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Aaron Klemz

Columbia Heights, MN
Commenter for
5 years 5 days

Recent Comments

Posted on 07/06/10 at 04:35 pm in response to Stop subsidizing sham colleges with public dollars

Amy Nelson's got some good points, but is obfuscating the truth on one central claim.

The claim "tax dollars do not fund for-profit schools" is flat out false. The largest for-profit college chains like University of Phoenix and Career Education Corp. report that over 80% of their revenue comes from Federal Title IV money (Pell Grants and FFEL loans). From Apollo Group's (U of Phoenix's parent company) (APOL:AMEX) latest SEC 10-K form:

"University of Phoenix represented...

Posted on 04/30/10 at 12:14 pm in response to What Republicans believe

So let me get this straight. Is there any gov't position Annette Meeks is in (Met Council) or seeks (Lt. Gov) that isn't supposed to be abolished?

Posted on 04/26/10 at 11:21 am in response to DFL convention buzz: Rukavina's Kelliher kiss

Uptake interviewed Rukavina and he said he wasn't happy about that lit piece. Rukavina: "Well, I didn't really appreciate that, because I didn't approve that . . . I can't remember when I gave her that smooch." "I'm a little bit put out with that piece going out like that."

See http://the-uptake.groups.theuptake.org/en/...

Posted on 04/07/10 at 04:33 pm in response to It's not the narrative, it's the paradigm

One more example. Consider the case of the man convicted of manslaughter in the fatal car crash of a few years ago (I forget his name.) Was he "truly" guilty? A jury thought so, then. Then when the "truth" of Toyota's problems of unintended acceleration became a matter of public concern, his case began to be seen differently.

The physical reality of what the "true" cause of the accident was exists. Our ability to apprehend it is inherently limited. But the meaning and culpability from...

Posted on 04/07/10 at 04:27 pm in response to It's not the narrative, it's the paradigm

Dan, it's undoubtedly true that this is less a matter of substantive disagreement, but you have to understand that the use of phrases such as "mere story or social construction" is what causes me to bristle. Kuhn's notion of paradigm, indeed, doesn't seek to demolish the notion of facts or truth, only to demonstrate how they are assembled into a meaningful body of work, and then again how a community of scientists engages in a shift from one body of work to another.

I would note that...

Posted on 04/07/10 at 02:39 pm in response to It's not the narrative, it's the paradigm

Paul, you are misreading Fisher. "Facts" are not the opposite of stories, they are stories themselves. If you don't science is full of narratives, then think about the story of the human genome, the big bang, etc. These theories hang together on the basis of their narrative fidelity and consistency. Narratives are not the opposite of evidence; to the contrary they are both comprised of evidence and are evidence. This is the part of this article and the subsequent discussion that I find...

Posted on 04/07/10 at 10:17 am in response to It's not the narrative, it's the paradigm

In the academic discipline of Communication Studies, the seminal article on this idea was written by Walter Fisher. You can find a pretty reasonable summary on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_paradigm

Posted on 03/15/10 at 06:11 pm in response to Latest conservative talk-circuit rumor: Obama wants to ban fishing

Swift, as usual you have the facts exactly backwards on Stupak. It isn't that "fans of abortion" (all, well, none of them) oppose the INCLUSION of the Stupak language. It's that the Senate language on abortion, which Stupak doesn't like, HAS to be the controlling language if the House adopts the Senate bill. Reconciliation can't be used to fix that clause because the rules don't permit it. You have the causality exactly backwards - it isn't that "fans of abortion" will attempt to scupper the...

Posted on 03/10/10 at 05:01 pm in response to If PolyMet meets its commitments, the DEIS suggests that its proposed mine poses no serious environmental impact

Somehow, I don't think that continually referencing how long a document is makes it inviolate. Oh wait, I forgot, it has all those charts and tables too! Silly me.

I'm reading Atlas Shrugged for a class right now, and I can assure you, length does not equal quality.

Posted on 03/10/10 at 10:24 am in response to If PolyMet meets its commitments, the DEIS suggests that its proposed mine poses no serious environmental impact

The US EPA, the tribal cooperating agencies and other organizations disagree with this DEIS conclusion. They have good reasons for doing so. First, there is inadequate hydrogeological data with which to draw conclusions. There have been only nine test wells drilled to determine the ground water movement across thousands of acres of a fractured bedrock environment. Some of the stream flow data is sixty years old. This led the EPA to give the DEIS a rating of "3 - Inadequate" which means that...