We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Low grading standards in university education departments are part of a larger culture of low standards for educators, and they precede the low evaluation standards by which teachers are judged in K-12 schools. The culture of low standards for educators is problematic because it creates a disconnect between teachers' perceptions of acceptable performance and the perceptions of everyone else.
It's difficult for me to form a strong opinion on the grading topic because I have no idea what Education Majors learn or study. Maybe it's so easy and simple that anybody can master it readily, and all deserve As. Maybe they have full-semester courses in making Lesson Plans, and full-semester courses in Social Justice. Beats me.
However, it does not escape me that no profs in higher ed have ever taken a teaching course (outside of those profs in the Education Dept.). Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge,not one of my kids was ever taught by anybody with an education degree.
(A reader asked the question. Yes, very expensive private schools. Private education is the only way to not be taught by people with ed degrees, if such things matter to you. Most of my kids' teachers had done a lot in life before they decided to follow their hearts and teach. Their Latin teacher was a professional actor on the side, their math teacher a retired Wall Streeter, their English teacher a retired Sports Illustrated writer, etc.)
I think it would be constructive to abolish the entire notion of the Education Major. Let people who feel called to K-12 teaching study something like everybody else does and, if they want to take some courses on the side on primary school education or Special Ed or whatever, OK. It seems to me that most teachers ultimately learn their trade by being assistant teachers - by apprenticeship and supervision, not in education departments.
Teaching is not hard work, if you know your topic. I've done it. It's fun (but some kids can't learn and some don't want to. Many are not interested in anything academic.). In fact, every parent becomes an amateur teacher. Much more primary education is ultimately home schooling than schools might want to admit. (In my state of CT, the "quality" of the schools across towns correlates exactly with the levels of average education and income of the adults in the town - regardless of teacher pay etc - suggesting to me that it is, in part, education-minded parents who make their schools look good.)
Irene might be headed to New England. No problem - we can deal with it. It's always a smaller deal than they make it sound. I call it "Weather Porn." And if Yankees can't deal with bad weather, who can? Heck, we enjoy bad weather.
Muslim immigrants to America seem to get with the program - that's why they came. I wonder why they form dangerous and socially-hostile ghettoes in Europe. Might it be because they are given too much? The workers in my Dunkin Donuts used to be all Hispanic women - now it's half Hispanic women and half Muslim men.
What an absurdity. Had Obama not shattered investor and employer confidence with massive intervention after massive intervention in the markets, had he practiced any fiscal discipline or simply not imposed the enormous burdens of Obamacare on employers, then the country would not be struggling to get unemployment under 9%. If he just called off the NLRB there would be more jobs in South Carolina, and that is one of thousands of destructive regulatory decisions, perhaps tens of thousands of such decisions.
I have grown fond of Psychiatrist-blogger 1 Boring Old Man. I generally agree with him on things, and I respect his efforts to be more up to date on the latest things than I am. From one of his Awakening Thoughts:
My real complaint about modern psychiatry, besides the corrupting influence of industries of various flavors, is that it lacks the tension and curiosity about things unknown that drives medicine forward. For all the talk of neuroscience, what I mostly see in our literature is "product testing" and the application of any new technology of science that comes along to conditions without creative ideas and hypotheses driving the endeavor. I don’t know why people have Schizophrenia, and I want to know about that. There are thousands of similar questions, and not all of them have to do with neuroscience. I’m sure that people get depressed, have bad anxiety, or behave destructively because of things in their minds, or biographies, or lives – not in their brains. That seems self-evident to me. And I’m tired of having those of us who are interested in that causality discounted as kooks based on complaints about the early theories of Freud or the arrogance of our predecessors.
My profession is currently schizophrenic (in the non-clinical sense).
I think one of the things that defines our website, Maggie's Farm, is curiosity. Curiosity about almost everything. We are only adequate writers; we lack creative flair and a zippy way with language; we rarely present entirely new ideas about things (but sometimes we do); we are dilettantes in most areas we discuss.
Curiosity is us. We like to wonder what is inside things.
