Maggie's Farm

The relentlessly arrogant and condescending Noam Chomsky is wrong about most things. The fame which gave him a voice in politics was, of course, his linguistic theory on which, as it turns out, a generation of Linguists have wasted their careers. 

Because that turns out to be wrong too. Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned

If interested in language, Roger Brown's fascinating 1968 Words and Things can't be beat.

Photo is Harvard students, 1953

If you dressed that way in college today, people would assume that you were as gay as Milo. However, kids in fine private schools still dress in ties for class, and those youths in the photo were probably just wearing something similar to what they had always worn to school. People used to dress for church too. I still do. It shows respect for the occasion. Please do not wear cut-off jeans to church. I am sure God doesn't care, but I do. (And you gals, please do not dress too sexy. It is a terrible distraction for us guys.)

It seems to me that part of the post-war cultural change in the US, and in the West generally, contained a degree of psychological regression, a clinging to childhood or adolescence. I do not know why that happened (decadence from prosperity and comfort?), but there was a time when people aged 18 were adults, viewed themselves as adults, comported themselves as adults, dressed like adults and, in short, aspired to be dignified grown-ups. I know this from my parents, but I grew up after that. Adulthood was difficult for them (military service, war, money, etc) but adulthood is always a deadly serious matter for which children are not equipped.

Dress expectations are superficial for sure, but they still mean something. So do all other cultural expectations. I am most comfortable associating with those who share my cultural expectations. Generally, know what to expect. Birds of a feather...

Solway discusses The Infantilizing of the Academy. I will not blame anybody or anything for the cultural regressions, but it is an interesting question.

It's about time that a national politician made an issue of public K-12 education. Only somebody with the audacity of Trump would do it. In some ways promotion of school choice seems most relevant (and appealing) to inner-city blacks but there is no reason it should not be appealing to others.

While elite private schools can be prohibitively expensive, most charter schools cost less to run than government education. Prosperous people (like Clintons and Trumps) have school choice for their families. Nobody else does. What matters is choice. Probably most public ed in the US does a fine job but, fine or not so fine, why not give parents a choice?

Trump’s Marshall Plan for Inner-City Kids - School choice is the most important civil rights cause since Martin Luther King:

 Everyone with eyes knows that the urban public school system in America is a travesty. Over decades the Left took a basically good system that churned out good citizens, entrepreneurs, and employees, and transformed it into a jobs program for adults, especially Democratic Party supporters and labor bosses. It amounts to a gigantic partisan slush fund that everyone who pays taxes in America is forced to support. And no matter how much money gets spent, things never seem to improve...

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

G K Chesterton,  as quoted in Warren's On the need to remain cheerful. Warren's short essay reminded me a bit of Kipling's eternal IF:

If you can keep your head when all about you  
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;  
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;  
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;  
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;  
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,  
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,  
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Pathetic. New Videos Show How Yale Betrayed Itself By Favoring Cry-Bullies.

What kind of people are these administrators? Surely Yale Univ. has thousands of smart, normal students even if the admin consists of castrati. Are they all intimidated into silence while these circuses occur?  Or too busy studying to have time for nonsense?

Farmers Deserve Free Markets, Not Handouts

Farming is a big industry today, thriving on government handouts. Thus the citizen pays twice for food: once in taxes and once in the store. Why is Big Ag insulated from supply and demand (I know - politics).  Must be nice to be an industry for which supply and demand do not exist. Nice, but degrading.

And ethanol is the worse.

From The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration

and other old-time insults

Regarding big-time college sports, Isn’t it Time to De-escalate the Arms Race?

Big-time sports simply do not blend well with academic pursuits. Georgia Tech’s Richard DeMillo nailed that point when he wrote in this Pope Center article: “Sports programs are grafted onto universities to extract value from academic programs for the sake of the sports programs. Athletic decision-making cannot be trusted to align itself with academic goals when so many of the incentives are tied to the success of a non-core, big money operation that has virtually no relationship to academic outcomes.”

Is there any hope of escaping from the arms race for sports prestige?

Useless as it may be, it's too popular to go away.

Capitulation to adolescents? Via Heterodox Academy, a brief documentary by Brown alum Rob Montz:

Alice Ely Chapman wages a one-woman war on poverty.

Good for her, but you do not need to go to Appalachia to find Charles Murray's Fishtowns. There is lots of dysfunction out there, and many people lacking in "Social Capital" and "Cultural Capital". So much, in fact, that the Fishtown life might be a sort of normal. The Belmonts might be exceptions, not normal.

Leading a high-functioning, disciplined, and productive life is far more difficult that it can appear.  When dependency becomes normalized, behavioral regression and immaturity are further enabled.

Please see Belmont & Fishtown:

 America has never been a classless society. From the beginning, rich and poor have usually lived in different parts of town, gone to different churches, and had somewhat different manners and mores. It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.

Above the wheel and fire. A discussion of Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech.

 “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

John Maynard Keynes (of all people) as quoted at Zero Hedge's "We Are At A Point Where The Encroachment Of Government Power Has Historically Resulted In Rebellion"

There are good reasons.  Among the reasons are that science is performed for money, by human beings.

The War on Charters Escalates.  It must be an election year. Teachers' unions are rich.

There was a time when teacher unions were on the cutting edge of reform, and it would be a mistake now not to recognize those accomplishments, and not to understand the good reasons many people still have to support them. But the future of our schools isn’t more of the same: more big box, one-size-fits-all cookie cutter educational institutions in which everybody moves at the same pace through the machine. As the American economy changes, our schools must change too. Big box schools prepare people for big box jobs: in government bureaucracies, in bureaucratic stable corporations, on jobs for life assembly lines.

We are going to need schools that are focused on preparing kids both intellectually and socially for very different lives than their grandparents led. Among other things, this means that we don’t want the next generation to spend most of its formative years under the guidance of people who have been socialized into the jobs for life in behemoth institutions.

It's not Grandpa's Yale anymore: The Birth of a New Institution - How two Yale presidents and their admissions directors tore up the “old blueprint” to create a modern Yale.

Our pal Assistant Village Idiot sounded inverse-snobbery about this fine lunch, but I still love it. I grew up with this thing, yes, at the Club. It was always turkey, not chicken. Always served with a little cup of extra mayo, and with kitchen-made chips and not french fries. My club still makes their own chips - heavenly.

At home, we had five basic sandwiches: Baloney with mustard and lettuce, the excellent BLT, Fluffernutter, BB&J, and Tuna Salad. That was Mom's sandwich repertoire.

History of the Club Sandwich.

h/t, reader

 The Dictatorial, Anti-Democratic and Socialist Character of Interventionism

Many advocates of interventionism are bewildered when one tells them that in recommending interventionism they themselves are fostering anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies and the establishment of totalitarian socialism. They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favour a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government.

What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this failure of its first intervention, is not prepared to undo its interference with the market and to return to a free economy, it must add to its first measure more and more regulations and restrictions. Proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism of the German pattern, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis, emerges.

- von Mises, Ludwig (1947). Planned Chaos

"The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them." 

- Glenn Reynolds

"When you're explaining, you're losing."

That expression has been going around a lot lately, especially applied to Mr. Trump.  Corollaries might be "If you're complaining, you're losing" and "If you're making excuses, you're losing."

People thought he would be a fiery antagonist, but his aim is terrible. Hillary is a sitting duck, for 100 reasons.

return, but in somewhat new forms.

No doubt there will be safe spaces for white middle class jocks too. People like to hang out with those with whom they have more in common. The racial component seems rather strange, as if, for example, all brown people have a lot in common. That is ridiculous.

I predict that one ethnic group will not go for this sort of thing: Asians.  Forgive the evil stereotype, but Asian kids seem versatile, comfortable, well-adjusted, and goal-directed. There are reasons for that, and it is not all their higher average IQs.

Intellectuals are Freaks. Lind begins:

I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds too much like “public nuisance” or even “public enemy” for my taste.

My point is that people who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies. They — we — are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of  their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals...

"Membership entails obligations, many of which are unchosen."

That there are empty seats in the hall at Princeton is astonishing to me. I would go to listen to Sir Roger anytime.