Political Commentary

More On Infantilization

On Monday, I wrote:

Here it comes. Now they’re going on about “the children, won’t someone think of the children“? Someone on Cavuto is demanding to know what they’re doing for “the kids.” Are they being kept warm, are they being fed, are they getting the grief counseling they need?

These “kids” are college students. Almost all of them are of the age of majority. They’re the same age as the “kids” who are off fighting for us overseas, who are seeing things just as horrific, or more so, every day. Yes, one doesn’t go off to an idyllic campus in the western Virginia mountains with the expectation that they’ll have to deal with something like this, but they’re not kids. In every society up until this one, they would have been considered adults, and many of them would have already been married (or not) and raising families. The notion that we should treat them like grade schoolers, for whom we are responsible for feeding, and heating them, is ludicrous. Yes, they’re upset, but I’m pretty sure that they’re still capable of feeding themselves, and finding a blanket, if shooting people somehow caused the heating systems on campus to break down. If I were one of them, I’d be insulted and appalled at this kind of stupid, stupid commentary.

Today, Mark Steyn expands much more eloquently on that theme, and on our culture of passivity:

The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and

General

Report From The Front

Professor Chris Hall, former aerospace engineering blogger, but now department head at VPI and too busy to blog, checks in with a message:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I have heard from many of you throughout the last 24 hours. I’m sure I speak for the entire department, when I say that we thank you for thinking of us and for your many thoughtful notes. It means a lot to us.

As far as I know there were no casualties from the department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering. We won’t really know that until the names are released though. My son is a sophomore in Engineering Science and Mechanics, which is the department that Occupies most of Norris Hall. He is safe, but his undergraduate research advisor was one of the fatalities.

The departments of Engineering Science and Mechanics and Civil and Environmental Engineering lost three good men, and there are several folks in the hospital. The three fallen professors are Liviu Lebrescu, Kevin Granata, and
G.V. Loganathan.

Liviu was an internationally known mechanician and was teaching a junior-level course on Solid Mechanics yesterday morning in Norris Hall. I did not know him well, but occasionally chatted with him about his home country of Romania.

Kevin was a young professor with a young family. His field was biomechanics, and my oldest son chose to major in ESM because he wanted to work in Kevin’s lab. My son, Duncan, a sophomore, has worked in Kevin’s biomechanics
lab for the past year. I thoroughly enjoyed Duncan’s stories of how Professor Granata was teaching him how to program nonlinear controllers for inverted pendula. I know Duncan will miss those lessons.

G.V. was an award-winning professor of environmental engineering, whose expertise was in water resources. Most recently he won the university’s prestigious Wine Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Again, I thank you all for your kind messages. I will let you know more when I know more. Please feel free to forward this email to friends and colleagues.

General

Hey, So We’re Cheap

Eric Scheie has the same attitude toward haircuts as I do:

I’m definitely into minimizing my disutility, especially if it saves time, plus I’m lazy about these things. I end up having my hair cut too short with relatively long intervals between haircuts. Of course, there’s a very noticeable contrast between what I look like right after a haircut and what I look like after six weeks without one, but it’s a gradual process interrupted only by sudden contrasts in my appearance. I realize politicians need to look the same all the time, but I don’t.

It’s not just the cost of the haircut. It’s the irritation of it, in terms of time out of my life, and having to interact with the haircutters.

General

Hey, So We’re Cheap

Eric Scheie has the same attitude toward haircuts as I do:

I’m definitely into minimizing my disutility, especially if it saves time, plus I’m lazy about these things. I end up having my hair cut too short with relatively long intervals between haircuts. Of course, there’s a very noticeable contrast between what I look like right after a haircut and what I look like after six weeks without one, but it’s a gradual process interrupted only by sudden contrasts in my appearance. I realize politicians need to look the same all the time, but I don’t.

It’s not just the cost of the haircut. It’s the irritation of it, in terms of time out of my life, and having to interact with the haircutters.

General

Hey, So We’re Cheap

Eric Scheie has the same attitude toward haircuts as I do:

I’m definitely into minimizing my disutility, especially if it saves time, plus I’m lazy about these things. I end up having my hair cut too short with relatively long intervals between haircuts. Of course, there’s a very noticeable contrast between what I look like right after a haircut and what I look like after six weeks without one, but it’s a gradual process interrupted only by sudden contrasts in my appearance. I realize politicians need to look the same all the time, but I don’t.

It’s not just the cost of the haircut. It’s the irritation of it, in terms of time out of my life, and having to interact with the haircutters.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!