As I sit by the pool this lovely Connecticut afternoon sipping a Scotch and enjoying a decent ceegar after having done a mile in the pool nude nekked with only God and the wife's horses watching me, I have been reading this in American Scientist: That’s Interesting - Curiosity drives discovery. But what, exactly, makes us curious? One quote:
Faced with a puzzle, and excited by it, I do try to understand the anomaly before me. My failure to find a ready explanation, and my feeling that the phenomenon is nonetheless understandable—these are both motivating psychological actions. In time, if I am fortunate, my thinking brings me to an explanation that makes sense not only to me, but to the community of chemists. I wouldn’t have gotten there without thinking, “That molecule is really interesting.”
Three things drive learning: curiosity, ambition for mastery, and necessity. Curiosity is an underrated and relatively rare gift. We try to nurture it in ourselves.
My stage-and-screen pupette drove out to Cleveland last week to work in her second major motion pic this year, part of which is being filmed there. She has to be ready, on the set at 5:42 each morning. Why not 5:45? Don't ask me. She says she's staying in a really nice place near the Cleveland Clinic.
I emailed her this old vid which I still find amusing, and she emailed back that "It's actually quite nice here."
I think the debt ceiling debate this year has done for future debt ceiling thresholds what the Bork nomination did for judicial politics in 1987—changed the political rules of the game forever.
If the moral arc of the universe truly bent toward justice, Theodore Parker's line wouldn't be inscribed in the Martin Luther King monument and ascribed to King as one of his most famous sayings.
As a very casual fisherman now - but an ex-avid fisherman (I no longer really care whether I catch anything or not as long as I can be out on the water), I kinda wonder.
Maybe most of the world is on vacation now, or taking breaks from their information-gathering and opinion-surfing. Still, I expected more interest in my racism post yesterday. Perhaps it is all old hat to our readers. I thought I did an OK job of pointing out that multiculturalism, when extended to acceptance and "tolerance" of self-destructive cultures or subcultures, is not a particularly noble or constructive mission (despite its obvious political motives).
...for the highly politicized parts of black America, the point has always been to keep race in American politics.
For black political culture that dominated after the Civil Rights Movement, the point was not just equal treatment under the law, but special treatment under the law.
Plus the assumption that more black political power -- defined by more blacks holding office -- would mean that blacks would be better off.
In other words, post-Civil Rights Movement black political culture embraced an agenda exactly the opposite of what the civil rights movement was about.
Its agenda was to get laws and policies that were not neutral but racially slanted and to put individuals in power based on their race and not on their character and capability.
So, according to the script of this political culture, election of a black man as president meant more than an end to racism. The conclusion had to be that if the man holding the highest political office in the nation was black, it must follow that blacks would be better off.
Anyway, I am back to my education beat today.
One of my repeated claims here has been that those who deserve advanced education are those who pursue it on their own. After high school, nobody should want or need to be force-fed most (I'll make an exception for Physical Chemistry and Calculus) of what they need or desire to know, so the only test of their desire is whether they pursue it on their own (rather than the simple credential-buying).
All learning is self-education, and "going to college" does not make anybody "educated." Furthermore, true students study throughout their entire lives. There is no finish line, and you do not have to be in academia to do that.
For that, Mr. Gore himself has a lot of blame to carry. His own “sputtering righteousness” and his adolescent barks of “bulls–t” to his critics may be a reverse of the Obama declaration. Gore’s meltdown might just be the moment when the people of the planet saw the carney show for what it was.
The absurdity of Garofalo’s theory is evident to anyone who knows even a little bit about Herman Cain. He’s no one’s dupe. But to the racist left he’s the Clarence Thomas of the political world. “How dare he wander off the plantation. We want our escaped slave back!”
I have always contended that Repubs (and their allied Conservatives and Libertarians) are the non-racist party. It's the party of Lincoln, the part of Ike who desegrated the army, and the party whose support was essential in passing the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s against a large segment of Dems.
I have always contended that the Left is the racist party in viewing American blacks as a helpless, feckless, childish category of people, a permanent victim underclass destined to eternal dependence on government actions and benefits and the beneficence of white Libs who want to take care of them, like pets. That's the "plantation" people talk about. In my view, this is a deeply condescending and insulting way of viewing any group of people.
