Maggie's Farm

Cooking With Glass: How Pyrex Transformed Every Kitchen Into a Home-Ec Lab

Yes, suicide does correlate precisely with US spending on science. Fun topic, fun book.  But you can get the gist of it just by looking at the site: Spurious Correlations. 

At This New College, Yes to Latin and Hiking but No to Cellphones and Federal Aid. Like Hillsdale, in some ways: Wyoming Catholic College.

Article by George Leef.

Peterson is right. The Liberal Arts have been degraded by neo-Marxist jibber-jabber, and few students find inspiration in that. It's deadening.

“The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.”

Jacques Barzun, from a collection of his observations

We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it’s in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they’ll do you harm, why isn’t it all right to say you must not eat too much because you’ll do harm? Why isn’t it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you’re likely to die? Why isn’t it all right to say, “Oh, skiing, that’s no good, that’s a very dangerous sport, you’ll hurt yourself”? Where do you draw the line?

Milton Friedman (h/t Ace)

Curating is the new pretentious term for picking and choosing things you like or want. I was recently at a restaurant which offered a "Curated selection of organic teas." 

Well, highly-selective colleges now "curate" their admissions. Of course, they always have done so. 80 years ago they wanted to be preppy, WASPy clubs.  Not now.

The top-rated comment on a column titled "Harvard can’t have it all" (about the lawsuit charging discrimination against Asian-American applicants).

I very much doubt that Harvard, for example, is biased against Asians. Selective schools are not purely meritocratic, if grades and SATs are the only measures of merit. They are not, of course. They do want a mix of interesting and talented people who they think can contribute to, and thrive in, their environment, and who will be future successful ornaments to their alma mater They make a bet that you will be special. Plus necessary legacies and donors. And quarterbacks. And bassoonists.

In my view, as long as past performance and IQ (eg SAT) meet some standard, let them "curate" their Freshman classes at will.  Elite schools could fill their classes many times over with kids with perfect grades and perfect SATs, but that would make no sense at all.

Has the Justice Dept and the FBI been a rogue system?  Dem advisor Penn says they have been a state unto themselves. It is true that they hold frightening power, but when they go political, can't be fired, and refuse to respond to congress, what is that?

This from last week:

Brilliant analysis. This was before the inauguration, I think. VDH underestimated Trump, in retrospect. Good phrase: "Boutique environmentalism."

Lawns are foolish things but unless you live in the woods, a desert, or a beachy place, they are sort of expected.

A lawn is a certain sort of constantly-cut garden, copied from the estates of England where sheep kept the grass neatly cropped and sheep poop kept it fertilized. (Thus putting greens.)

If you want a happy lawn, I recommend aerating a lawn every two years with a coring machine, in late Spring. Or now. Every year, if it is used heavily by kids, animals, sports, or heavy mowers. If you have bare patches, overseed before coring.

At at about the same time, you topdress the grass with compost, manure, sand, or mixes of those. It works as mulch, fertilizer, worm food, microorganism food, etc. Health, because lawns are not natural and you have no sheep.

You can rent a coring machine anywhere for a day or two. Leave the cores on the grass. They disintegrate fast. 

For large lawns or golf courses, large machines almost like farm manure-spreaders do the topdressing, but you can spread good compost mixes with a fertilizer spreader or with shovel and rake. 

Around here, you can have a pleasant and useful lawn without irrigation and maybe only once or twice/year organic fertilizing if you treat it as the garden that sod is. You have to assume that lawns will brown up in the greatest heat of summer, but it's only a few weeks. That's natural grass dormancy. It bounces right back.

Irrigation and nitrogen fertilizer are like photoshopping a lawn. Fake. An important garden lawn might need irrigation though, to look Spring-like during the late summer weeks.

 How to Topdress Your Lawn with Compost

Photo is a commercial aerator/corer. The ones you can rent are like heavy lawn mowers.

Story here. We now understand that the SAT turned out to be basically a proxy for IQ.  It makes sense to me for schools to be interested in IQ.  Of course, there is far more to what a person might have to offer than IQ, but I think they ought to know that when making distinctions between applicants. Especially at a school like Chicago, which, unlike most of higher ed, requires that a graduate actually ends up knowing a lot of basic things which are not easy to learn.

I am just talking about Liberal Arts higher ed, of course. 

From A GREAT HIGH SCHOOL AND THE MAYOR WHO WOULD DIMINISH IT, an ethnic/racial breakdown of one of NYC's three elite high schools:

Asian — 613
White — 151
Hispanic — 27
Black — 10

Why do they even measure these statistics? Can't we just view people as people? I am confident that nobody in the board of ed is discriminating against whites, hispanics, and blacks.

Interview transcript here. A slice of her comments: 

I think one major impetus for my change was the fact that, despite being in default liberal environments all of my life, I nevertheless always adored the works of the Western literary tradition. And when I saw the 1980s’ multiculturalism taking over university campuses, and ignorant students who had never read the works of the Western canon feeling empowered to reject those works on the basis of the gonads and melanin of their authors, that to me was appalling.

Ironically, people I don’t think understand this distinction, in the 1970s, which was the height of this very abstruse literary theory known as deconstruction, that you mentioned, and that I was an uncritical acolyte of. However odd the theories of language were, holding that meaning is impossible, that the human self is just a fiction, a trope of language, we read the canon without ever once thinking to say, if I’m a female, “Oh, gee, I can’t read Milton because he’s a dead white male.” It never came up. So, I fortunately had a strong grounding in greatness, in beauty, in eloquence, in sublimity. And when that came under attack, that started to turn me away from the broader trends that were going on in academia.

The USA is the worst country in the world. Europe is a terrible ex-colonial place in its death throes, a quaint museum with food. European civilization is the worst the world has produced. The Western World is obsolete and evil, etc.

These radical chic attitudes are getting old-fashioned, but they are still around in academia: It’s Time to Fight for Western Civilization

A short book and a warning about life from Carl Hiassen:  Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You'll Never Hear

It's a short post.

Our friend AVI noted the Gini coefficents in the US, by state. The Gini statistical method measures income "gaps" and is seen as a measure of economic inequality. And inequality is supposed to be bad, for no reason I can understand other than that it just sounds bad. "Gaps" sounds bad too.

It seems to me that if a state has lots of wealthy people, it's good for the state. But if a state has lots of rich people and lots of poor immigrants, it gets a bad grade. A solidly middle-class state like Utah (few very rich, few poor immigrants or "inner cities") gets a "good" grade because it is neither a magnet for immigrants nor a magnet for high-income industry. 

In any event, all of the states in the US seem pretty close. The only one that bothers me is that Washington DC tops the "bad" list and it is obvious why that is. Government makes for a very wealthy industry in that factory town thanks to us taxpayers - and a large part of it is a ghetto.

Anyway, if government wants to "solve" these "gaps", the easiest way to do it is to drive the rich out of state. Problem solved, statistics fixed. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are trying hard to do that.

Florida, Texas, South Carolina, and Wyoming are very welcoming of prosperous people and prosperous businesses.

This essay (actually a book review) took me two readings: Founding philosophy by Michael Anton - A review of The Political Theory of the American Founding by Thomas G. West.

Whenever I read on this topic, I am reminded about how radical and idealistic it all was. Equal rights, the sanctity of property rights, weak government subservient to the citizens, and attempting to take into account all we know about the flaws in human nature while counting on virtue, religion, and self-reliance to keep the nation on a wholesome track.

With all of their opportunities to seek power, those guys tried to set up a system with as limited and contained power as possible. Quite a remarkable, bold, and humble experiment into the unknown and untried. 

Even as government power and authority have grown like Topsy over two centuries, the US remains the desired destination for millions on this planet, for better or worse. Sad to say, I think that is more about economics than the ideal of individual freedom. That ideal is not native or natural to most societies and cultures.

 “Would you rather have a Princeton diploma without the Princeton education, or a Princeton education without a Princeton diploma?”

Austen Allred, via  6 Forces Disrupting Higher Education. It's a cute question,  but I don't know what a "Princeton education" means. It could mean any one of a hundred things. I have a better idea of what a U of Chicago education means.

‘I’m off the plantation, bro!’ Video of black Stanford student goes viral. Here’s his back story.

Silence Around Test Scores Serves the Privileged

Every college has its price. 

To what extent are degrees little more than credentialing?

From Roger Kimball's The Long March: Reckoning With 1968's 'Cultural Revolution,' 50 Years On

(Writing about Rousseau) In the Confessions, he claimed to be “drunk on virtue.” And indeed, it turned out that “virtue” for Rousseau had nothing to do with acting or behaving in a certain way toward others. On the contrary, the criterion of virtue was his subjective feeling of goodness. For Rousseau, as for the countercultural radicals who followed him, “feeling good about yourself” was synonymous with moral rectitude. Actually behaving well was irrelevant if not, indeed, a sign of “inauthenticity” because it suggested a concern for conventional approval. Virtue in this Rousseauvian sense is scarcely distinguishable from moral intoxication. Anyone who has contemplated the suppression of free speech in the name of sensitivity and identity politics on our college campuses will understand what I mean.

Establishing the reign of virtue is no easy task, as Rousseau’s avid disciple Maximilien Robespierre discovered to his chagrin. All those “particular wills” -- i.e., individual men and women with their diverse aims and desires -- are so recalcitrant and so ungrateful for one’s efforts to make them virtuous. Still, one does what one can to convince them to conform. And the guillotine, of course, is a great expedient. ..