It seems that someone associated with Bubba Fest posted a clip of "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead" in connection to the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and then was astonished at the backlash to their "joke ( Read more... )

Recently I read an article that I simply couldn't get out of my mind. It was the story of a promising young diplomat who was driven from her career by relentless harassment by Customs and Border Protection agents. Her identity documents were treated as suspect, she was regularly required to prove that her car was indeed her own, and she was ( Read more... )

In another blog, someone mentioned the problems of group projects. In particular, the problem of the person (or persons) who want to ride on the efforts of the person who actually wants good grades and is willing to make the necessary efforts, even if it means doing the whole thing ( Read more... )

Most of us like to think of ourselves as nice people. Certainly, most of us really don't want to be seen as ogres or tyrants, bullying our ways through life.

However, like so many things, an excess of niceness can actually do us harm, both to our own mental health and to our relationships with others. When we always put others first without ( Read more... )

I found an interesting article on why why torture doesn't work as a tool for gaining information. It's been long known that brutality can actually harden the will to resist -- I'm most familiar with the stories of the early Christian martyrs, but there are stories all over the world of people refusing to yield to torture -- but what is really ( Read more... )

The images of flooding in Houston are dramatic, horrifying. More than once I've recognized half-drowned buildings as ones we passed when we went there for Anime Matsuri either this year or last year.

A lot of questions are being asked about the disaster, particularly variations on why didn't they evacuate?. But are they necessarily the right ( Read more... )

Last weekend I was at a convention, and another vendor was at the same hotel where we were staying. I was talking about this month's lack of conventions, and how getting older made it more difficult to fall back on the old stopgap of casual labor to make up the income, for the simple reason that most of it is highly physical. I said that this isn't ( Read more... )

When I was young, we were warned about the danger of the creepy-looking stranger who roams around the neighborhood, maybe asking for directions or wanting help finding a lost puppy. The underlying message was pretty clear -- dangerous people look out of place. They act like they don't belong. They're creepy ( Read more... )

Over at her Livejournal, Elizabeth Moon has some excellent points on the problems of communication going awryI've had my own bitter experiences with miscommunication, of words misheard or misconstrued, both in speech and writing. It's especially annoying when I'm left feeling that the listener has grabbed about half the words I said and put them ( Read more... )

I'm in the middle of back to back conventions, I've caught a cold, and tomorrow I have to change our merchandise loadout in weather I'd expect in mid-January, but not mid-November. Posting may be light for a while, for the simple reason that I have way too much to do and far too little energy ( Read more... )