Maggie's Farm

Is college supposed to be more demanding than High School? Maybe not, in the new, democratized Higher Ed. From a post at Chronicle on reading books:

...when I listen to students today chat (not, I hasten to point out, the ones in my very own class who are all good looking, strong, and above average) about their classes, I too often hear criticism of the work load rather than excitement about the subject matter, a complaint about the hours taken from meeting with friends or playing sports rather than engaging in debate, deciphering philosophy, history or a good poem. “Keep it neat, simple and to the point,” my faculty colleagues tell me. If I assign too much work, they say, students will write negative comments and the following semester enrollment will plummet.

Over the transom:

"We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election.

On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, and a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer.

On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.

Is there a contest here?"

From an essay by Richard Wolin in Chronicle of Higher Ed, titled Jurgen Habermas and Post Secular Societies. It begins:

Among 19th-century thinkers it was an uncontestable commonplace that religion's cultural centrality was a thing of the past. For Georg Hegel, following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment, religion had been surpassed by reason's superior conceptual precision. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach depicted the relationship between man and divinity as a zero-sum game. In his view, the stress on godliness merely detracted from the sublimity of human ends. In one of his youthful writings, Karl Marx, Feuerbach's most influential disciple, famously dismissed religion as "the opium of the people." Its abolition, Marx believed, was a sine qua non for human betterment. Friedrich Nietzsche got to the heart of the matter by having his literary alter ego, the brooding prophet Zarathustra, brusquely declaim, "God is dead," thereby pithily summarizing what many educated Europeans were thinking but few had the courage actually to say. And who can forget Nietzsche's searing characterization of Christianity as a "slave morality," a plebeian belief system appropriate for timorous conformists but unsuited to the creation of a future race of domineering Übermenschen? True to character, the only representatives of Christianity Nietzsche saw fit to praise were those who could revel in a good auto-da-fé -- Inquisition stalwarts like Ignatius Loyola.

Twentieth-century characterizations of belief were hardly more generous. Here, one need look no further than the title of Freud's 1927 treatise on religion: The Future of an Illusion.

Today, however, there are omnipresent signs of a radical change in mentality.

Read the whole thing.

From a comment on the above book at AEI:

Religious belief is thriving in America today, even though it seems under assault as seldom before--attacked by secularists, scientists, and increasingly vocal atheists; constrained by judges and civil libertarians; mocked by contemporary artists; and treated pragmatically, if not cynically, by politicians seeking votes. This book explores the enduring strength of religion in American life. Faith and religious observance are not obsolete or incompatible with modern society; on the contrary, the religious principles that guided the Founders continue to bind the nation and justify human endeavor.

 

In Religion and the American Future, a distinguished group of scholars examine the future of religion in America. Michael Novak, John C. Green, Leon R. Kass, Douglas W. Kmiec, Roger Kimball, and Marcello Pera contemplate in turn the relationship of religion to the dominant secular realms of politics, science, law, and art. They argue that the religious and the secular realms should construct a mutual and productive understanding; that faith-based voting is not the threat it often seems; that science cannot answer humanity's deepest moral inquiries; and that the United States Constitution presupposes the existence of God. The volume concludes with an instructive look at Europe and the troubling implications of turning away from religious belief altogether.

In the WSJ, Peggy Noonan begins thus:

I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.

Read the whole thing, which I think sums it all up.

From The Art Revolution in Cuba, in the WSJ, which begins:

John Crago, an agricultural exporter from Colorado, took a business trip to Cuba last spring. He came back with 60 paintings, from island landscapes to abstract works, rolled up in his carry-on luggage.

With art from Asia and Russia in demand, some in the art world are betting on Cuba to be the next hot corner of the market. Prices for Cuban art are climbing at galleries and auction houses, and major museums are adding to their Cuban collections. In May, Sotheby's broke the auction record for a Cuban work when it sold Mario Carreño's modernist painting "Danza Afro-Cubana" for $2.6 million, triple its high estimate.

Photo of decaying Havana by Carlos Garaicoa, from the WSJ article 

Also interesting: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz. He creates things with everything from Bosco to shovels. Much of his stuff defies definition.

