Sunday, January 30. 2011
 Went to a very enjoyable and festive Chinese New Year party last night. It's the Year of the Bunny Rabbit, I was told.
The special cocktail of the evening was the Lychee Martini. I don't think I had ever had a Lychee before, much less a Lychee Martini. Delicious and refreshing.
Lychees are tasty fruits, flavor somewhere between a pear and a grape.
At Reason - Economist Walter E. Williams reflects on his long career battling Jim Crow, big government, and liberal orthodoxy.
I would offer an enticing quote but my machine is acting up. I like him.
"I don't understand it. I don't like it. And I don't think anyone would think differently. There's nothing you're trying to say that hasn't been said before you. And everyone who's said it before you has said it better than you have."
That was part of the critique the pupette got on her recent college poetry writing course effort. I guess everything is supposed to be new, despite what Ecclesiastes teaches us. She has always been told in the past that she is a talented writer. She did say "I'd like to point out, however, that this professor is phenomenal."
I emailed back something like this:
"That's what we are paying them for - tough criticism, high demands, and a dose of humility. If you could meet their demands already, what would be the point of being there and paying them money? My best teachers ripped me to shreds. They want to stretch you to your max and beyond it to find your limits, and that is good. We can't all be TS Eliots, and few youths have enough life under their belts to write poems that are more than pretty strings of words anyway. Don't worry - you have your friends and family to love you regardless."
Last week I sent her a poem that my brain wrote during a dream. (I never sit down to write a poem, but sometimes they come to me so I try to put them on paper before they disappear. Generally, I only share them with my sis who is a published poet.) I thought this one might have been about my college pup, or maybe any one of my kids, and did not add the title until I guessed what it could be about. I would not want to show it to a Prof.
Child
First you jumped
out of my hand,
hid in the sand
camouflaged by the sand.
Then I caught you
with two hands
but with a laugh
you jumped out again
into the water where the sea
had carved a deeper channel.
The water was clear.
You dissolved in the water.
I dove in to search
but I could not find you.
Later,
you returned from a foreign shore
tall, and painted blue,
asking what we do next.
It certainly looks like Egypt is heating up. Looks like the Brotherhood has been waiting for this moment.
Stratfor: Red Alert: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood
Via Other McCain: “I have to pay 150 pounds a day to bribe police officers to let me sell on this pavement. How can I be this educated and not find proper work?” – Ramadan Mohamed, Law graduate selling sunglasses on Cairo street
But their unemployment rate is lower than that in the US
WSJ: Rebellion in the Land of the Pharaohs - A man who places himself at the helm for three decades inevitably becomes the target of all the realm's discontents.
Iconoclast has update on the near-chaos
Some friends in the know told me last night that I might think I am going to North Africa this summer - but that I'm not. Lucianne's headline: U.S. Embassy tells Americans they should consider leaving Egypt as soon as possible because of unrest, violence and ongoing demonstrations. An estimated 55,000 Americans are currently in Egypt. Flights scheduled for Monday
Related, Tunisia: The End of a 23-Year Regime. We were there in summer 2009. Cool place, exotic. Different rules. Not Kansas.
Browner Resignation, Obama Omission Could Spell the End of Global Warming Policy, Say Climate Change Analysts
Perhaps reason has prevailed, this time. When something becomes a joke in stupid DC, you know its time has passed.
But what the heck is a "climate change analyst"? Is that a paying job?
Our mens' study and prayer group is doing Ecclesiastes right now. As we are all more or less middle-aged, we can all relate to this poetic "wisdom book."
Ecclesiastes 1
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 “ Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“ Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
3 What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.
5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose.
6 The wind goes toward the south,
And turns around to the north;
The wind whirls about continually,
And comes again on its circuit.
7 All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again.
8 All things are full of labor;
Man cannot express it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after.
Saturday, January 29. 2011
Further to my post, China's Navy, this from the Naval War College: Underestimating China. They begin
Denigrating Chinese maritime prowess is a longstanding habit in the US naval
establishment. Officers and analysts reared during the Cold War found it
hard to shed the image of China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) as a
backward force composed of patrol boats, short-range fighters, and small
submarines that hugged the coast.
Perception chronically lagged reality even after the turn of the century,
when the PLAN started introducing a panoply of high-tech warships, aircraft,
and antiship missiles.
 FOF: Why Isn't Marriage the Way I Thought It Would Be?
Cuz it's Real Life, not fairy tale.
Heavier snows may stick around, climate experts say
Let's all plan our lives around what the experts say. That's a good plan, if one is utterly lacking in common sense and "critical thinking."
Sissy: Rand Paul: "The president has been co-opted by the Tea Party"
Muslim Brotherhood Declares War on America; Will America Notice?
TNR: Five Things to Understand About the Egyptian Riots
In a way, this all makes me feel more interested in my trip to Egypt and the Middle East this summer. Danger and chaos adds a little spice to life.
Sweden is a model for American school choice options
Mostly, those gloomy Swedes are crazy-depressed, Moslem-loving, atheistic drunk and sex-addicted Socialists who hate hard or unpleasant work, but they got this one thing right.
