Friday, January 8. 2010
The arguments pro and con in detail at Lizards.
Thursday, January 7. 2010
What are "intellectuals" anyway?
When I was young and vain I thought I was one. I read lots of books, got myself overly-eddicated, used to read the New York Times daily, and robotically held most of the socially-acceptable, arrogant, bien pensant views. Now I know I am a regular person who just tries to live in reality as best I can, fully aware that many non-tweedy, non-Ivy grads understand life far better than I do. Uncommon sense and sensibilities can replace common sense. From Tom Sowell's new book, with interview video, at SDA:
Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society - intellectuals certainly can renounce war, “and that does not stop your neighbor from building up the biggest army in the world and coming in and killing you.”
We used to ski the places on Rte. 93 quite a bit when the pups were younger. Wildcat and Gunstock Mtns, too. Less crowded and, truth be told, more genteel folks on average than on the Vermont slopes. I am partial to Loon, but Cannon Mtn. gets the prize for NH's funkiest, old-style place. Here's a brochure from the 1970s (Mittersill has been closed since the 70s):
Krauthammer is right, at NRO:
On Ben Nelson’s statement that “I think it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend the time on the economy”
Nelson is right on two counts. A, it was a distraction, as the citizenry sees it, from the main issue, which is the recession and unemployment. And secondly because the bill itself, the proposals themselves are so appalling that on the merits, on the substance, there's huge opposition. ...
Very smart. Read it all (link above)
Send a few spare bucks to Scott Brown.
Jacob Burkhardt did. First Principles.
...my friend saw a leaf floating down from a tree in a peculiar swirling pattern. He then asked, "Dr. Einstein, why is the leaf falling from the tree like that rather than straight down?" Einstein replied with a smile, "I don't know."
Via a piece at Am Thinker by Lauri Regan. I find "I don't know" to be one of the most useful sentences in the English language.
A sad end for the Tavern on the Green. They closed down last week.
Wednesday, January 6. 2010
Our readership grows each year. It used to double, but now it only grows at around 20-25%. Bummer.
Cybersluts that we are, we want to keep on growing. It's our only reward for our efforts - besides our own private pleasure in posting.
I know that we are a boutique site - not to everyone's taste - but there are probably millions out there around the world who would like to partake of the Farm's offerings.
(Remember that politics is just one part of what we discuss here. Even if people are further Left than we are, they can read us because we try to discuss things half-intelligently and with facts - except when we need to perform a therapeutic rant.)
Do us a favor, and do your friends and email list people a favor, and send the link to Maggie's around. It's a free subscription! Plus no annoying advertisements!
Thank you, Readers.
(Photo of one of our farmworkers, organizing our archives for posterity.)
This graph is making the rounds today so we might as well pile on. It's from Clusterstock. I think the problems this represents are obvious:
"The United States does not have a security system; it has a system for bothering people."
Shlomo Dror, an Israeli air security expert (h/t, Vanderleun)
 Dodd out? That's a problem for the Repubs. Dodd would have been easy to run against. We think Linda McMahon might be the best deep-pocket bet against Blumenthal. She is not a social conservative so she won't frighten the CT voters - and her past co-ownership of the WWF (now WWE) gives her some street cred.
Oh, great. Democrats Considering Health Care-Immigration Deal To Overcome Key Sticking Point. Gotta pander to that illegal immigrant vote.
Didn't Adam Smith cover this already? What makes a nation rich? One economist’s big answer
Your climate scientists at work:
If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct...
Pondering and pondering David Brooks' "educated classes."
The cowboy spirit. Dr. Sanity. What gal would want a guy without some cowboy in him?
9 points. Republican Heir To The Liberal Lion?
Now they are using the redskins to block Cape Wind. What next? Of course, the whole project is a dumb scam anyway, but uncovering the elite hypocrisy is the fun part. They don't want oil, they don't want wind, they don't want nuclear - but they do want their overland SUV permits and their 10,000 square foot houses overlooking Nantucket Sound.
Another org co-opted by the long march through the culture: AALS: A Learned Society or a Bunch of Left-Liberal Busybodies? Gramsci tactics, Prof.
We should have a category for New England sites. This good one is new to us: As Maine Goes.
We posted on Sol Stern and ED Hirsch yesterday. This is about the opposite: Thoughts on the Rotenberg Letter. Isn't the notion of "institutional racism" a bit dated these days?
Tuesday, January 5. 2010
France to introduce new law banning 'psychological violence' in marriages. "French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said electronic tagging would be used on repeat offenders."
Brilliant. Make marital discord illegal (and thus make-up sex too). How come it took government to think up that simple solution?
It's about the Conspiracy to Keep Them Poor and Stupid. One of our favorite guys writes a piece in City Journal about another one of our favorite fellows. One quote:
Like A Nation at Risk, Cultural Literacy came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist. The progressives often lumped him in with the three “killer Bs”—Bennett, (Allan) Bloom, and (Saul) Bellow—whom they loved to hate at the height of the 1980s culture wars. Because Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind appeared just above Cultural Literacy on the bestseller lists for most of 1987, many liberal commentators paired the two writers, calling them conservatives agitating for a return to a more traditional, elitist education.
In fact, Hirsch is and always has been a liberal Democrat. Far from being elitist, he insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents.
H/t to Vanderleun for Spengler's essay, A Commedia for our times. One quote:
The most onerous expression of idolatry in the modern era was the communist conceit that the scientific ordering of society can eliminate uncertainty. Scientific socialism was supposed to eliminate economic crises and war; instead, it brought about 100 million deaths and reduced once-prosperous countries to penury. Seventy years after its founding, the entire value of the industrial plant of the Soviet Union and its satellites was less than its scrap value, taking into account the costs of environmental cleanup. The life expectancy of Russian men has fallen to only 55 years, and the most frequent cause of death is alcoholism. Russia and its former satellites have such low fertility that their populations will fall by between one-third and one-half by mid-century. Europe's nanny-state version of social democracy is a low-grade version of the same infection.
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