Russian Steel buys American mills

A brief for Whitey: Buchanan

At Foreign Affairs, The Unfulfilled revolution of Chavez. Name one socialist revolution that was "fulfilled."

Cuba should be the Hong Kong or Singapore of Latin America. Canada.com. Used to be a great place to visit. Now it's a Commie dump - despite the wonderful Cubans. I believe they have gun control there.

"The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash" One quote:

We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the lips of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.

It was politically brilliant of FDR's speech writers to use the language of "rights" (which until that time in American liberty-oriented, revolutionary language had referred to rights granted by God to individual humans in opposition to government power) to the "right," or even the duty, of government to take the fruits of our efforts and that of our parents, without any apparent limit.

With a devilishly clever twisting of "freedom"  language, leveraged with the timely intervention of the Great Depression, FDR decided to turn a charitable US with Christian values into a welfare state with a strong dose of secular socialist values. He had plenty of other choices.

I recently ran into an essay by Cass Sunstein in The American Prospect on FDR's "Second Bill of Rights."

A quote:

Roosevelt said that the nation "cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people--whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth--is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure." Roosevelt looked back, and not entirely approvingly, to the framing of the Constitution. At its inception, the nation had grown "under the protection of certain inalienable political rights--among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures."

But, he added, over time, "we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." As Roosevelt saw it, "necessitous men are not free men," not least because those who are hungry and jobless "are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made." He echoed the words of the Declaration of Independence, urging a kind of Declaration of Interdependence: "In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all--regardless of station, race, or creed."

Sunstein approves of FDR's revolution. Read the whole thing.

Comment from The Barrister: We cannot rest until one insecure family is made secure? What does that mean? My life would be instantly insecure if I decided to quit work today, grab a six-pack and go fishin.'

Comment from Bird Dog: To imagine that FDR and his pals were indifferent to the laws of incentive and of unintended consequences would be to underestimate them. Since I do not believe that it is possilble to be charitable with other people's money, I assume that they were simply very crafty politicians. The Dems have never wavered from that same strategy: the more people you put on the dole and the fewer folks you have paying all of the taxes, the more votes you get. It's not complicated. Hence the moves for socialized medicine...and then what next, after that?

Comment from Dr. Bliss: As an aristocrat in a family with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, FDR never had to worry about freedom. Freedom never entered into his administration's equations, and the Progressives back then had as little interest in struggling with the conflicts between individual freedom and autonomy vs. material social well-being, as they do today.

A new and useful hobby: Coin Stacking.

Many photos of his glue-free structures at the link.

Some of the expected prices of American furniture and folk art in a Christie's auction today and tomorrow are astonishing. Still, I thought our readers might be most interested in the values of the old decoys in that auction.

The hen merganser above is expected to fetch between $200-250,000. Another hen merganser in the auction is expected to fetch up to $500,000.

In the NY Sun's piece on the auction, they note:

Americana doesn't have to be made from precious metal or come with a society pedigree. Christie's will be auctioning hand-carved duck decoys this week with several estimated in the $500,000 range. What makes carved birds so pricey? "It's the confluence of two collecting categories — hunters and folk-art collectors coming together and competing over the same material," the head of Christie's Americana department, Margot Rosenberg, said. Twenty years ago, a similar phenomenon took place with weather vanes. "Weather vanes was the old story," Ms. Rosenberg said. "This is the new story. At auction, a bird has yet to break a million, but one will soon."

It's time for everybody to check Grandpa's barns and sheds for old decoys.

It's thin for a guy his age, compared to most people I know. It is not apparent that he ever had a real job in the real world - but neither did Bill Clinton: WaPo. Narcissists hate to compete in the real world, because they might not win.

On the other hand, few people who really do things go into politics. They seem to be the exceptions. 

More on his background at American Thinker.

From the news piece:

“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.

Steve Boigon, 62, a florist from San Diego, wrote, “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.”

Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.

In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet — nerd safari garb — he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.

He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.

He was No. 1 on the most downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that lineup constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford.