and Go...

There are times when there is no point in even having a conversation. I find nothing more aggravating than people standing in the campus green and debating the existence of God. There will be no winning on either side, and it almost always seems to end uncivilly. This argument bugged me more when I was younger than it does now, because I previously did not realize that it was indeed a futile conversation. In life, one must have postulates. For me, the existence of God is the central postulate, and all other postulates extend from there. Without this central postulate, there can be no objective good, and we might as well just accept Thrasymachus justice. This is key difference twixt a Machiavelli and a Aristotle. Both are brilliant and have flashes of insight, but one believes that there is a higher eternal truth, an ideal which is most nearly approached through love and moderation, and the other is interested only in pragmatics, the how and why of power, and his ultimate virtu is not l...

You cannot understand the present unless you understand the past. The present is only the momentary continuation of the past and is part and parcel with the same. So why is it that when American history is discussed, be it in schools or books, that we seem to skip from the freeing of the slaves right to the beginning of the first World War? One would almost think that slavery ended with the end of the civil war. It did not. It might have ended in name, but it was not over in reality. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were obeyed in the south only because the union troops, underneath the command of the brutal but efficient Sherman, ensured it with force. The black populace voted for the republicans; the party of the abolition. Republican power during this short span was greater than it ever was and will ever be again. And the black populace enjoyed greater civil rights than they would until the mid twentieth century. 1866 saw the formation of the KKK; the, evil, white trash, scrub bas...

Rehashing American history (again) has proved an interesting exercise. I catch a lot of the evil, sneakiness, and treachery, that I missed in previous examinations. I make connections and see political deals and the sacrifice of principle for personal gain or power. So many people--our local afternoon talk-show host included-- live under the delusion that there was a time when politics and politicians were civilized. When there was a dignified exchange of idea, not the personal attacks and nastiness of today. Would Burr-Hamilton count as a civilized exchange? Perhaps the Alien and Sedition Act? It only jailed all the dissenting journalists and newspaper men, what's wrong with that? Even Abraham Lincoln jailed dissenting congressmen when they spoke against the war. Politics have never been civilized, they will never be civilized. The floor of the senate is the natural habitat of the power hungry and the corrupt, liars, thieves, cheats, gamblers, and feckless beggars in fine clothi...