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.
[The rationalists] have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality ... When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. Whoever tries to peel off this fundamental idea—belief in God—from Christian morality will only be taking a hammer to the whole thing, shattering it to pieces.
Frederick Nietzsche (h/t Dr. Bob, who seems to be on blog sabbatical or retirement)
As far as I can determine, the Department of Education has no track record of positive accomplishment—nothing in the national numbers on educational achievement, nothing in the improvement of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged, nothing in the advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of money. This brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only reason that anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public schools have developed a dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As a practical matter, actually doing away with the Department of Education would involve creating block grants so that school district budgets throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.
We have rreported so many scientific frauds in the past couple of weeks, I thought I would highlight some commonly-used "data-management" tricks designed to dishonestly influence people.
1. "Clustering." We have all heard about cancer clusters - Why does my town have triple the breast cancer of towns two miles away? There must be someone I can sue about this. Such claims have an emotional appeal, but they are nonsense. Random distribution is not even - it is uneven. Just try flipping a quarter, and you will get little runs of tails. Clustering is a natural effect of randomness, but trial lawyers are always busy trying to track them down: they can get rich before anyone figures out the game.
2. "Cherry-picking." Cherry-picking is a frankly dishonest form of data presentation, often used by newspapers to create alarmist stories about the economy, the environment, food safety, etc. It fools people without some decent science education. What it entails is combing through, say, 60 pieces of data, and then using the three points that support your argument, and ignoring the rest. Presenting random changes as meaningful facts is a lie. Environmentalists use this all of the time, as do other agenda-driven fact-handlers. A casual use of this fallacy is characteristic of The New York Times typical headline: Despite Good Economic Statistics, Some Are Left Behind - and then they scour NYC to find some single black mom in the Bronx who cannot support her kids - and she becomes the "story".
3. "Anectdotal evidence." The above example could also be termed "anectdotal evidence." If you look around, you can always find an exception, a story, and example - of ANYTHING. But anectdotes are compelling, and Reagan used them to the best effect. And how about those swimming Polar Bears! (I always thought they liked to swim.)
4. "Omitted evidence". You tell me how common this is! A first cousin of Cherry-picking, Omitted Evidence is also a lie. All you do is ignore the evidence and data that disagrees with your bias or your position. Simple.
5. "Confirmation bias". People tend to remember evidence which supports their opinion, belief, or bias, and to dismiss or forget evidence which does not. It's a human frailty. Humans have to struggle to be rational.
6. "Biased Data". "A poll at a local pre-school playground in Boston at 2 pm today indicated that 87% of likely voters will vote for Obama." Picking your data sources, like picking the questions you ask, can determine your results with great accuracy. As pollsters always say, "Tell me the answer you want, and I will design the question."
7. "Data mining." Data-mining is used by unscrupulous academics who need to publish. Because it is a retroactive search for non-hypothesized correlations, it does not meet criteria for the scientific method. Let's say you have 10,000 data points from a study which found no correlation for your hypothesis. Negative correlation studies are rarely published, but you spend a lot of time collecting it - so you ask your computer if it can find any other positive correlations in the data. Then you publish those, as if that was what you had studied in the first place.
Image: two good varieties of cherries for picking; Stella on the left, Lapins on the right, from Miller Nurseries
This production of Richard lll is a stunner, according to my family including my theatrical pupette, and the reviews. It's traveled around the world, now finishing up at BAM in New York until March 4. (Trailer of the performance at the link). Worth a trip to Brooklyn.
It's a joint production of the Old Vic, BAM, and Neal Street, known as "The Bridge."
“Mr. Spacey gives fierce and flashy physical life to every twist of a power-mad man’s corkscrew mind.” —The New York Times
Since we're on the topic of Shakespeare, Never Yet Melted found this:
Murray: The New American Divide - The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else...
At one time, a college degree was a virtual guarantor of secure, well-paying employment. Now, most college grads leave school with large debts — more than $27,000 on average. A college degree also no longer signifies that the recipient is either well-educated in the traditional sense or that he has acquired specific skills suited to the labor market.
What race is Obama? Black or Caucasion or Middle-Eastern? What race am I? If the one-drop rule applies, I am Native American. And since when is "Hispanic" a race? Are people from Spain "Hispanic"? Are European Cubans Hispanic? Are Central American Indians Hispanic? Or Indians? Are black Cubans Hispanic? So confusing. And I haven't even gotten to the Irish: definitely a race - and a race with a history of cruel discrimination in the US for which generous compensation is due (my kids are 1/4 Irish and would welcome a check).
Do you ever play Mexican Train Dominoes? A good game, quite absorbing. We learned to play it in Mexico last year. More fun than watching TV. Uncle's Games sells Mexican Train Domino sets.
This game is said to be the most popular Domino game these days. Rules here (which sound more complicated than it is to play). It's a good alternative to Chess and Scrabble when you don't feel like over-taxing your brain, and 4 or 5 can play.
The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education, collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common codes of behavior and civility -- and exempts no one from those rules. Such knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can be lost in a single generation.
Can We Spare Newt Gingrich? He Fights. (Video Added)
The Obamacare issues of Medicaid coercion and the individual mandate are twins. They confront the court with the same challenge, that of enunciating judicially enforceable limiting principles. If there is no outer limit on Congress’s power to regulate behavior in the name of regulating interstate commerce, then the Framers’ design of a limited federal government is nullified. And if there is no outer limit on the capacity of this government to coerce the states, then federalism, which is integral to the Framers’ design, becomes evanescent.
In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find Four great rock maples seemingly aligned, As if they had been set out in a row Before some house a century ago, To edge the property and to lend some shade. I looked to see if ancient wheels had made Old ruts to which these trees ran parallel, But there were none, so far as I could tell - There'd been no roadway. Nor could I find the square Depression of a cellar anywhere, And so I tramped on further, to survey Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray Or spirals in a pinecone, under trees Not subject to our stiff geometries.
(A bio and some commentary here. Buy the Collected Poems of this modern master here)
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's The Calling of Matthew (1600)
The notoriously brawling artist brought a new look to European late Renaissance art, and is viewed as a bridge between Mannerism and Baroque. He was a rock star artist in his time.
The Associated Press reports the most extensive study yet of whether engaging in sex causes heart attacks.
In its first science-based recommendations on the subject, the American Heart Association says having sex only slightly raises the chance for a heart attack. And that's true for people with and without heart disease.
Surprisingly, despite the higher risk for a heart patient to have a second attack, there's no evidence that they have more sex-related heart attacks than people without cardiac disease.
However,
The doctors' group offers advice for heart patients based on scientific research involving sometimes provocative sex-related topics:
—Who's most at risk for sudden death related to sex? Married men having affairs, often with younger women in unfamiliar settings. Those circumstances can add to stress that may increase the risks, evidence from a handful of studies suggests.
Still, “sexual activity is the cause of less than 1 percent of all heart attacks," says the lead author of the report.
The revolution of the left is the stratified revolution of Barack Obamas and Elizabeth Warrens, greedy political activists feeding at the watering hole of government and crying out for more. More power. More laws. More chains. Parse the rhetoric and all you get is the powerful demanding that we give them more power. This revolution of the greedy and corrupt would already be dead if it had not used the momentum of its ideological fervor to embed itself into every institution and seize control of the educational system and the cultural dialogue to program succeeding generations to give it even more power.
The time is ripe for a true cultural and political revolution of the right, but that revolution has been hijacked over and over again by the gatekeepers who warn us that it's time to play nice, that we must think of the long game, that some issues have already been lost and we need to fight only for the core issues that matter to them lest we alienate people. The long march never ends in a last stand, only another tactical withdrawal on issue after issue.
There was a brief period when Clinton actually sounded like a growth and prosperity Dem, but, since then, the party snapped back to its 1930s approach. Tyrrell:
...Obama is a reactionary. He believes in the past, a past of vast government control of the economy, redistribution, and slow growth. Christie and Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin believe in growth. The future is theirs.
Cabo, last March. A good time, great food, fun fishing with the whales and Sea Lions, and plenty of great pals of my in-laws. My, my, my, how time flies.
Nat Helms at Defend Our Marines and Tony Perry at the Los Angeles Times, both able reporters of the Haditha prosecutions, have similar stories up about the choice that Frank Wuterich must make tonight. As Perry puts it, “This could be the longest night of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich’s life since he became a defendant in arguably the largest war-crime case from the war in Iraq.” Helms brings in the deeper meaning: “The 31-year-old father of three can bite the proverbial bullet and ask for administrative separation, or he can dig in his heels and fight for the principles he has already proved he is willing to die for.”
Admittance to a minor charge and an administrative separation, meaning under less than honorable conditions, means that Wuterich would lose veterans benefits and carry on his record a crime. On the other hand, as Perry says, “But if he decides to continue fighting the charges against him-- manslaughter, assault and dereliction of duty--he could end up with a conviction on one or more of the counts,which would also bring a discharge under less than honorable grounds.” And, possibly, prison time.
The cost of one bad teacher for one year on an average classroom of students is a whopping $266,000 in that class's collective lifetime earnings, which is over $2.6 million which that lousy teacher will cost society over ten years, or possibly $7.8 million over the teacher's tenure.
That's just one bad teacher. Multiply that by the possibly tens of thousands of wretchedly bad teachers whom the teachers' unions protect, and you realize the cost to society of our monopolistic public school system.
So says Robert Redford. (But, I ask, who will stand up against Big Hollywood?)
I think our readers understand that this is not about "Big Oil." "Big Oil" is a straw man. This is about a supply of cheap energy for Americans, and a supply that does not come from the Middle East or from Venezuela. The moonbats, who depend on energy as much as I do for daily life, appear to believe that it grows on trees.
How does Redford heat all of his houses? And does he care what it costs him? Would he care if his estate in Aspen lost heat this winter?
During his campaign, Obama promised to raise the cost of energy. He and his EPA have been doing their best to do that. Makes no sense to me. Now Canada's fuel will be used in China instead of here. What sort of accomplishment is that?
Mead: 
We have rreported so many scientific frauds in the past couple of weeks, I thought I would highlight some commonly-used "data-management" tricks designed to dishonestly influence people.
America is drunk
In Trackless Woods
The 