People like Tom Sowell, Herman Cain, Mayor Nutter, Bill Cosby, Juan Williams, Shelby Steele, and many others agree with this.
Fact is, before WW2 there was a vast (although often segregated) black middle class in America, church-going, hard-working, self-respecting, etc. The disruption of the black family during the war (large numbers of black men moving north for high-paying industrial jobs), combined with the Great Society's enabling and supporting of family dissolution, have been the real problems. Young single motherhood under unstable and poor (due to the singleness) conditions are the obvious problem, and everybody knows it. No amount of money can fix a subculture like that.
Of course, there are still large numbers of middle-class blacks in America. However white Liberals, in their hypersensitive yet condescending way, are phobic about speaking about the self-destructive black subculture (even though there are poor white subcultures which are no different, and can be found anywhere), in the US as in the UK (vid h/t SDA):
(This woman has chosen government as her husband. She does not seem too bright, but is clearly gaming the system. What that piece ignores is how many entry-level jobs in the UK are eagerly taken by ambitious and entrepreneurial immigrants. "There are no jobs" because somebody else got to them first, or convinced somebody to create them. Same thing in the US: the Hispanic immigrants around here work their butts off, and are not too proud to get their hands dirty. Nobody has a job handed to them on a silver platter.)
So even though the US is probably the least racist nation on earth, it seems necessary to the Left to keep the racism meme alive - even with a black president. Otherwise, they'd have to talk about the truth of the (possibly insoluble) problem of underclass dysfunction and exploitation of assistance - regardless of skin tone. Free money.
To keep the meme alive, sometimes people have to look pretty hard to identify a sort of victimhood which requires or justifies government dependency and unequal treatment. Here's a beaut: Secret Racism Running Wild in Our Government.
I’ve heard more than 20 years of this oppressive windbaggery from do-gooder liberals who treat my unhyphenated American brothers and sisters and me as treacherous puppets for The Man. Their smug refusal to acknowledge free will, individual choice and true diversity of thought confirms that race-obsessed liberals remain the most unrepentant and odious racists of all.
They have become their own self-parody, but they are dangerous because the constant repetition works in creating a public imagination that Republican candidates are racist.
So if you think it cannot get any worse, trust me, it will.
A commenter here mentioned C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man recently. It got me thinking about what the most influential books have been for my adult thinking about socio-religio-political topics.
I'm sure I omitted quite a few, but these came to mind. (I guess, as an ole Yankee, I am rather freedom-oriented and leave-me-alone-oriented rather than gimme-oriented. I was raised to fend for myself and to shoot my own moose, but that might be old-fashioned nowadays. The "modern" women, apparently, want government to be their help and support in life instead of husbands. That's pathetic - on both sides.)
When I think about writings that influence me, I wonder whether they indeed influence, or whether they articulate half-thought and semi-formed thoughts that were already brewing in the back of my brain from my life experience.
In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man's ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature's ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.
Feel welcome to add your personal list to the comments.
As fall planting season approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere, here are two simple tips to save you money and hassle:
1. When you plant a tree or shrub, space it to what its size will be in 10 or 20 years, if not more. Time flies, and the next thing you know you'll be cutting some of them down so they don't jam eachother into poor health. This error is commonly made when planting things too near the foundation of a house. Landscapers love to jam things in everywhere because they can sell you more stuff, and it looks better right away. I have made this foolish error enough times to have truly learned it: I am having to cut down a $175 fir today which I had planted, five years ago, too close to a group - because it looked good at first.
2. When you read that a plant needs "full sun," that means direct sun from morning until dusk. It does not mean full sun for part of the day. Furthermore, half-sun means half-day sun - preferably morning light. More sun is not better for a half-sun plant: just ask any Rhododendron or most Hydrangeas.
Oh, almost forgot a third: Never plant Wisteria anywhere, unless you have full-time gardeners to keep your place looking neat and under control. Take it from me. Just don't do it, no matter how delightful it is in May. Pick some other vine for shade unless continual warfare is your plan.
How do they get 40 black government SUVs to the Vineyard? Do they charter a ferry? Or two? And where does this entourage sleep at night? In tents? Space on MV ain't cheap at all.
