Actually I just went the other day, as I continue to vacation here in SoCal. My daughter enjoyed the excursion of course, and her favorite ride was the “Pirates of the Caribbean” -- the last time we came here, she was too young and would have been too scared by it.

Anyway, one observation to make -- way too crowded! Disneyland seems to have reached it maximum capacity -- no room for more rides/attractions and way too many people trying to occupy the same piece of concrete.

For that reason, I would be surprised if I ever came here again. I need something my space!

I haven’t posted in a while because I’m still vacationing in California. This time though, I’ve traveled down the coast to SoCal, as my family and I are staying with my parents in the L.A. area.

It’s always nice to visit the folks, to stay in a familiar environment, and enjoy the SoCal weather. But one thing I’ve concluded since being here is, I like where I live now (western MA). I like that where I live now doesn’t have nearly the same kind of traffic congestion, pollution, and cost of living that SoCal has.

Sure, I love the racial/ethnic diversity and incredible ethnic food that’s here in SoCal, but all in all, they aren’t enough for me to want to move back here. Foe me, the overall quality of life in Northampton, MA is still superior to that in SoCal.

Coming at you from the American Sociological Assn. meeting in San Francisco once again. You might be asking, what exactly do sociologists do? Well as one example, we come up with studies like this: Income Gap Of Poor, Rich, Widens. Some excerpts:

The wealthiest 20 percent of households in 1973 accounted for 44 percent of total U.S. income, according to the Census Bureau. Their share jumped to 50 percent in 2002, while everyone else’s fell. For the bottom fifth, the share dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent. . . . New government data also shows that President Bush’s tax cuts have shifted the overall tax burden to the middle class from the wealthiest Americans.

Do we any more proof that this country is headed in the wrong direction?

I’m posting from the left coast today, at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, CA. It’s been six years since I was last year, when the last ASA annual meeting was held here in 1998. It was at that meeting in ‘98 that my wife and I hypothesize that we “created” our daughter Sangha -- the beginning of, of . . . everything!

We haven’t had the chance to see much of the sites so far but we’ve enjoyed being in SF nonetheless. Beyond the sites, SF offers many things that can be hard to find elsewhere -- plenty of racial/ethnic/cultural diversity, very progressive political environment, and very vibrant Asian ethnic neighborhoods. We enjoy where we currently live but we’ve always secretly wished that we could afford to live here. Mat=ybe someday in the future.

In the meantime, I send you greetings from the “Most Beautiful City in the World.”

A study by the Congressional Budget Office just came out and found, not too suprisingly, that:

[T]he effective tax rate for the top 1 percent of taxpayers dropped from 33 percent in 2001 to 26.7 percent this year, a decline of 19 percent. The middle 20 percent of taxpayers saw a decline of 4 percent. . . . People in the top 20 percent of incomes, averaging $182,700 a year, saw their share of federal taxes decline from 65.3 percent of total payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year, according to the study by congressional budget analysts. In contrast, middle-class taxpayers — with incomes ranging from $51,500 to $75,600 — bear a greater tax burden. Those making an average of $75,600 had the biggest jump in their share of taxes, from 18.5 percent of all payments in 2001 to 19.5 percent this year.

Naturally, Democrats are saying I told you so, as well as they should. It shouldn’t be a secret that Bush, like a good little Republican, wants to implement that largest tax cuts for the rich. But I also found it interesting that Republicans defend Bush’s policies by saying:

Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said, “Because of President Bush’s policies every American pays less in taxes today than they did before he became president…John Kerry has promised to raise taxes during the campaign. That is the clear choice Americans will have in the fall elections.”

In other words, this is another example of politics at its best -- the same results of a study being used to support two completely different sides of an argument.

Is it any shock to hear that Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company Haliburton cannot account for why it billed the U.S government for $1.8 billion in work it supposedly performed in Iraq? As you might remember, Haliburton received a no-bid contract worth billions of dollars for rebuilding Iraq -- a contract that we all know Dich-head Cheney personally had a hand in arranging.

Do the American people need any more proof that Haliburton is one of the greediest corporations on Earth, that Cheney is one of the least trustworth and most corrupt politicians on Earth, and that this whole Bush administrations is one of the most incompetent and most beholden to wealthy mega-corporate donors in the history of humanity? It amazes me how ordinary citizens can sit by and ignore how Bush and his cronies are completely in these corporations’ back pockets. Absolutely amazing.

My wife and I are preparing to depart for San Francisco to attend the annual convention/conference/meeting of our national professional organization (the American Sociological Assn.). The theme of this year’s conference is “Public Sociologies.” What exactly does that mean, you ask. Good question.

Sociology was invented as an academic discipline about 150 years ago with the explicit purpose of developing rigorous academic knowledge about society in order to apply them back into society and to make a difference in improving people’s lives. Since then, sociology as a discipline has struggled over the question of whether to, on the one hand, focus on gaining legitimization as a true “scientific” discipline (and therefore, staying out of politics and remaining “unbiased” and “objective") and on the other hand, living up to its original goals of applying research to real world issues and even engaging in social activism, armed with our in-depth knowledge of a particular issue.

The current ASA President, Michael Buroway, is squarely in the latter camp. He is passionate about applying our knowledge to make a real difference in our social environment. He recently wrote:

In a provocative opinion piece in The New York Times this past spring, Stanley Fish, just stepping down as a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago, offered a “three-part piece of wisdom for those who work in higher education: Do your job; don’t try to do someone else’s job, as you are unlikely to be qualified; and don’t let anyone else do your job.” Fish told us not to cross the boundary between academic work and partisan activity, not to engage in the business of forming character or fashioning citizens. We should just stick to the “search for truth and the dissemination of it through teaching.” We should dabble only in the mundane politics of academic life: curricula, department leadership, the direction of research, the content and manner of teaching, and so on. Real politics should be left to the professional politicians, those who know what they are doing.

Academics are living in a fool’s paradise if they think they can hold on to their ivory tower, fashioned for another era, another world. For too long too many of us have been hiding behind academic freedom and university autonomy --all in the name of truth. But the chickens are coming home to roost as the public is no longer interested in our truth, no longer prepared to subsidize our academic pursuits. So our budgets fall, and we increase fees, commodify learning, turn admissions into marketing ventures, contract out research to corporations, and search out donors. With that kind of privatization of higher education there will be no search for truth, no fidelity to its sacred values, except, of course, for the cream who rise to the top of our elite universities. Fish would have us draw the curtains, close our eyes, and either accede to privatization or hope that the passion for the market will evaporate. It won’t. We have to demonstrate our public worth.

Where do I stand on this issue? Simply stated, I feel that sociology is indeed worthless if it cannot be applied to the real world and used to achieve real social change and justice. San Francisco, here we come!

My wife and daughter were strolling through our front yard earlier today when they were startled to find a dead squirrel lying next to one of our trees. We ended up uisng a shovel to place the squirrel inside a cardboard box, closing the box, then placing the box inside a big trash bag, which we’ll put out with the regular trash on Tuesday morning.

It led me to wonder -- with all the squirrels that exist in a typical neighborhood, how come you rarely, if ever, see a dead squirrel lying around (that hasn’t been run over by a car)? In other words, when squirrels die, what usually happens to them? Do they just fall from trees into the bushes and then their bodies just slowly decompose? I would think that squirrels decomposing would create a pretty powerful stench, but usually we don’t come across them too often. Just one of those mysteries of life I guess.