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 way we used to think about politics and, unfortunately, the way I fear they’re thinking about politics still in Washington” involves “the old playbook [which] says, “lie, deceive, obfuscate and make it to the next election.”
Being old-school folks with an appreciation for the variety of interests and talents that exist in different people, we view education as having three components:
1. What everybody needs to know to function as a citizen in a free republic 2. What somebody needs to function in a job 3. The opening up of the life of the mind without regard to utility
#3 is, of course, what the original Liberal Arts college education was designed for. It was assumed that #1 was accomplished already, and #2 for most non-professional jobs.
Prof. Fish is not happy with the invasion of the marketplace into academia, but I think it is inevitable; inevitable because employment demands are requiring college degrees, whatever they might be and however silly such requirements might be. It's about monopoly credentialization, like education degrees.
We all know people with good IQs but without degrees who know more and are more interested in life than most of the folks we know with fancy degrees. I need not refer to George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Bob Dylan, or Bill Gates: I need only refer to our appliance repairman who is an impressive Shakespeare scholar (about whom I have posted here in the past).
The identity of the "college" has changed enormously over time, as has the amount of stuff to learn about. In 1700, many barbers doubled as dentists and surgeons, and our few colleges were as much about producing educated and literate Congregationalist ministers as anything else. Things have changed. A "college degree" can mean almost anything now.
A quote from Fish's piece:
What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the higher learning. John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that expand their minds nonsense.
The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.
In this latter model , the mode of delivery a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up doesn't matter so long as delivery occurs.
Yes, it's a downscale, mass-market Kollege-Mart now. Read Fish's brief, poignant NYT essay, The Last Professor.
"We do want more, and when it becomes more, we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more until we have received the results of our labor." - Samuel Gompers
In the romantic liberal vision of this union uprising, determined workers are standing up to the powerful. But there's no fat-cat owner wanting to pocket more profits here. The unions' target in Wisconsin is the taxpayer.
Those statehouse Republicans want to bust up that longstanding sweetheart deal in which public employee unions elect Democrats, who turn around and give the unions anything they want.
This arrangement between the unions and Democrats has led to unfunded liabilities for pension and benefits for retirees that now total $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion among the states.
I think the backlash is going to be harsh, and the Presidents' joining the fray is going to hurt him with the middle class. Too many taxpayers feel left out of the equation and resent the apparent greed, childishness, anger, bullying, and inflexibility of the people who are in their employ. It's understood that there is much - if not everything - at stake for the government unions who currently seem to own the Dem Party. However, by making such a conspicuous and unappealing spectacle during a time when so many are out of work, underemployed, or plain hurting, far more people are becoming aware of the sorts of generous deals these unions have made with their Dem patrons in the cities and states.
Only government employees get pensions these days, and many governments have switched to normal 401-Ks.
As Gov. Walker commented, the people of Wisconsin are saying "Hey, where can I sign up for this deal?"
I think people are most appalled by the teachers' behavior. People want to admire teachers. They are damaging their reputations and damaging their cause, so I suspect they will evoke little sympathy regardless of whatever justice may be in their cause.
Hats off to Gov Christie, TigerHawk's "Governor Awesome," for having shown the way to sanity and responsibility.
19:2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.
19:9 When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.
19:10 You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.
19:11 You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.
19:12 And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the LORD.
19:13 You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.
19:14 You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.
19:15 You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.
19:16 You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.
19:17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.
19:18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.
A reader sent me this pic. Trust me: these dogs are trained. Which reminds me - we need a series on dog training, hunting and regular obedience. It's an important topic, and only the rich farm it out to experts. I have trained my own. For regular obedience, they have been quite good but for hunting they have been a little "difficult." They like the birds too much and behave like children when there is too much game around. My fault.
If you feed a dog, he'll love you. Any dog will snuggle. The training is the deeper connection in which you learn to think like him, and hopefully mostly vice-versa. His work is to anticipate your wishes just as our work is to anticipate our bosses' wishes (but at Maggie's, we try to avoid having bosses other than God).
Any dog can be trained to the whistle and to hand signals. Any human can learn God's hand signals.
Our group is still reading Ecclesiastes and yes, I do know that a more accurate translation would be "futilities," or "meaninglessness."
Despite the wisdom of the Preacher, our animal spirits and desires are ever-present and ever-pressing.
There's not much that I desire, but I really want one of these systems: Heated Driveway. A flame-thrower would be cheaper and more fun, though it might melt the asphalt.
Followed them forth; and meanwhile there was heard
A mighty shout: "Come, O ye sons of Greeks,
Make free your country, make your children free,
Your wives, and fanes of your ancestral gods,
And your sires' tombs! For all we now contend!"
And from our side the rush of Persian speech
Replied. No longer might the crisis wait.
At once ship smote on ship with brazen beak;
A vessel of the Greeks began the attack,
Crushing the stem of a Phoenician ship.
Each on a different vessel turned its prow.
At first the current of the Persian host
Withstood; but when within the strait the throng
Of ships was gathered, and they could not aid
Each other, but by their own brazen bows
Were struck, they shattered all our naval host.
The Grecian vessels not unskillfully
Were smiting round about; the hulls of ships
Were overset; the sea was hid from sight,
Covered with wreckage and the death of men;
The reefs and headlands were with corpses filled,
And in disordered flight each ship was rowed,
As many as were of the Persian host.
But they, like tunnies or some shoal of fish,
With broken oars and fragments of the wrecks
Struck us and clove us; and at once a cry
Of lamentation filled the briny sea,
Till the black darkness' eye did rescue us.
The number of our griefs, not though ten days
I talked together, could I fully tell;
But this know well, that never in one day
Perished so great a multitude of men.