Surber: If Obamacare is so great, why so many waivers?
Because it sucks, and takes away freedom of choice.
Politico: Republicans are terrified of the tea party
In 2006 Dems Cheered When They Blocked Social Security Reform – Now It’s Running in the Red
Will people adjust to change? VDH: The Waning of an Old Established Order:
In response to this topsy-turvy world, the traditional media, tenured professors, well-paid public employees, rigid ethnic and racial lobbies, unions, organized retirees, open-borders advocates and entrenched politicians all are understandably claiming that we live in an uncivil age.
We well may, but we also are seeing the waning of an old established order. And the resulting furor suggests that the old beneficiaries are not going quietly into that good night.
War (1870)
When a child,
certain skies sharpened my vision:
all their characters were reflected in my face.
The Phenomena were roused -
At present,
the eternal inflection of moments
and the infinity of mathematics
drives me through this world where I meet with every civil honor,
respected by strange children and prodigious affections -
I dream of a War of right and of might,
of unlooked-for logic.
It is as simple
as a musical phrase.
(from Illuminations. Sadly, one must be careful about posting poetry in translation - publishers own the copyrights, so you just have to buy the books. Two Rimbaud websites, here and here.)
Friday, January 28. 2011
A big snow is a delight to every Yankee who has a camera. Big snow makes everything new. An ordinary snowfall is not as inspiring. Here's the road I live on:
Just kidding re the above. My friend Nathan sent this pic of Central Park yesterday. I'd guess that was his Leica, not his cell phone:
NYC is a wonderland in a good snow. Our buddy Kab sent these to me from NYC too:
A relative sent in this pic of his house in CT. That's a typical, in-town New England house. It provides shelter. Your heart and soul provide the charm and warmth:
Those of you spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for your children’s college education, and paying taxes to support colleges, may be interested in a current brouhaha at my alma mater, Brooklyn College.
A doctoral student, 1 ½ years into his studies, was hired by the Political Science department to teach a graduate level course on the Politics of the Middle East. I wrote about his clear and one-sided pro-Palestinian writings and radical associations, and of his slanted syllabus of readings. Subsequently, others wrote to the college administration questioning this hire, including the New York State Assemblyman for the adjoining district. The hire was rescinded, the formal reason given that the hire was insufficiently credentialed.
Predictably, the hire complains that academic freedom has been trampled. Some on campus and the hire’s ideological friends in the blogosphere agree. The NYC press has covered the incident, repeating their charges. The hire himself appears in a TV report saying, “I have very vocal views in favor of the Palestinian cause for self-determination.” At his personal website, the hire says, “Unfortunately, due to external pressure, the Brooklyn College provost has chosen to suppress academic freedom and intervened to cancel my appointment. This is a profoundly unsettling outcome and I am currently challenging it.”
Au contraire writes a retired professor at the college to the Chancellor of the City University of New York:
By now serious academics realize that the propagandists work deliberately to confuse "academic freedom" with freedom of speech per se. Academic freedom is the freedom to teach and write within the constraints and standards of one's discipline, which means paying methodic attention to the relevant sources and domains under a course heading. This is the freedom that needs defending, and has been commendably defended in this instance.
Further, it does not appear this hire has any legal grounds to demand he be hired.
So, what is at stake: academic freedom or academic license, especially when abused, completely inviolate from legitimate concerns of students, parents, or knowledgeable critics?
The hire at Brooklyn College was, most charitably, a mistake, now corrected.
If you agree, you might email the Chancellor of the City University of New York ( chancellor@cuny.edu ) and the Brooklyn College President ( klgould@brooklyn.cuny.edu ).
Majority of US Students Lack Science Proficiency.
No surprise there. Those students don't know grammar either. What do they know? I hope they know quadratic equations. I hope they read the Constitution - but you don't need a school to do that.
Well, they certainly know what Howard Zinn thinks - I mean, thought. They aren't necessarily lazy and dumb, they just aren't cut out for the really demanding mental stuff. What they need is solid basic knowledge, learn a job, maybe make a family, and they'll be just fine and as happy as they want to be. How many really smart kids do we need?
Science and math require more disciplined, rigorous, and abstract thinking than most kids want to bother with or, perhaps, are capable of. If a kid says languages - or math, or chem - are "too hard," you know right off that they lack the serious horsepower even if they are "bright and articulate." Most kids like the soft stuff - if they like any of it at all. Trouble is, you don't need a school for the soft stuff: it's all available out there, for free. Everywhere, nowadays.
In our spoiled, decadent culture, most people seem happy to pay others do the heavy mental lifting while they benefit from it all at ridiculously low cost. I know, because I am one of them, although I did plenty of math and hard science in college.
It has always been my contention that nobody should be able to earn a college degree without at least a year of calc, and real college chem, physics, and Bio (also, Econ). Otherwise, however bright you may be, you can't call yourself eddicated because there is too much basic stuff in life you don't understand well enough to have a legitimate opinion about.
Maybe I should have said a High School degree instead of College. If a kid had my kind of High School degree, they would be in a position to learn everything else they were interested in or needed to know on their own, in the library, or from The Teaching Company, or on the job. (Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from getting out there and living and getting into the cage with the Beast of Reality, and taking the knocks and dealing with the BS.)
High Schools should have oral exams on simple basic facts, because kids aren't ready for wisdom. "What's a subordinate clause?" "What's Avogadro's number?" "What's iambic pentameter?" "Why was Alexander Hamilton important?" "Why was Alexander the Great important?" "How does a lever work?" "Why do we care about the Phoenicians?" "How do you find the volume of a cone?" "How does an airfoil work?" Etc. Send in examining teams to do the testing to see whether a High School degree is justified. Paper testing doesn't do it. Nowadays, there are kids graduating from High School who cannot answer those questions.
It's the elite few who design our software, who design and build our computers and X-boxes and cars and refrigerators and airplanes and bridges and office buildings and coffee pots and power plants and missiles and digital cameras and machine tools and oil refineries and robots and hybrid wheat and permanent paintless house siding and our chairs and tables and new medicines and our Blackberries. Those are the unsung heroes of our daily lives.
It's all I can do to repair a horse fence or to replace a cracked windowpane in the barn, yet I am paid better than the people who design and build those useful things I listed above. Understand the workings on my motherboard? Not likely. Not smart enough, yet I am considered "highly educated."
My point is that the kids don't need to know the challenging stuff: Let them learn the elementary basic stuff, and the soft stuff if they want, and get their lightweight diplomas signifying that "they attended," and leave the challenging stuff to the smart, ambitious kids. Let the rest of us lazies flip burgers or teach school or attend meetings or sit in cubicles or express shallow and uninformed opinions about how life works, because we do not know how to make anything useful.
Let those few precious brainiacs work nights to make the tools and toys for us while we fart around with stuff that "interests us." The rest of us don't have to know anything complicated, do we?
We hate it when our brain hurts.
Was 2010 the Hottest Year Ever?
How humans are 97% the same as orangutans
Not me. I am all dog.
Are Law Schools Lying To Their Applicants?
Shrinkwrapped on vibrators, etc.
Powerline: Sputnik? Try Stalingrad:
Young Americans already face a future defined by an inescapable reckoning. They already tend to look at our grand entitlements as phantoms, as dead entitlements walking. They already know the problem isn't that we have too few college graduates, but that we -- like Tunisia and (gasp!) China, to mention a few -- have too many for the market to absorb.
Another bold social pioneer
Heck, if it's consensual...
Betsy: Dumb demagoguery
WSJ: The Great Misallocators - What Barack Obama and General Electric have in common.
The Old (Liberal) Frontier - Barack Obama is stuck in the 1960s.
That is so true. We have been saying that the Libs Progressives have been stuck in the 30s and in the 60s forever. No learning from experience.
Thursday, January 27. 2011
Thanks for your good pic, lad.
Can readers identify that building?
Freshman Sen. Mike Lee speaking at The Federalist Society. He is impressive. I share his quaint views of the Constitution.
Thanks to the people who email links to me:
The Battle Over the DSM-V:
Maybe I just have a case of too skeptical for my own good syndrome, with a touch of sick of the bullshit fugue. And maybe a little everybody seems to have a way to scam money from the government but me anxiety. Yeah, there's that.
Corrupting Psychiatry:
Indeed, APA members stand to gain from new regulations they lobbied for. In other words, if Til Wykes were an American psychiatrist, he too might be seeing dollar signs in temper tantrums and pot use “disorder.” But when it comes to medicine, America is the special interest state. And make no mistake: this is not the free market at work. It’s what happens when greed and government power commingle under a blanket of good intentions.
At the feeders today:
(Note Cottontail Rabbit gnawing on my roses. He's my official rose-pruner.) Tree Sparrow, Carolina Wren, Dark Eyed Junco, Cardinal, WT Sparrow, Red Bellied Woodpecker, BC Chickadee, Song Sparrow, Downy Woodpecker, Grey Squirrel (of course), Mourning Dove, Blue Jay.
Notable for absence: Goldfinch, Tufted Titmouse.
From Dr. Sanity:
What made America 'exceptional' is the moral and political vision of its Founders, who clearly understood that a country established on the principles of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' was, not only an historical anomoly, but also represented the embodiment of the highest values to which mankind could aspire.
What continues to make America exceptional is the extent to which we still live up to those same values bequeathed to us by a group of exceptional and extraordinary men.
From F- Feelings' Feelbreaker:
Yes, you’ve probably heard some wise child guidance expert say “there’s no such thing as a bad kid; just a misguided parent,” and I wish that expert wasn’t full of shit.
Don't be humble; you are not that great.
Golda Meir
It just keeps coming. Snow is up to my knees. Got myself plowed and shoveled out at 4 AM this morning, and headed right off into the snowy dark to Dunkin' for my morning fix, and took some snaps.
This would be a good morning to be in Vermont, with skis. It's beautiful.
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