Author: Marc Jampole

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Watson computer win over “Jeopardy!” champion is another victory for humankind.

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Ken Jennings, the “Jeopardy!” champion who lost a globally-watched three-day match of the TV game to the Watson computer, got it completely wrong when, upon acknowledging his defeat, he said, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” All those headlines that said that the computer defeated a human are dead wrong, too.  Neither Watson […]

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Journey into designer mac & cheese and vending machine food, and get an upset stomach just reading the menu.

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I’m going to do in my blog life exactly what I do in real life: ignore (St.) Valentine’s Day, a minor Christian holiday with pagan roots that has developed into an annual ritual in which human beings buy unneeded luxuries to publicly profess a formal and commercialized version of love.  No holiday represents the commercialization […]

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Chris Lee must have had a subconscious wish to out himself.

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The Chris Lee affair exemplifies the weird results obtained from the mixture of politics and private life.  Lee is the married-with-lovely-children Congressman who just resigned from office because a photo he had emailed to a woman he had met through a Craigslist ad showed him naked from the waist up.  He was outed when a […]

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On his 100th B-day, we recall that Reagan broke the law and took money from the poor and gave it to the rich

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The weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, and a lot of people used the occasion to wrap themselves in the flag called Ronald Reagan.  Our current President Barack Obama reminded the country how much he admired Reagan.  Sarah Palin did her best prophet-of-doom  imitation with her warning that we as […]

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Maybe Texas should spend less money on high school football and more on educating its children.

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Texas high school football has been in the news a lot lately.  First came the report last weekend that a high school in Allen, Texas is building a $60 million stadium for its football team.  Then came the story about how amazed the Green Bay Packers are at the luxuriousness of the indoor football practice […]

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Pundits use extreme and extremely unrealistic Tiger Mom as a straw man to support American anti-intellectualism.

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My initial reaction to the Tiger Mom concept of parenting that Amy Chua presented in early January in her Wall Street Journal article titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” was to dismiss it as the ranting of a neurotic mother who presents her own almost sadistically extreme parenting tactics as representative of traditional Chinese attitudes […]

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In confronting change in Northern Africa, the U.S. has tied its own hands because of the Iraq War.

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Our news media always seems to mimic the overly optimistic view of our government, at least at the beginning of the events. For that reason, one thing that an analysis of past media coverage of wars and insurrections can teach us is that at this point we don’t really know exactly what is happening in […]

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The Kids are All Right is a step forward, but maybe also a step backwards for gays.

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I finally saw The Kids are All Right the other night, thanks to Netflix, and I thought it was a good, but not great movie: a nice evening’s entertainment for adults with a message to convey, but not necessarily a work of art. As usual, Annette Benning was wonderful—I have long thought her America’s best […]

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Do the attitudes on TV drama reflect or create public opinion? Let’s compare a scene in Kojak and Law and Order.

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While riding my exercise bicycle the other day, channel surfing brought me to Kojak, a police series starring Telly Savalas popular in the early 70s.  A very short scene employed a standard convention of police dramas, the lineup, and the dramatic moment focused on the reaction of a witness to the lineup process.  Coincidentally, one […]

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In the propaganda of National School Choice Week, remember that the real meaning of “school choice” is lower teacher salaries.

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How can a word convey a wonderfully positive sense in one context but mean something immoral and hateful in another?  If you’re an archetypal right-winger, it can happen if the word is “choice,” which for some reason means a good thing to people on the right when it comes to education, but not when it […]

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