(This English translation by William Cranston Lawton of 'The Battle of Salamis' is reprinted from Greek Poets in English Verse. Ed. William Hyde Appleton. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1893.)
The Liberal Mead's The Madison Blues. Real change is coming, moving past his "Liberalism 3.0."
For many Democrats, the weakening of the public sector union movement looks like a strategic setback to be resisted at all costs. Blue labor has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to Democratic candidates in recent election cycles — both in direct cash contributions and in volunteer and in-kind contributions like phone banks.
But public sector union support, however attractive in the short term, is a poisoned chalice in today’s world. As long as Democrats are in hock to the teachers’ unions, the postal workers, and the various state and federal civil service unions, they are reduced to a producers’ lobby for government workers. They are tied to the 22.6 million Americans who have government jobs — and cannot respond creatively and thoughtfully to the needs of the 280 million who don’t.
and
However much money the public sector unions fling into the maw of Democratic party politics, the old system is going down. Workers will actually do better in states that act quickly; the longer the day of reckoning is postponed, the higher the bill will be, and the more savage and draconian the cuts will have to become.
But if the blue social model and 4.0 liberalism are losing, what will take their place?
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
USDA employees and FBI officials estimate that the number of fraudulent claims ranges from 50 to 95 percent. Boyd takes issue with those statistics, though.
It's more shooting than hunting, but it looks like great fun. Friends who have done such shoots come home with sore shoulders but otherwise very happy and well-fed - with no time zone change.
More cool if slightly pricey hunts at GSS. (No, this is not a paid advt. We do no paid ads here but we do plenty of freebies just for fun.)
Increasingly, innovative companies are avoiding going public, and confining their capital-raising to the now vast private capital markets. This is not surprising; we have made it so unpleasant to be an executive of a public company that I do not know one who would not rather be private. Worse, the people who do succeed at public companies are experts in process and governance, and not very likely to make imaginative leaps or forge new businesses from the wreckage of the old.
...getting a grip on mass immigration would at least signal to existing foreign residents that the west has ceased to fetishize civilizational suicide as moral narcissism. For Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron to give speeches arguing that their societies have failed to turn immigrants into citizens to a degree that threatens social cohesion while simultaneously leaving the doors wide open suggests a certain lack of seriousness.
...it’s one thing if teachers just want to be hard-core unionists, no different from the least pretentious laborers you can think of. It’s just the “for the children” stuff that’s so hard to swallow.
Obama is not “failing to lead” as some people are claiming. That is all wrong. All suggestions to that effect are all wrong. Obama knows exactly what he is doing.
Obama is setting up a confrontation and he plans to win.
Call it Chess, or call it Rope-a-Dope; it's a DC game but the MSM will never say so.
If I had to pick my favorite song by The Band, I think this would be it (or maybe Acadian Driftwood, or The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, or The Weight, or their version of Dylan's Tears of Rage, or I Shall Be Released) :
“The argument between assimilationists and multiculturalists is whether it is the immigrant or the culture that should change.”
I've always assumed that the reason at least half the world would like to live in the US is because of our culture. Who wants to change it? You don't see people climbing barbed wire fences and breaking laws to get into Russia or Egypt or Iran or India or China or Venezuela, etc. The most recent stats I saw (2000) showed 2.9 million people in NYC itself were foreign-born. That's mind-boggling, equivalent to the entire population of Kansas.
The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Amendments led to a surge in immigration to New York City and a decline in the share of European immigrants. Between 1970 and 2000, the total foreign-born population nearly doubled, from 1.44 million to 2.87 million, while the share of Europeans dropped, from 64 percent to 19 percent. Latin America was the largest area of origin in 2000, accounting for nearly 32 percent of the city's foreign-born, followed by Asia (24 percent), the nonhispanic Caribbean (21 percent), Europe (19 percent), and Africa (3 percent). Thus, New York City's foreign-born in 2000 have extremely diverse origins, in contrast to the overwhelming European origin of the foreign-born in earlier decades.
Sometimes, listening to the MSM and the Left, you'd think that this country was a terrible place to live in. Ingrates, if you ask me. My foreign-born colleagues and acquaintances thank God every day that they are here in America - while people like me, it's shameful to admit, often just take it all for granted.
Vietnam today has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for?
It's a good piece, but minimizes what I think the war was really about: geopolitical maneuvering. Both North and South were proxies, if not pawns.
That's us and our proud staff. As Sipp would say, we are out standing in our field.
Point is, if you like our site, please let your friends, colleagues, neighbors, relatives, and enemies know about our eclectic (our euphemism for unfocused, random, shapeless) site.
How many sites have Assyrian carvings, Snow Geese pics from a goose blind, sauce recipes, Bible verse, Petrarch, Brooklyn College, The Grateful Dead, and political slapstick on the same front page at one time? Who can predict what you'll find here?
So show us the love. And if you have a site, and like us but rarely link us, let your readers know that we exist.
If our readership (much as we love our current readers) doesn't continue to grow steadily as it has thus far, we will move to Canadakill this cute puppyjump off a bridgequit taking our ADD medications be tempted to retire from this not-very-lucrative, if somewhat enjoyable and educational, endeavor.
Idle threat? God knows. We make this pathetic appeal twice yearly. There remain many billions of humans who haven't seen us yet, and, while we seem not to meet a mass market taste, I am certain that our market is not yet fully "exploited," as the marketing experts would say.
In the meantime, we Farmers will just...
Thanks in advance, friends, from your Editor in Chief, Bird Dog:
I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.
Stanley Fish, who we just happen to have linked last week 
FDR's Ghost Is 
Sipp links to 
Michael Milken warned us: 
As 
My morning links somehow all got hijacked by Iana - some site that sells domain names. First time that has ever happened. Will fix when I am able -
