Disneyland Out in Paperback

My novel, Disneyland Closes at 35, is out in paperback as well as the Kindle edition from Amazon.com I am working on the sequel and hope to have it completed by Christmas of this year.

I promised in an earlier blog to keep a record of my initial experience with teaching a college philosophy online. In order to teach the course I had to learn to use a rather complex softwared program, well complex for a non-techie like myself, and I also had to learn to teach over the web with no students in front of me and no face to face interaction.

Thus far I can say that I believe the courses are valuable to perhaps sixty percent of those that enroll. The student needs to be computer savvy, self-disciplined, well organized and dedicated. I have lost about forty percent of each class because, I think, they were none of the above. Those who are seem to be grasping the material and doing as well or better than they would in a lecture class. The online course requires that the student read the material. There are no ways to avoid doing the reading. In lecture classes my students often never read the text but rely solely on the notes they take during lectures and comprehensive reviews prior to tests.

More on online learning later.

I am wondering what others think about the first 100 days of Barack Obama? I taught a class tonight in political philosophy. I was lecturing about the difference between the socialist and libertarian thought as relates to the role of government. I cannot imagine that anyone could watch our President in action and not note the Socialist leanings. Is that all bad. I have my opinion but I could be wrong. Is he leaning in the direction of Socialism? Yes. I am not wrong about that.

What say you?

Comments

[OneForTheCountry]

President Obama is socialist! I don't care how you try to confuse the issue, he is a socialist and he's taking our country in a dangerous direction. He actually thinks that he can talk to Iran and get them to quit making nukes! The next thing you know he'll be wanting to give them a few billion dollars like he's doing with AIG and the big banks. Nobody wants to see the truth no matter how plain it is.

[L. Fleming]

I keep hearing tv people on Fox News say that Obama is moving us toward socialism. I never hear anyone on any of the other news networks saying anything like that, and I can't myself imagine what the talking heads at Fox are talking about. It all sounds like so much political propaganda to me. People in this country are afraid of the word "socialism", so Obama's opponents like to say the word as often as they can.

Massachusetts has universal health care, but I don't think too many people in Massachusetts think they are living in a socialist state. All of the bailout money did give the US government some stake in private enterprise, but so did the bailout money we paid out in the early '80s to Chrysler and others, and all of those bailout recipients remained patriotically capitalistic--and miserably greedy and mismanaged, living to do their part in the new millennium to screw things up again.

With respect to the bailout money paid directly to businesses, please bear in mind that 99.9% of American businesses have received not a single dime of money from the government. There is no bailout for them, nor is their any bailout for private citizens.

There is no socialism here, just
an effort to shore up a failing economy by infusing capital into business sectors where the mighty and mightily greedy have robbed, raped and plundered their customers, investors and the taxpayers. In a socialist system the government owns, operates and controls all players in vital industries. Look around. It isn't happening.

It sounds real scary, makes for a lot of drama and intrigue to say it, and the cluckers at Fox News want everybody to believe it and get all worked up, but we just aren't moving into socialism. There is no socialism, libertarianism, communism, anarchism, Rastafarianism nor liberality of mind in this country. Just capitalism and capitalists who are ever pushing the limits of what the citizenry will tolerate.