Four Months of Solar and Still Happy

It's been about 4 months since we installed a 5.59 kwh leased solar system from Solar City on our roof. The whole process was amazing and we've generated over 1600 kwh since then. We expect this system to cut our electric by about 72% a year (which is contractually guaranteed by the company) and perhaps more. No hassles, start to finish, and great customer service for every step.

Some photos from the initial installation.

Austin, TX: The Next "Placeless Place"?

I went to UT from 1990-97 and lived in Austin until 1999. I just visited and drove around town. I am probably a curmudgeon, but here are a couple things which unsettled me. Perhaps they're symbolic to you, perhaps not. They are to me.

(1) There's a Ferrari dealership in downtown, right near the luxury apartment skyscrapers.

(2) There's a Starbucks where Les Amis used to be.

(3) There's a Patagonia on Congress Avenue. [Michael Lind once named trends like this " Brazilization of the economy." Brazilization, Lind defines as "a high-tech feudal anarchy, featuring an archipelago of privileged whites in an ocean of white, black and brown poverty."]

Much, in fact, of the development I saw was of the expensive, upper middle class kind. Serving needs but in an anodyne and corporate way. Austin seems ineluctably moving from "weird" to "placeless."

The photo below is from....Cleveland. But it could just as easily have been Austin, in many places.

God, A.B.D.

God: A.B.D.

Sitcom. Premise: God's created the world and everything in it. In 6 days. But he cannot complete his dissertation. Tune in each week as God procrastinates, makes excuses, cultivates distracting hobbies, etc. all to avoid writing his dissertation.

Grading is like profiling: one must suppress their own ideas and instincts enough to inhabit someone else's (frequently twisted and errant) perspective, all the while not losing themselves in the process. I drape myself with incomplete sentences, half-baked vagaries, and listless quotations so I can discover--aha!--this person has neither understood nor, alas, tried to understand. And if I do this earnestly, it is called "engagement" by the people we've paid to stop teaching so they can exhort teachers to "teach better."

SAAP at Advancing Public Philosophy Conference in Washington DC

D. Hildebrand (SAAP Communications Director),  J. Kegley (SAAP President), K. Stikkers (SAAP President-elect)

SAAP was well-represented at a recent conference on “Advancing Publicly Engaged Philosophy” held in Washington, D.C. October 6-8, 2011. This conference, the first for the Public Philosophy Network, was a mix of formal and informal sessions on various issues in practical philosophy, including concrete projects and political problems as well as discussions of larger philosophical questions about how to engage in philosophical activity outside the academy. The conference was co-chaired by two people very active in American philosophy: Noelle McAfee, of Emory University and Andrew Light, a SAAP member from George Mason University and the Center for American Progress.

A SAAP sponsored panel was presented on “Pragmatism as a Publicly Engaged Philosophy.”  For this panel, President Elect Ken Stikkers (Southern Illinois University” talked about “John Dewey and the Public Responsibility of Philosophers,” focusing on Dewey’s  discussion of establishing a “public” and defining the meaning of “publics.”  David Hidebrand (University of Colorado, Denver) talked about “Journalism’s Destructive Addiction to Fake Objectivity” stressing a useful notion of “pragmatic objectivity as a better criteria for journalistic endeavors.  President Jackie Kegley (California State University, Bakersfield), discussed “Royce as a Public Philosopher,” focusing on his recommendations for building community through interpretation and she used the work of the Kegley Institute of Ethics as a concrete exemplification of this philosophy.

In addition, Paul Thompson from Michigan State University was on the Conference Committee and also chaired a workshop on “Philosophers Working in Collaborative Research Teams.”  Richard Hart, Bloomfield College, and John Shook (George Mason University) also chaired workshops- Richard on “Public Philosophy in Other Genres,” and John on “Philosophical Debate with Religion.  Judith Green, Fordham University, chaired a session on “Speech and Knowledge in Public Life.” Eric Weber (University of Mississippi who gave a paper on "Philosophical Influence on Culture," and Jonathan Moreno who led a workshop on Bioethics and Biopolitics.  SAAP members David Woods and Kathleen Wallace were also present at the meeting as discussants in workshop sessions.

The meeting ended with strong encouragement to spread the word about the network and to remain creatively engaged with the project of advancing philosophy into public arenas and problems.  Information for anyone interested can be found at http://Publicphilosophynetwork.com

Jacquelyn Kegley, President, SAAP

Philip Kitcher on John Dewey: Most important philosopher of 20th century

"Reconstruction in Philosophy is the title of a book by John Dewey whom I take to be the most important philosopher of the twentieth century."
[Philip Kitcher, "Philosophy Inside Out," Metaphilosophy, Vol. 42, No. 3, April 2011]

Regarding Jonathan Chait's What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama

Regarding Jonathan Chait's What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama
By JONATHAN CHAIT, NYT, Published: September 2, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/magazine/what-the-left-doesnt-understand-about-obama.html

The author's disdain for the left is clear when he writes: "The most common hallmark of the left’s magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president’s." That's downright patronizing. I think many on the left are smart enough to understand politics as the art of the possible (duh), but we also understand that negotiating involves the creation of a "reality bubble," if you will. I.e., if you don't push for something, you don't get it. Why push for something you can't get? Two reasons: (a) you stand a better chance of pushing the ball further down the field, while (b) you define what you stand for to everyone. (Read Marshall Ganz's Feb. 2, 2011 account in The Nation of how the Obama administration intentionally abandoned the youth vote which helped elect them. Then, the disastrous 2010 election happens. Hmm.)

For me, Obama's primary failure as President has been to define what it means to be a Democrat, i.e., to advance a public and persuasive rhetorical account of what the Democratic Party stands for. By missing the opportunity to define what Democrats stand for, Obama has failed as the party's leader. The long-term damage includes (a) public cynicism, an increased sense among the public that "all politicians are alike (in the pocket of the powerful)" and (b) further destruction of the Democrat's identity, i.e., the public (and liberal's) perception that Democrat's don't really stand for anything truly different. They're a too-faint variation of the GOP: corporation-friendly, Wall Street-beholden, opponent of the middle and working classes. As far as I can tell, Obama has done nothing to show that what the Democrats stand for, at least, is a principled opposition to a return to the Gilded Age.