Drove 580-ish miles for Thanksgiving, all told. Averaged over 30mpg. We drove to my parents, then went to where I live for more family, then went to the west end of the state, then drove back. On the way back, we hung out a bit with some local friends of mine and their friends (mostly law students). Law is apparently a tough field right now even here.

I should be grading right now.

I've been reading a lot of news lately. I've also been going down the rabbit-hole a little bit, looking at radical Republican stuff and radical liberalist stuff. I still don't understand people who think Obama is a socialist or that Obamacare is a socialist thing. I am quite puzzled by people who think it's obvious that Obama doesn't know what it means to be an American. I doubt my curiosity will ever be satisfied by their answers. The interesting thing is the language - you can tell who's hanging out with whom based on some of their verbal tics and by what issues suddenly pop out. "Democrat Party" is the biggest flag. The whole voter fraud issue - still not sure where exactly it came from, but it's only Republicans, coincidentally, and all the talking points are exactly the same. Oddly, just a few years ago, this same constituency would have been up in arms about mandatory picture IDs in general because it's a communist thing or even "the Mark of the Beast".

By the way, one thing I really hate is bad reporting and bad discussions about the cost of college attendance. People are always moaning about how, OMG, the cost of Harvard is rising. Here is a great article about price discrimination: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-27/misconceptions-101-why-college-costs-aren-t-soaring.html In short, there's a sticker price and a price people actually pay. Only rich people pay the sticker price (except at crappy schools). Of course, the worst decision you can make, apparently, is to go to a for-profit school. But, yeah, costs are going up, but not so much.

Doha conference on climate change is going on right now. Unfortunately, people won't do anything. Current commitments aren't enough to evade doom, future commitments won't be enough to evade doom. Republicans in America still deny that there's a problem. Coal companies rejoice. Tonight at 11: DOOM. And, of course: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/26/china-emissions-rise-green-policies And Germany, shortsighted, may have to undo their success by getting coal again since they are unwisely phasing out nuclear: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/26/german-renewable-energy-emission-co2

We've been watching some MST3K. We watched, among other things, MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE. It was fairly amazingly bad, as expected, and the commentary was pretty great.

Had a test in that 1-credit programming class yesterday. I just couldn't figure out the one problem on regular expressions - partly figuring out how to get R to do the regexp in the right way. Even with open access to google! I could figure out how to do it in, like, a sensible language.

Anyway, you have people like the following:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revenge-of-the-reality-based-community/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175590/jeremiah_goulka_confessions_of_a_former_republican