Maggie's Farm

Gagdad Bob and I are fans of the chemist and polymath Michael  Polanyi, which I guess means that we are fans of epistemology. 

Bob comments, in Probing the Vertical Unknown:

Polanyi compared scientific theories to the cane of a blind man. Imagine if you suddenly lost your sight and had to explore your surroundings with a cane. At first you would be very aware of the sensations of the cane in your hand. In a sense, your world would be very "cramped" and up close. But with time, the cane would begin to be an extension of your hand, so that you could "feel" things beyond your hand by essentially ignoring it.

In other words, if you focus on the hand, you specifically lose "sight" of what the cane is touching. Eventually the hand's "touch" would extend as far as the cane. Polanyi called the "hand knowledge" tacit and the "cane knowledge" focal. He also called it from ---> to knowledge; however, he felt that all meaningful knowledge shared this from ---> to structure. It doesn't mean that the knowledge isn't "real." But there is no way to conceptualize it in the absence of an active subject who evolves by converting more and more focal (to) knowledge into tacit (from) knowledge, thereby expanding the space in which he lives. For example, various scientific canes have allowed us to "see" all the way back to the origins of the cosmos, just as psychoanalytic canes allow us to peer into the unconscious. 

Clear, or not? Epistemology slides into metaphysics, and metaphysics mercifully slides into "Where are my sneakers?" and "What's for supper?"

Polanyi viewed "knowing" as an art, and believed in objective truth but respected its elusiveness. Most of his philosophy of science is in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy.

Image: A star "nursery" from the Hubble telescope

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Tom Paine, in Common Sense (1776), as quoted by A Jacksonian in a comment here.

Why I think Hillary will win. I am by no means as pessimistic as Mr. Armey, but he makes good points with which I agree. In fact, I believe McCain or Rudy could beat her relatively easily.

Without the MSM carrying her water and covering her tracks, and her last name, she would not even be in the running. She is a wholly media-made celebrity product, like Crest toothpaste and Paris Hilton. Where's the beef?

I think the country is "ready" for a woman, black, or anything-else President (I know I am - but I do not like to vote for a potential Commander in Chief without military service) - but I don't think it's ready for a socialist with a rotten personality and a dubious moral compass.

The new counter-insurgency aircraft, the A-67 Dragon, is similar to the P-51, observes A Jacksonian, who compares their specs and capabilities. A restored P-51 below:

People are talking about the new Brit socialist/communist blog, Liberal Conspiracy. It is remarkable to me that, with so many years of Labour power and their disheartening, intrusive programs, that there are still people in the UK who want more government in their lives.

Our thoughtful friend Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling, with whom we generally disagree, discusses the two types of "Positive Liberty," which are at odds with the "Classical Liberalism" which we stand for here. A quote:

But there’s a second type of positive freedom... It’s that people must be empowered to control their lives - they must have real liberty, as well as formal liberty.
This means, for example, greater direct democracy in local and national government, worker control and a no-strings-attached basic income.

Heck, I want a free Lamborghini.

But thus does the "new," FDR-era definition of "liberty" become an infantile and spineless serfdom to a supposedly benevolent, but ultimately psychotically power-hungry State. It always works that way, human nature being the dark thing that it is. But I guess I would be OK with a Philosopher-King - as long as it's me, and not you - because I seek no power over anybody except my dogs.

What's the point of all of this in prosperous, middle-class countries which are full of opportunities for anyone who wants to reach for them... assuming they are not either dysfunctional, or the fortunate people who are motivated by the good things in life above and beyond material gain, and choices which cost money like recreation, entertainment, education, and special comforts and pleasures? God bless 'em, but I am not one of them (mostly) because there are too many things I'd lke to do which have costs attached. Like another ten days in Tuscany or Turkey or Scotland. My basic human dignity will not permit me to take things from others: it's degrading and leads to shame and shame's companion - bitterness, rather than the pride in finding your own path through life. A path illuminated by your own conscience, abilities, gifts, judgement, resourcefulness, hopes and dreams.

