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.
...for Phil and me the beer was the facilitator of the point but never the point. It was a vehicle the purpose of which was to get us to the problem of irony as a default mode of consciousness—and with luck direct us toward a solution. It brought us together on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons and it bore us upon its wings toward an answer, but it was never itself the answer. And this, I take it, is strict theology. Perhaps we violated St. Augustine’s injunction to use but not enjoy the vehicle, but at any rate we could justifiably say of the keg what a charitable and mysterious auto mechanic says to Hazel Motes in the novel by Flannnery O’Connor I just mentioned: The mechanic is unimpressed by the car Hazel has put all his trust in, but he says “Some cars’ll get some folks somewheres.” Hazel has no idea where his will get him. (He’s being undermined by a thing called grace.) He has no idea that the car he drives, lives in, preaches his creed of unbelief from, and eventually renounces will get him where he’s going, or where that place is, but then in O’Connor’s fiction no one ever knows what hits him. In this respect her characters are just like us.
A British TV crew went undercover into Syria. Foreign journalists have been forbidden to enter, which is one of the reasons why the brave Syrians' revolt has not received the foreign support it deserves and which makes it easier for President Obama, France and Britain to avoid providing worthwhile support. The overthrow of the Syrian regime, client state of Iran, dominater of Lebanon along with Iran's tool Hezbollah, would do more for US interests in the Middle East than all the other revolts in the Middle East that have turned illusions of Arab Spring into realities of Islamist Arab Winter. Watch it all. (HT: British blog Harry's Place)
It is difficult for me to believe that taxpayers want to pay for this crap. As she notes, if social work fixed social dysfunction, everybody would be functional by now. One quote:
Schools have been piling on social services for decades, yet the illegitimacy rate continues to rise, most cataclysmically among blacks (73 percent) and Latinos (53 percent). (Teen birth rates have gone down since the early 1990s, though they are still magnitudes higher than in Europe and Asia.) The social dysfunction that results from this spiraling illegitimacy rate provides the pretext for further increasing the school social work bureaucracy.
Someone who is young and knows very little may occupy Wall Street and call for the abolition of capitalism, yet this same young person has enjoyed a high standard of living because of capitalism. Whether he knows it or not, the protestor who calls for the abolition of the market economy is siding with a totalitarian principle. He is siding with the followers of Lenin and Hitler. Those who decry “economic inequality” may not realize that equality is a totalitarian objective, while economic inequality is the condition which continually raises the level of civilization and the general standard of living.
Read the whole thing. As Milton Friedman often said, there can be no freedom without economic freedom. Free markets are simply what free people chose to do in the course of a day to pursue their own goals, dreams, and wishes.
Every red-blooded American kid should know how to handle firearms. And a lot of other things, too.
As I always say to my critical sisters, it's more morally consistent to kill your own food than to buy it at the supermarket after other people kill it.
Happy Hunting season to all Maggie's Farmers, whether you participate in the fun, or not.
There are many reasons that the liberal meme about the unfairness of income inequality is misleading. Still, there is income inequality, and one of the largest causes of income inequality is the difference in rewards to those trained in technologies and those not. See this graphic of the difference in pay among those in hi-tech jobs and those in service jobs. Those with technical skills, also, go on to build successful businesses of their own and get wealthier. As the CBO report on income inequalitypoints out, an increased proportion of the wealthier are those applying skills rather than clipping coupons or withdrawals from trust funds. This News Hour interview nails it.
Our 4-year (yeah, I know, for many it’s 5 or 6 years) colleges do not produce enough graduates in the sciences, nor for that matter do they offer much training in the supporting tech vocational skills. As a result, we import immigrants with hi-tech skills and innovate to transfer more work to machines. Both of these do add to the nation’s productivity and wealth, to some extent benefiting the poor through funding government welfare programs and to some extent benefiting the non-tech middle class through added comforts and medical breakthroughs. But, still left behind are the earnings of those without hi-tech skills.
Our colleges serve their faculty with jobs for those in the humanities. Our colleges serve students with perhaps interesting courses, and delayed adult responsibilities, who do not acquire marketable skills. The opportunity costs are enormous of college enclaves buffered from the laws of supply and demand.
Community (2-year) colleges have many vocational and certificate programs of value to businesses, many allied with local businesses, and offer many entry-level courses for matriculation into 4-year colleges and at lesser tuition. But, they also offer wide-panoplies of fun courses for the young and for adults, courses that detour spending away from vocational curriculums and away from hiring higher-paid, more competent faculty. Private technical schools and vocational colleges do partly fill the gaps in training, the well-motivated with adaptive attitudes and sufficient intelligence getting better paid and more secure jobs. However, most of the brightest are blindly steered into conventional colleges’ humanities degrees (including various “diversity” degrees) where they do not acquire marketable skills. One could argue that most of them, however, lack the interest and application to be successful in technical degree programs anyway.
Another major diarist: Everywhere Man - Count Harry Kessler dined with Diaghilev, fought for Germany, and penned one of the greatest diaries ever published.
The Real Lessons of Moneyball - The efficient market hypothesis in Michael Lewis’s book essentially holds fast, but there are still inefficiencies to be exploited
Recently, my alma mater Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh applied to join the ACC. Both were accepted. I had very mixed feelings. I attended Syracuse during the halcyon days of Big East Basketball. We were one of the original 3 Big East schools. We pulled the first major upset, beating Villanova for the Big East Tournament Championship in 1982 with a very mediocre squad. The Big East placed 3 teams in the Final Four in 1985, then 2 in the Final Four in 1987. The 1987 NCAA Championship saw Syracuse lose by a point in the final seconds as Indiana' Keith Smart nailed a jumper in the final seconds. Over the years, the Georgetown/Syracuse and the University of Connecticut/Syracuse rivalries have been heated and seen many legendary games. Syracuse's 6 overtime Big East Tournament victory over UConn in 2009 was the kind of game you only hope to see, and wind up telling your children about.
Big East men's basketball has had 6 NCAA Champions in the last 27 years. Women's basketball has seen many more, as the University of Connecticut Huskies have set a new standard for the term 'Excellence' when it comes to sporting achievements. In 32 years, it has won 28 championships in 6 different sports.
On the other hand, Big East football has seen very few important moments, has never really developed a strong following, and has not helped its best teams rise. In some respects, Big East football is a bit of a joke even though programs like UConn and Rutgers have managed to revive themselves. Over the years, it has been football that drives conference alignments because of the revenues involved.
As other conferences grew and focused on their revenues, the Big East played it safe. They lost Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech in 2005. Hardliners in the conference scoffed, and I count myself among them. There was no way the move would benefit those teams (it hasn't really, but they've done better than they would have in the Big East). The Big East was clumsy. It just couldn't get the job done for those schools, nor for the two which recently left.
At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.
That's what I have been talking about lately - students evaluating teachers, dumbing down to please students, etc. A quote from the piece:
According to a lawsuit filed Oct. 14 in U.S. District Court, Maranville’s lawyers allege UVU administrators justified the dismissal based on student complaints that his “capstone” course in business strategies was too rigorous and his Socratic style intimidated them.
“A number of students liked him a lot and said so. The brass came in and liked what he was doing. [Maranville] wanted students to get together in small groups and chew over the topics they were studying,” said his attorney, Robert Sykes. “They get him up here and toss him under the bus because some of the students wanted high school.”
Boo hoo. Tough Socratic teaching and interrogation is typical in elite colleges, laws school, medical school, and business school. If they think a prof is too rigorous, they oughta see real life.
Estimates of the costs to the US of 9/11 range up to $5 trillion, from a left-leaning source. The September 2011 New York Times survey of estimates balances at $3.3 trillion, noting that “this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt.” Much of those costs could have been avoided if the US had a more alert, focused and muscular foreign policy in the 1990s. Much of future such costs of the US being dragged by events into future conflicts may be avoided if there were more attention by US politicians and public. In 1996, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said Americans were unintersted in hearing about foreign policy challenges, and is repeating that now. We paid for it then and will pay for it again. Luntz' polling is dangerously misleading to politicians with finger-in-the-wind that invites fists in America's eyes.
Given the varying opportunistic rationales over the years by Osama bin Laden for attacking the West, and similar from other Islamist foes, it is reasonable to assume that one way or another attacks on the US – absent 9/11 – would have occurred anyway. They did, but not of the scale and shock of 9/11. But, in Islamist foes’ own words, their perception of US weakness of reaction and resolve throughout the 1980s and 1990s encouraged them to step up their attacks. However, these attacks didn’t rouse the US before 9/11, so the $3.3 trillion, or some cost lower or higher can justifiably be connected to 9/11, which by the way cost al Quaeda about $500,000.
Some of that $3.3 trillion represents improving our domestic defenses, much of which can be seen as plugging holes that weren’t paid attention to before 9/11, much else of which can be seen as misspent or over-reaction: $360 billion for Homeland Security, $110 billion for domestic expenses of National Intelligence, $100 billion for lost time at airports, extra driving to avoid flight-boarding delays resulting in $19 billion in car accidents. A bigger amount, $1.6 trillion, went to military related costs ($1.2 billion directly in Iraq and Afghanistan). Up to $1 billion will go to future costs of veterans and wounded.
One can argue retrospectively that both or either Iraq and Afghanistan were avoidable choices, including not having sufficient military forces for the required occupations. That would require avoiding realities of threats and the best intelligence available at the time, and avoiding that the 1990s drawdown of our military left us ill-prepared. One can argue prospectively that the dysfunctional Iraqi and Afghan governance should be avoided by our non-involvement. That would require a neo-isolationist avoidance of facing up to the likely worse results there, in their regions, and for the US.
There’s no mistaking that most Americans want out of such frustrating, protracted entanglements. There’s also no mistaking that the erratic and incoherent foreign policies pursued by the Obama administration have failed to provide Americans with leadership, explanation or guidance as to why the US should be engaged abroad. There’s, as well, no mistaking that the potential Republican 2012 candidates have not presented nor emphasized the details of a more forthright, focused and muscular foreign policy for Americans. Democrats and Republicans read similar polls about most Americans properly putting our domestic concerns and angst above all. But, they also fail to provide credible leadership.
It is uniquely the job of the President to inform and lead American public opinion about issues that are not part of their daily lives and preoccupations, and to exert himself to protect American interests and security. Regardless of the lack of knowledge or interest or agreement by US media, the leadership of the President is essential to raise the salience, importance, of such issues via the media to provide Americans with better information from which to assess priorities and feedback choices to our political class. Otherwise we Americans are cast adrift in too late reactiveness that soon fades or is pained by costs for which we are unprepared.
Hasty and excessive withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with huge slashes of our military, plus acquiescing to Russian and Chinese expansionism, are an easy path now, but will very likely require far more expenditures of US influence, US lives, and US treasure than the leadership path. Republican candidates must present the details of a surer and less expensive future, not just one-liners, or be complicit in those present and future catastrophic costs. Another $3.3 trillion or far less now for preparedness is only the financial equation. Our very future is the higher and more pressing cost that must be paid for or suffer the consequences. Better to spend some budget and political capital than be doomed to repeat the past decade or worse.
"Oh, big deal! Probably nothin' more than a bunch of fat-cat 1-percenters living in the lap of luxury off the sweat and toil of us hard-working 99-percenters! Go get 'em, Rina! Kick some Wall Street ass!"
(goes back to reading, glad he got it out of his system)
Ding!
"Hmm, an email. From the landlord? Wonder what that's all about."
Subject: HURRICANE PREPAREDNESS PLAN
"Huh?"
(goes to NOAA web site)
"Uh, yeah? And? Who gives a shit what happens to Mexico? What the hell's my landlord talking about?"
(fearing he's being suckered into playing into the hands of a demented madman, Doc goes to the Stormpulse site, since it has such pretty graphics)
"Oh."
(preparing for a long evening of picturing the worst that could happen when hit by a Category 18 hurricane, Doc grabs the blender and whips up one of his famous Valium-Vicodin-Jack Daniels-methamphetamine milkshakes and heads over to Terrapin, his usual mainstay for hurricane tracking because it uses the combined plot of the six best agencies in the business)
"Well, at least we can be grateful that we live in a day and age when hurricanes can be accurately predicted," he says fatefully.
"Okay, so maybe there are still a few kinks to work out of the system."
And that's the sitch at the moment. If it continues on the Stormpulse track (also in this video), you'll have some real, live hurricaneblogging here at Maggie's.
Let’s hope the next generation of environmentalists is a generation of tinkerers, innovators and builders rather than a generation of leaflet distributors, envelope stuffers and foundation-fund scroungers.
Because of the way "achievement gaps" are measured — using scores on standardized reading and math tests — any effort to "close the achievement gap" must necessarily focus on instruction in reading and math. Hence many schools, particularly those at risk of getting failing grades under NCLB, have fixated on reading and math exclusively; other subjects — art and music, foreign language, history, even science — have been set aside to make more time and resources available for remedial instruction. The New York Times has reported that, in Sacramento, California, poorly performing students are permitted to enroll only in math, reading, and gym, in a mad dash to help close the achievement gap. The Wall Street Journal has reported that, facing budget pressures and a relentless press to drive up reading and math scores among the least proficient students, school districts nationwide are axing foreign-language instruction. Indeed, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics, between 1997 and 2008, the share of U.S. elementary schools offering foreign-language classes fell by roughly one-fifth.
There will always be achievement gaps until 1+1=2 is the math test and "See Spot run" is the literature exam. Humans are far too variable in interests, talents, abilities, self-discipline, and motivation for it to ever be otherwise.
As somebody recently commented, "Why not aim for equality in violin, film-making, dress-design, tomato-growing, or basketball?"
The 
Free diapers for babies or parents? Taranto on 
Happy Hunting, 
I forgot where I found today's image
Loving the Chambered Nautilus to Death