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.
A friend recently extended his driveway to put in a Pickleball court. The game is like a cross between tennis, ping-pong, paddle tennis, etc. It looks like this:
Was Kelo decided rightly or wrongly? The Supremes decided the case against Mrs.Kelo and her little pink house 5-4. Naturally, the little people of the USA were horrified by the decision which indicated that a local government could take your property for the use of a private business.
Science is not about finding the truth at all, but about finding better ways of being wrong. The best scientific theory is not the one that reveals the truth — that is impossible. It is the one that explains what we already know about the world in the simplest way possible, and that makes useful predictions about the future. When I accepted that I would always be wrong, and that my favourite theories are inevitably destined to be replaced by other, better, theories — that is when I really knew that I wanted to be a scientist.
Read the utterly innocuous but useful piece. How the idea of debating scientific theories could be "high risk" is beyond me. Or maybe the very phrase "free speech" triggers people. If so, I feel depressed.
Famous quote to Stalin from Lavrentry Beria, head of Stalin's secret police.
I continue to recommend the (depressing) Three Felonies a Day by Prof. Harvey Silverglate. You can count on it. You are a felon. There are 6000 federal crimes (including owning an owl or eagle feather), and nobody knows all of them until somebody looks one up to pin on somebody they decide to target. That's not counting the 40,000 pages of federal regulations.
Feel free to confess in the comments for your trivial crimes which might be past the statute of limitations.
Nack was a towering figure in the history of sports journalism, a literary wordsmith and tireless reporter whose distinctive and soaring prose is revered by his peers and generations of younger writers. He stands among the best sportswriters in the history of the genre, and in many ways, among the best writers of any kind. When he stopped typing, he was a giant personality, full of endless good charm, disarmingly well-read and all times, given to entertain...
And here's Nack's reminiscences of his favorite horse, Secretariat: Pure Heart
I was asked this weekend "In what ways are Trump's policies any different from Bill Clinton's, and how is Trump's character any more reprehensible than Bill Clinton's?"
I replied that their policies were similarly moderate, and that Trump was not a rapist.
Probably a pointless gesture. I hope it is a parting shot. Re the commentariat, however, I consider that if Trump sent the bombs it would be "Insane warmonger Trump playing Wag the Dog," and if he didn't it would be "Proof he's working for Russia."
I see no compelling US interest in Syria. Assad is just one of 50 terrible rulers, but Syria probably needs him. And I do not care what Russia does. That crappy country is destroying itself anyway.
Powerline: "For someone who grew up in the era that I did, it is hard to believe that the FBI has fallen so low. "You get the impression that today's FBI is filled with liars with political agendas. Not good. Was that always the case? I suppose it was with J Edgar Hoover...
We await the FBI's IG report, although we still wonder how the FBI can inspect itself.
“Another way in which I tried to define the crank was that he always begins at the wrong end. He never knows the right way to take hold of anything, as one takes hold of a cat by the scruff of the neck. He always tries to catch his cat by the tail; especially if it is a Manx cat. The thing he begins with is always the thing that is last — and least. Thus, if he is talking about the ancient and lawful bond between man and woman, he will talk about votes before he talks about vows. Thus, if he is talking about children, he will be genuinely interested in the children’s schools; it will never so much as cross his mind that children, as a class, generally belong to families. If he is interested in Shakespeare, he will not be interested in Shakespeare’s poetry; he will be interested in the extraordinary question of who wrote it. If he is interested in one of the Gospels or in one of the Epistles, he will not be interested in what is written there; he will be interested in some bottomless bosh about when it was written.”
The college screechers disparage manliness, but the real world continues to value specific, ideal manly qualities because they are so useful in life and helpful to others. Young men, listen up.
Historically, the path from boy to man was hard-earned and marked by specific achievements. With the modern invention of adolescence and "extended adolescence", the lines are blurred. Like the song says, a "mannish boy" is not a man. Puberty does not make a man, nor does sexual activity.
