Maggie's Farm

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.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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Tuesday, May 20. 2014

Tuesday morning links, with Trigger Warning


Pic of photographer pigeon from World War I in Photos: Animals at War


Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest


The Power of Character on ‘Mad Men’


The Knightly Ideal


How to get and keep a job


Nanny State University:  Students Campaign for Warnings on “Offensive” Books


Fragile little totalitarian bullies. Trigger Warning for Maggie's Farm: "Danger!!! Reading this site might cause you to lose your hatred of Libertarian/Conservatives after a while."


Why the "Check Your Privilege" Crowd Won't Win



The extremist error was to draw the attention of the broader public in the first place. They can only win in undemocratic spaces, spaces where an elite minority can act without an effective majoritarian backlash. The radicals prefer to seize control of these spaces, to achieve influence on them, or to carve out fiefdoms within them. Failing that, a small but vocal minority can badger elites unused to dealing with bad press and public pressure. Indeed, all of the recent radical victories have been confined to elite, undemocratic spaces. The media? A salon for well-educated Northeasterners. Universities? Opaque bureaucracies flush with cash. Corporate boards in the tech industry? They’re corporate boards in the tech industry. And that’s the dark truth of Cultural Marxism: While it claims to stand for equality and against elite privilege, its method has always been to become the elite, not to destroy it.



A Connecticut Yankee in Appalachia - Alice Ely Chapman wages a one-woman war on poverty


Reynolds: Higher ed becoming a joke


Thomas Sowell – Campus Rape Cases Should be Handled by the Criminal Justice System


Goldberg:  The Washington Post, Life & the Trouble with Experts


Greg Mankiw feels that Summers has the best review of Piketty


Behold the power of Power Line:  It appears The Nation has scrubbed the politically incorrect comments we highlighted here.


Settled science and saturated fats


Warmist Bill Moyers is utterly concerned with saving the planet from “climate change”, so, obviously, he recommends that Warmists practice what they preach, and has promised to give up his own use of fossil fuels!


The IRS’s Media Firewall


EPA to Unveil Carbon Regs Next Month


The insanity of the Left’s opposition to voter ID Laws summed up in one poster


The Logic of Castro’s Nomination:
It’s More Than Identity Politics


The New Palestinian "Journalists"


Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 06:12 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

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WARNING: This book may provoke thought in the reader. Your Progressive views may be endangered.


I can't help but wonder. We hear how the universities, especially the "elite" unis, carefully select the students they admit to their classes so that they are part of the learning experience as well. So what does this rush to protest speakers and put warning labels on books say about the university's careful selection of their classes?
#1 JKB on 2014-05-20 08:04 (Reply)
Start with its strengths. In many respects, Capital in the Twenty-First Century embodies the virtues that we all would like to see but find too infrequently in the work of academic economists. It is deeply grounded in painstaking empirical research. Piketty, in collaboration with others, has spent more than a decade mining huge quantities of data spanning centuries and many countries to document, absolutely conclusively, that the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top—the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and .01 percent of the population—has risen sharply over the last generation, marking a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I. There can now be no doubt that the phenomenon of inequality is not dominantly about the inadequacy of the skills of lagging workers. Even in terms of income ratios, the gaps that have opened up between, say, the top .1 percent and the remainder of the top 10 percent are far larger than those that have opened up between the top 10 percent and average income earners. Even if none of Piketty’s theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize-worthy contribution.

I'm curious.
Since WWI, has the top .1 percent and the remainder of the top 10 percent been the same people?
If so, then I'd say Piketty is on to something.
I'm willing to bet not only have the individuals in the top .1 percent and top 10 percent changed dramatically, but so have the families.

Some, of course, will remain the same. I'm still willing to bet the majority have cycled through.

As a result, the starting point of Summers' proclamation of a 'strength' is profoundly misguided.
#2 Bulldog on 2014-05-20 09:05 (Reply)
re Students Campaign for Warnings on “Offensive” Books

So what comes after the 'warnings'? Burning said books?

After all, who needs a bunch of steenking books for college?

re Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest

Though this is mostly too complex for my feeble mind to comprehend, I do get the gist of it and it is very cool.

re EPA carbon regs

The one thing we can be sure of is that they will be a disaster for the economy.
#3 feeblemind on 2014-05-20 09:54 (Reply)
"Settled science" as it relates to saturated fats:

"As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders' diet partly during Lent."

DOes anyone see a correlation between Dr. Keys scientific methodology and the science of global warming. It will take years before we finally see the media print the truth about AGW and in those years the left will loot the treasury and bankrupt economies. We are witnessing the greatest scam in history. What is amazing to me is how truely stupid people are. This scam depends on a willingness of the people to vote themselves into poverty. In fact they are required to pull the wool over their own eyes. The evidence against AGW is everywhere for all to see. The massive release of emails from the many pseudo-scientist warmies showing collusion to hide the decline "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqc7PCJ-nc" and fake the data so they could keep the gravy train flowing dollars. And yet if you talked to a million kids between 10 and 22 years old the number who doubted the AGW scam would be a few hundred at most. Is it really this easy to brainwash an entire generation?
#4 GoneWithTheWind on 2014-05-20 10:45 (Reply)
Sorry to barge in like this, but I would like to inquire about advertising the new Theodore Dalrymple book at Maggies Farm. I don't see any other way to contact the administrators.

If someone could email me, we could speak privately.
rebecca@newenglishreview.org

Thank you,
Rebecca Bynum
Managing Editor
New English Review
#5 Rebecca Bynum (Link) on 2014-05-20 11:14 (Reply)
"How to get and keep a job"

agree to work for peanuts, without overtime compensation or benefits, at irregular schedules of no less than 16 hours a day.
And then make sure you never call in sick or take a vacation.

"he nation's job market continues to force college graduates to take jobs they're overqualified for"

you'll never get hired for one of those because the HR person or recruiter will consider that you're not going to be motivated and will quit the moment something more in line with your qualifications comes along.

"bosses are impressed by those who get to work early"

And then stay until after the boss has left, because if you come in before the boss and leave before he does you're still considered a slacker because he's only seen you 4 hours that day after he arrived 5 hours after you did.

"Getting to work early is the easy part. If you are both the first to arrive and the last to leave, it will surely enhance your career prospects."

And lead to an early burnout at which point you'll end up being terminated for "not meeting performance targets", targets that will have been constantly raised because you're working more and more hours to meet the targets that keep getting raised.
Been there, done that.

"Experts say coming across as overly needy or boastful are the quickest ways to rejection."

Contrast that with being rejected because you're considered "apparently not interested enough" when you're showing yourself calmly confident rather than super nervous (and yes, I've had that happen, that was the reason given).

"One consultant explained that applicants should gear their answers toward the job that is being offered, not toward what they really want to do in life"

In other words, lie through your teeth...
#6 J.T. Wenting on 2014-05-20 12:18 (Reply)
Re: The Knightly Ideal

following some blather over GRRRRrrrrr Martin's knights are accurately portrayed (of course not, Westros is make believe) or not comes this, in defense of knightly "ideals" as still worthy today.

QUOTE:
The ideal of a chivalric knight is compelling. He is a man (and, in some cases, a woman) of arms who wields strength to serve justice and defends those weaker than himself. He he seeks honor above his own desires — and is thus accorded it. When we discourage such ideals, I believe we lose something. The bar is impossibly high, yes, but should we seek that standard we will do well indeed. Constantly readjusting that standard — or worse, removing it altogether — leaves us unwilling to discipline our hearts and minds, accepting where we are as good enough and failing to seek a higher purpose.


I'm not buying any of this BS.

The issue is not whether there robber baron knights or knights of the round table who Galahaded around Europe rescuing damsels. There were both, certainly the former; for the sake of argument, I grant that there were the latter.

The problem was that there were knights. whether they were "good" or "bad" from a historical/fantasy point of view makes no difference at all. The author invites you to accept an argument that doesn't question whether the existence of knights, barons, dukes, feudalism, etc was good or bad, only whether some of these actors were "good" or "bad", another total deflection and another example of how the system preserves itself.

Could it ever possibly occur to Sir Goodly White Knight of the Shining Whatever, as he was chopping down dragons, that he's a key agent of a inherently brutally exploitative regime that denies basic, fundamental economic and political rights to the vast majority of its subjects/ slaves / serfs? By what insane standard can that be considered "wield[ing] strength to serve justice and defends those weaker"?

Could he ever say, "I'm going to end this pretense that I'm a better, more honorable man than the peasants I force to farm my land because I've got a sword and a royal patent, I'm not going to play this charade, even when my lord and his boss come for me."

Now, that would be honor.
#7 Frigate on 2014-05-20 13:43 (Reply)
re Behold the power of Power Line: It appears The Nation has scrubbed the politically incorrect comments we highlighted here.

It was interesting that in the scrubbed comments cited by Powerline, it was black behavior, not the color of their skin, that the commenters were running from. And they really have no choice. It's a matter of self preservation.
#8 feeblemind on 2014-05-22 17:33 (Reply)

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