Pat’s Polemics

Years ago, Richard Pryor made a bitter joke: when you go to court for justice, that’s what you find: just us [referring to Black people]. (Continue Reading)

Some time ago I blogged on the number crunchers who by dint of their success in managing the logistics of WW II found themselves in (Continue Reading)

The divided society, the alienated man, the disappointed citizen, the deracinated individual, the partisan, the ideologue, the isolate. Sociologists spotted this person long ago. Without (Continue Reading)

Citing poverty as the source of many of our educational problems is a trope of the left….. and of anyone with two brain cells to (Continue Reading)

I took all summer and and fall, after I started in the spring, to finish Francis Fukuyama’s big book, The Origins of Political Order. I (Continue Reading)

Reading an article on the training of military officers, I noted that “we now know” that the emotional and cognitive spheres are linked and even (Continue Reading)

I’m still reading The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama; half-way through.   What appeals to me is the way he grounds events and (Continue Reading)

Today we refinanced and we were talking to a 25 year old kid. He was the loan officer. He was struggling with his computer and (Continue Reading)

Here’s a simple notion very basic to any thinking but very complex in its ramifications and one easily overlooked and misunderstood:   scale.   What (Continue Reading)

This morning on npr I heard a piece which goes to the heart of my Basics category on this blog. It dealt with a society (Continue Reading)

Remember the movies that would show a young boy planting a tree with his grandfather? (insert your own relationship, sex, age, etc.) Then the scene (Continue Reading)

An article on npr concerning brain (or mind) functioning mentions not only the usual mental challenges like talking people you disagree with and pushing yourself (Continue Reading)

There do seem to be some real misunderstandings about how our country has come through 400 years from the settlement of English-speaking people on the (Continue Reading)

When I worked as a therapist in a Child & Family area of a large mental health center, a client and I put together a (Continue Reading)

Three of us spent four hours yesterday trying to adjust a basketball hoop to 10 feet. It wouldn’t go past 9. No problem before b/c (Continue Reading)

This new category, as of June, 2009, is a work-in-progress. That is, my other blog entries I try to edit so they may be carved (Continue Reading)

I will have to integrate this entry into other entries on the same topic, but it does have a different focus than the others. Most (Continue Reading)

I have always….. always, always, always, wondered wherever anyone gets the idea that learning is done for rewards. I survived the ASU anthropology dept (as (Continue Reading)

Just to keep in mind: Just now my son-in-law needed a copy of Harry Wong. We have an independent bookstore, a holdover from the Hippie (Continue Reading)

The following paragraphs were excerpted from earlier entries I had made onto the blog: In our society, those lines drawn in the 1600s are still (Continue Reading)

Most of our students do not come into contact with the justice system, although once I worked in a small charter school so many of (Continue Reading)

A This I Believe essay by Matt Harding on npr captures the sense of community that our primitive brains share. At the same time, as (Continue Reading)

Tonight we were having a deep family discussion; lots of tears and painful memories. We were talking about abuse and its sequelae and my daughter (Continue Reading)