In my view, "positive liberty" represents, or necessitates, a form of totalitarianism (whether democratic in origin or not), and "classical liberalism" is far more than a pretty abstraction.

Has the dream ended? Are people in the West exhausted by fighting for freedom from the State, and resigning themselves to an ignoble "Gimme" attitude? I hope not, but sometimes I wonder.

Photo: Our Massachusetts Minuteman, who was not fighting the Brits for a free lunch, but for autonomy and self-determination, freedom from the State and its power and its oppressive taxation at gunpoint.

Today, says Theo. (Expressive language NSFW in most places, but bravo to his sentiments.) His website here.

There has been a change in the policy on policies, and therefore all the policies have had to be rewritten in order to be in compliance with the new policies policy.

A compliance officer at a large investment bank, during a compulsory compliance training seminar this week.

(All of above borrowed from Samizdata.)

Roger Kimball. What took us so long? He is in our Pantheon of Essayists.

Here's a list of his books.

Here's his Wikipedia entry. He is not an amateur thinker.

We posted on Theodore Dalrymple's new book today. As many know, Dalrymple, whose real name is Anthony Daniels, M.D., is a retired Brit prison psychiatrist.

Here is a list of his books. If anybody can find a photo of him, let me know. I can't.

Thanks Opie - that was quick! A pleasant, benevolent-looking fellow with a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket.

And thanks to Mr. Vanderleun for another photo, and a bio, here.

The Dancing Lady is a fine optical illusion: she moves both clockwise and counterclockwise, depending on how your brain views her.

Blink once or twice, and you can change her direction. However, most people have an innate tendency to see her moving in one or the other.

People's Cube uses this image as the basis for a discussion about the subjectivity of perception.

Unfiltered, unprocessed perception isn't truth, but we already know that.

h/t, Tim Blair

In the pomo world anything is better than Christmas, and Saturnalia was much more fun - no rules - a festival of disinhibition like Mardi Gras or Bacchanalia.

So if we must have a Winter Solstice holiday, let's get rid of this "offensive-to-many" Jesus stuff and reach back to the Romans, before the church fathers got rid of all the pagan fun and replaced it with a Christ's Birthday Holy Day. Fort Collins, CO surely agrees.

Sorry - no room at that inn anymore.

That is of course, a too-skinny Callas, with her weakened and beaten-up voice at the end of her career - but who wants to judge Callas?

Having seen the rarely-performed 1917 comic opera Gianni Schicchi for the first time yesterday, I can finally put Mio babbino caro into full context. As the Bird Dog daughter said yesterday, "It's not even an aria. It's too short, and there is no refrain. It's just sung lines. Should be longer."

In the plot, Gianni (we call him "Johnny"), the crafty lawyer, manages to create a fake will for a wealthy Florentine family friend giving everything to himself, thus providing his daughter with a sufficent dowry to marry the aristocratic boy she loves. Gianni, in Dante's Inferno, can be found in the 9th circle of hell - yet there was redemption in love: her little song was what persuaded her dad cross the line. What dad could not be similarly moved?

A propos the link this morning about lying about infant mortality (but also a propos everything else) we urge all readers and all Americans to read Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics.

You do not need to be a math whiz to understand it, but if you don't know this basic stuff, you will be easily duped. Duped expecially by the MSM, which is not only biased in data presentation but is also widely ignorant about the most basic statistics.

In the link we mentioned above, the report was making an "apples and oranges error", known as a "Category Error."  It's the same error involved in the report that showed the world's best cancer center, Sloan-Kettering Memorial in NYC, as having the worst mortality rates of American hospitals. Data can be technically accurate, yet meaningless. Similarly, the most talented docs often have the lowest success rates because they take on the toughest cases.

Money manager acquaintances have told me how they make their numbers look good: they select their best time frame to present, and they decide whether to include or exclude new money added during that time frame. That is a fallacy known as selection bias. A good example at the bottom here: how different would the impression be if you just charted June to November?

Speaking of money managers, I have also enjoyed Jones' How to Lie with Charts and Graphs. Fun to peruse.

From It Takes a Church last year:

God of the ages,
We thank You for all who have served in the armed forces of this country.
We thank You for the freedom their sacrifice has earned and guarded for us. Help us to prize this freedom and use it well.
We ask You to bless all living veterans in a special way today, as well as the families of all veterans.
Comfort those who grieve for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.
Strengthen those who bear physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds.
Stand with those who provide care to them.
Move us to reach out to sisters and brothers who are veterans, or relatives of veterans, or who currently serve in the military.
We pray for the day when no one needs to serve in the military. Help us to live now in anticipation of that day, as people who long for peace, who pray for peace, and who seek to be peacemakers in this world.

"Just because you're 83 doesn't mean you have to sit around and drool."

George H.W. Bush, yesterday:

Luke 20: 27

27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him ²⁸and asked him a question, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. ²⁹Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; ³⁰then the second ³¹and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. ³²Finally the woman also died. ³³In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.’

34 Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; ³⁵but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. ³⁶Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. ³⁷And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. ³⁸Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’....Then some of the scribes answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ ⁴⁰For they no longer dared to ask him another question.

A snap of the interior of St. Peter's Church (1837), where we saw Pucchini's one-act Gianni Schicchi yesterday performed by the Chelsea Opera.

Exterior:

23rd St. in Chelsea, down from the church:

From What Bob Dylan Is Not, by Sean Curnyn in the Weekly Standard, 2006, a quote:

He really should have known better. In an interview several months later with Edna Gundersen in USA Today, Dylan was asked about the absence of any song about the current war on his own latest album, Modern Times.

"Didn't Neil Young do that?" he jokes . . . "What's funny about the Neil record, when I heard 'Let's Impeach the President,' I thought it was something old that had been lying around. I said, 'That's crazy, he's doing a song about Clinton?'"

With his sly and somewhat wicked response, Dylan had (1) desperately frustrated the considerable number of more obvious Dylan fans who have been waiting on the edge of a cliff for him to say or sing something--anything!--against President Bush and the Iraq war and (2) told Neil Young none-too-subtly that he found his recent ultrapolitical songwriting essentially pointless.

Somehow, after over 40 years of evidence to the contrary, much of the world seems to continue to expect the man who is arguably America's greatest songwriter to sign on to left/liberal causes at the first opportunity. If nothing else, it is proof that in attempting to kidnap Dylan's songs (in Dylan's own words, his songs were "subverted into polemics" in the 1960s), the left succeeded in convincing the average person that both the work and the man did, indeed, belong to them.

Nobody owns Bob. Read the whole thing. (h/t, reader)

Ringo's hair salon bit is the best: "Would you like a cuppa tea, Madam?"  More good Beatles links at Grow A Brain

A school voucher debate, at Pajamas

Dissecting Asus' EEE PC

Where was your car made? Cafe Hayek

The politics of planted questions. Patterico

Beer, Harp and Horns: Always a good listen

A unique blog: Indexed

Tort awards on free speech, Pretty interesting.

They call this reporting the news? The Globe just cannot stand the fact that Sarkozy - or anyone - likes America.

Peggy Noonan on Hillary vs. Thatcher.

Fort Worth, TX deals with "nigger" intelligently. There are many ugly and rude words in English. Sticks and stones...

I hope the Supremes take on the DC 2nd Amendment appeal.

How many academics feel like frauds? Norm. How many people, in general?

Hate speech: If you are Conservative or Libertarian-minded, you will surely recognize yourself in these words.

The Vioxx settlements. Worstall. Thus was an excellent drug taken off the market, and a great, innovative business damaged. It's probably just about greed that these lawsuits are brought. Does anybody really expect medicine to be without side effects? No free lunch.

From a piece on Venezuela at Devil's Excrement:

There is no milk but there is yogurt. There is no sugar, but there is Splenda. There are no eggs, nor meat, nor rice, but there is caviar, salmon and all the things to make Sushi. What type of economy is this? Who are the geniuses that play politics in the name of the poor and the result is that all that is available are the goods for the rich?

From the sane Joe Lieberman:

"There is something profoundly wrong — something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran's murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

Photo: Wine shop in Florence