Are the ideal "manly" qualities today very different from those of the past? I don't know. I can tell you what qualities my friends aspire to and work towards as a life-long project: providing for and protecting family and progeny, independence, courage and shame for weakness, the willingness to take risk, the willingness to be tough and forceful when needed, a seriousness about life while remaining cheerful, physical fitness and athletic development, mental fitness, spiritual development, skill development of all sorts, community involvement, responsibility and integrity, kindness and being a good friend, having constructive life goals, generosity of spirit, etc etc. We discuss these things in our men's Bible study group.
It's a tall order, and that is exactly the point. We all raise boys to aspire towards these qualities, knowing full well that it is a challenging and difficult path with many speed bumps and disappointments. (How different or difficult the path is for women is not something I feel qualified to discuss.)
When I went off to prep school at 13, on the first day the Headmaster said to us (paraphrased from memory): "Welcome, boys. You have said your goodbyes to your parents and have had a nice lunch. We are delighted to have you now officially join our school. I am sorry to tell you that we will make it very hard for you and you will suffer many disappointments but we expect that you boyswill become adult young men who are a credit to this school when you graduate. One more warning. Disappoint us too deeply and you will be sent home to your Mom. Please do not do that. Since we picked each of you carefully and personally, we expect that each one of you will have victories too in whatever areas you choose. If you have troubles with something, let us know. We are on your side but we will be tough in expecting and demanding your success, so get ready for the adventure. Give everything your best. You have one hour to settle into your rooms, and then report to the Field House for your health and physical fitness and sports assessments. Good luck, boys, and I will see you tomorrow morning in Chapel."
Good little speech about male privilege. Although the intellectual challenges were intense, overall it seemed secondary to their focus on personal development, to expand oneself to become the best, most developed person you could be. School, or parents, same message.
Last week I posted on Does Language Shape Our Thoughts? The subject provoked some discussion. It is true that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis turns out to have little empirical support, but I'll stand by my experience that a new word or phrase, and the concept in them, certainly effect the ways I think and can even give me a new tool to think in a new way. Heck, that is called "education." (a quote on the topic below the fold)
I think one problem might be taking the implications of a theory too far, too globally. This brings me to the notion of "social construction," popularized by Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality.After I read it, I asked my professor whether social constructionism might be a social construct.
Berger and Luckmann's claims were stimulating and I am certain that they have limited application despite being unreinforced by data. (I don't know how one gets data on such types of epistemologic theorizing.) However they were welcomed by radicals and deconstruction postmodernists who took them to extremes, sometimes to psychotic levels of subjectivity, because they appeared to support the ideas of the infinite malleability of the human mind and heart, and the impossibility of objectivity.
It seems self-evident that language and ideas shape our thoughts. Almost nobody ever has an original thought, but new words and new ideas we obtain from others and from the past are exciting (or disturbing) because of their shaping or re-shaping effects.
There is some Goethe quote that we can only see what we know. If you see a "fighter jet" and I see an F-16, our mental representations of the thing are entirely different. Similarly, if you see "woods" and I see an Oak-Beech climax forest. Knowledge embedded in language shapes our perceptions and thus our thought.
My favorite question is "Who was the genius who invented numbers?" Are numbers "real"? . Remarkably, not all cultures have/had numbers. Numbers make a huge difference in how we perceive the world. And colors are just handy bunching of slices of the humanly visible electromagnetic spectrum.
I suggest that we get our own act together instead of waiting for utopia. There is no utopia, and heaven, I am told, is like a boring vacation. A harp is a fine instrument, but all day long? Not to say that meeting God would not be an exciting moment.
It's about W.H. Auden's humanities class at Michigan in 1941. This is not mass-market, fast-food education.
Its syllabus resurfaced a few years ago and provoked much commentary on its mass of 6,000 pages of the most powerful and challenging literature in the canon: The Divine Comedy in full, four Shakespeares, Pascal’s Pensées, Horace’s odes, Volpone, Racine, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Faust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka, Rilke, T.S. Eliot. Auden even included nine operas. Opera in the 1940s was a popular art form, with millions of people tuning in each week to the Met’s Saturday broadcast, but it’s hard to imagine anything less consonant with millennials’ attention span than one of Wagner’s Teutonic enormities. Auden assigned three of them.
Families without good father role models do not work well, statistically. Where are the good men? And why do women go along with this program if it works poorly for their kids?
Restaurants 