Related: Steyn: The Imperial Presidency- European royals make do with a less lavish lifestyle than the supposed citizen-executive of a so-called republic.
Christians are used to their generosities doing no good at all. We rather expect that will be the case many times. It is ours to give, and then the matter is out of our control. We even accept, more reluctantly, that our gift may go to wrong purposes, that in the free will of the recipient are many of the evils common to mankind, and our nickel may go to the devil.
When we know that the gift will harm, however, does the picture change?
While the evidence (both from polling and observational data) strongly indicates Romney has the best chance to beat the Obama candidacy the Republicans are most likely to face in 2012, his biggest problem appears to be that while the base claims electability is the most important quality it is looking for, it doesn't yet understand that he may be the only person with a real shot.
It is also possible that, much like a young woman on the dating scene, what the Republican base says it wants and what it really desires are two very different things. They have already discarded the "nice" guy who would have been best for them in the long run (Pawlenty) and are now enamored with the latest "bad boy" (Perry) who is exciting but who has very little "marriage" potential.
In short, Romney is in great danger of being left at the alter (sic) by a base which wrongly thinks that Obama's weakness has left them free to follow their hearts instead of their brains.
He might be right. I don't know. I do know that Palin can't win a national election
Those leftists who spend their days spinning apology for this sort of thing (and for worse) might like to think about how they could contribute instead to forming a more appealing vision of ways to challenge the extremes of capitalist inequality, and social injustice more generally.
Yeah - they could start a business and hire some people. That would make a real difference in some lives. And pay themselves the same as they pay their employees...
12:1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
12:2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect.
12:3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
12:4 For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function,
12:5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.
12:6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith;
12:7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching;
12:8 the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
REX MURPHY: Global Warming Runs Out Of Gas.“In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comicbook fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the high profile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this ‘science’ as they pretend to be. “
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason:
Jason graduated from Dartmouth almost five years ago. Now 26, he works in finance in Boston and shares a Back Bay apartment with five other guys with whom he went to school. He runs and works out, stays fit, and dates lots of different women all in their early twenties. At night, he hangs out at the Dartmouth bars of Boston. Hey, college was supposed to be the best years of your life, right? he explains, with only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. So where is it written that it has to end when you graduate? College is forever, man. That's what the admissions guys say that these will be your friends forever. Well, forever is now.
To create blissful Socialist utopias, we need smart, strong, deeply caring men in charge. Lefty men, like Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, etc. Geniuses to rescue us from our pitiful fates as little people.
A quote from Fred Siegel's review of Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left in City Journal, re 1820s socialist Robert Owen:
Owen anticipated both Marx's concept of false consciousness and Herbert Marcuse's of repressive tolerance. He insisted that men, because of the way they have been hitherto educated . . . are incompetent to form a correct or sound judgment. Creatures of their environment, they have been rendered irrational by the absurd doctrine of free will and responsibility. All could be put right if such subjects. . . . be instructed in better habits, and made rationally intelligent. But until then, Owen didn't want the opinions of the ill-trained and uninformed on measures intended for their relief and amelioration. No! . . . their advice can be of no value.
Owen's sentiments were exemplified by the most famous of the utopian communes, Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Influenced by the ideas of French social reformer Charles Fourier, Flynn writes, Brook Farm was stocked with Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates, [and] descendants of the Pilgrims who retained the Puritan conviction that they were the elect but had little common sense. Failures at subsistence farming, dependent on charity for their Thanksgiving dinner, they needed to hire unskilled laborers in order to feed themselves. Writing about the plebes, one of Brook Farm's members, Charles Dana, insisted: 'We are in fact the only men who can really point out their course for them and they can hardly help looking to us for their advisors." But the laborers chafed under their supervisors feckless paternalism, openly mocking Dana and his fellows as "aristocrats."
My, my. How little has changed in the Left in 200 years. Utopians always condescend to us ignorant, feckless, unwashed, irrational "masses," don't they?
My personal utopia is all about freedom from utopians and power-seekers. I wish to control no-one - unless they are trying to harm me.
Image via 
Gun Owners: 
The Angler: 
My list would have to include:
As fall planting season approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere, here are two simple tips to save you money and hassle:
Photo from 
Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason: