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Save the world from home
— in your spare time!
Disintermediation means cutting out the middle-man, and, by teaching you a new way of thinking about human nature and about your own unique self, Man Alive! puts you in charge of your own philosophical affairs.The book's objectives are precise and concise: To take the claim of justice away from the state, the mantle of intellectual authority away from the academy and the experience of reverence away from the church. It puts all of those things back where they belong — in your mind. There is no middle-man on truth.
More by Greg Swann
FREE Willie
A 100% FREE collection of some of the best of the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories. You will want to read all of my books, but here is a cost-free way to get started.Buy my books at Amazon.com
Shyly’s delight
Work, play and love like a Labrador.
Print | Kindle
Nine empathies
Apprehending love and malice.
Print | Kindle
Father’s Day
More Married. More Husband.
More Father. More Man.
Print | Kindle
Loving Cathleen
A Love To Live Up To
Print | Kindle
Sun City
Loved ones die. Life goes on.
Print | Kindle
Losing Slowly
How Las Vegas lost its mojo – and how to get it back
Print | Kindle
Christmas at the speed of life...
Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie's Christmas stories
Print | Kindle
The Unfallen
A love story
Print | KindleMy other writing isn't collected in one place, but here's a shopping list for finding the best of it:
- Greg Swann writes – fiction and early essays.
- PresenceOfMind.net – a weblog I maintained in the early years of the new millenium.
- BloodhoundBlog – a national real estate weblog I started and contribute to. Much of the content there will be real estate related, but everything I write is focused on the self, and this is best represented in the longer essays.
- SplendorQuest.com – a weblog devoted to celebrating the uniquely human life.
New at SelfAdoration.com- Silent cinema in three quick glances: Emily Brownbangs at the conception of guile.
- Love at first sight, twenty-five years later: Someone to thrive with.
- My only points of disagreement with Ayn Rand, libertarianism and scholarship in general: Everyone has been wrong about everything, going back forever.
- Ayn Rand and me – why my homework is late…
- An infinity of souls.
SplendorQuest done socially
Start the day dancing: Walking the Dog by the Rolling Stones
Roads could be so much better built, but not while the state monopolizes transportation.
“Nobody got rich on their own. Nobody. People worked hard, they buil[t] a business, God bless, but they moved their goods on roads the rest of us helped build, they hired employees the rest of us helped educate, they plugged into a power grid the rest of us helped build.”
That’s newly-elected Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Cherokee Nation) speaking earlier this year. From defense from foreign aggression and Batman-like protection from bloodthirsty criminals, the state is reduced to defending itself with claims that the essential attributes of government consist of formerly-free-market businesses — road-building, education and energy — that the state has usurped and now holds hostage.
For a second thing, obviously none of these activities requires the use of force. To the contrary, the imposition of the state’s monopoly on force has made all of these businesses worse.
But for the first thing, this is a straw-man argument, anyway. Warren — and Barack Obama in subsequent mimicry of her — was not defending the supposed benefits the state provides by taking money from tax-payers and then shoveling some of it back their way with substandard replicas of businesses the government destroyed by monopolizing them. Her goal was to silence objections to the welfare state (more…)
Start the day dancing: Making gestures by The Pack A.D.
Start the day dancing: Rebels by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
A pocket-sized recording studio? With a USB Stratocaster and an iPhone, you’re ready to rock.
Is that a lovely image? It’s a Fender Squier Fat Strat with a whammy bar and a traditional 1/4″ amplifier jack. At the base of the guitar is a 1/8″ headphone jack and a mini-USB connector.
Yes, it’s a $200 Statocaster that can be plugged in to third-generation iOS devices. You can record directly, no static at all, or use the guitar as an input device for GarageBand.
From The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
Apple and Fender are working together to bring a USB version of the Squire Stratocaster guitar to Apple users. The Stratocaster is available for US$199 and is sold exclusively through the Apple store.
The guitar is chock full of features that’ll appeal to both the traditional and the digital musician. The guitar includes an analog output so you can use it with an amp and a stereo headphone jack for private playing. It also has a mini-USB connector that offers bi-directional audio streaming and lets you pipe your music directly to your Mac or iOS device without the need for additional hardware.
You can buy this beast from Apple only, but at $199.95, the price is not outrageous.
This is a small thing, I know, but most big things are made up of accretions (more…)
Start the day dancing: Build me up, Buttercup by The Foundations
Start the day dancing: Are you gonna be my girl by Jet
Build a better mousetrap? The proof of human ingenuity is building a better fire!
By way Instapundit, check out this item from The Daily Beast:
The image of groups of displaced refugees huddled around a contained fire during a blackout or after a major storm is certainly a familiar one. But charging their iPhones at the same time?
The BioLite CampStove is two, two, two energy sources in one, a small camp stove with a low-voltage electricity generator.
The BioLite CampStove is about the size of a coffee urn. Developed as the hot new toy for hikers, the stove houses a small fire that burns from hunter-gatherer fuel sources—dry twigs, pinecones—and, in addition to warmth, generates electricity for users to charge mobile devices. You can cook on it, too. But with hundreds of thousands of people without power for days following the wrath of Sandy, and many in the New York region still in the dark, a serendipitous new function of the CampStove—disaster relief—has come to light.
[….]
The CampStove has only been on the market since June, and has already sold tens of thousands of units. But this is the first time its application as a disaster relief tool has been tested.
There’s more to come from the BioLite folks:
“We’re seeing parallels from this experience to the challenges of international (more…)
What’s ahead for higher ed? In the age of the internet, who needs a school?
Says The Washington Post:
Universities are facing tough questions in an age when students anywhere can access an ever-growing catalogue of courses from top-flight professors online at no charge.
Ya think?
The public, Selingo noted, is less sanguine about what it is getting for its tuition and tax dollars than college presidents, who Selingo said are often “tone deaf.”
“We tend to overestimate the speed of change, but underestimate its depth,” said Selingo, who is working on a book called “College (Un)bound.” Tectonic shifts are happening, he said, in ways that will transform the higher ed landscape over 10 to 15 years.
He also offered a frame for thinking about online innovation that caught my eye.
The first phase of online higher ed, he said, was driven by individual institutions and inherently institution-focused. The second, which we’re seeing now in the form of joint ventures such as edX and Coursera, involves federations of institutions. So Coursera has 33 prominent universities offering hundreds of MOOCs. EdX encompasses three elite schools and a major state university system. And there are other emerging groups.
The third phase, which will probably gain prominence, features the free agents. These are professors who are offering up MOOCs on their own, or with only slight (more…)