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.
I have attempted to lure readers with some Christmastime totty ( I just do not have it in me to post any half-nude hunky guys in Christmas outfits for our gal readers), but I would suppose that most Christians are now either frantic with last-minute gift- or food-shopping, or preparing for evening church services.
The B team will be out of range, skiing and cavorting in beautiful snow and invigorationg cold for a week after Christmas, but I have pre-posted mostly to keep my generous paycheck coming from Maggie's.
So perhaps only our Jewish, Hindu, Ba'hai, Buddhist, and Muslim friends will be reading this post, but that's fine with me.
Top pic of global warming is via Pirate. Pic of the super-special Christmas present below is probably from Theo but I am not sure.
In my view, the Christmas Eve candlelight service is not to be missed, even though I do not think of Christmastime as a particularly holy day in the church calendar. Christmas is a magical, miracle, beautiful time, but not too holy really, as least in the Protestant tradition.
The prayer: Be born in us today.
Our family doesn't do gifts, but we will assemble to church tonight to squeeze in, and will host a fine Christmas feast for 32 tomorrow at the Barrister homestead. The feast is the gift, bringing home-made foods are the gifts to eachother. Family, friends, and neighbors, coat and tie dress code including the youth, plenty of eggnog and good wines but no Festivus Pole.
Non-Christians, including the 5% of Americans who adhere to a non-Christian religion and the 18% who either claimed no religion at all or chose not to answer the pollsters, need to know about Christianity too. Religious education has pretty much fallen by the wayside in American life today. That’s a problem in more ways than one; I see the consequences all the time when students I teach – and policy makers and journalists I know – simply do not comprehend the cultural foundations of American politics and cannot understand the ways that so many people here and around the world are moved by religious values and ideas. I have taught a course on the relationship of American religious ideas to American foreign policy in some of our leading colleges, and I have had smart, well traveled and otherwise well-read students in that course who have never opened a Bible (or any other holy book) in their lives and simply had no idea why so many other people read and study it every day of their lives.
Indeed. FYI, Prof, I may be an older Ivy-Leaguer but I read a Bible verse each morning, contemplate it, and pray. Before the morning coffee. As I always say, it has never harmed me to follow that discipline. Find a church tonight, you agnostics and atheists and unbelievers, etc. It won't hurt you at all.
When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion. This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practicing scientists themselves were uncomfortable.
The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth.
another quote:
Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.
This is one of the most depressing Christmases many can remember. Many feel that way this year, and not just Libertarian-Conservatives. It seems gloomy out there.
There are many factors, Mrs. B. theorizes. A world of kids with lousy job opportunities, higher taxes, decreasing incomes, the horrors of Newtown, unemployment, the election, etc.
She is quite shrewd about politics. From a political standpoint, her view is that a tipping point has occurred. Yes, Repubs won some elections, yes, it was fairly close, etc., but her main point was the decline of marriage and the rise of childbirth outside of marriage. The single woman vote. Emily or whoever she was.
She says African-Americans and immigrant Hispanics will trend Progressive for the indefinite future because their political goal is to get stuff from the government, but that is nothing new. Not everybody understands what America is all about. Married white people, and especially married white Christians with self-reliance as a fundamental socio-cultural goal, are descending towards a minority.
Many men are no longer in any hurry to get married despite marriage's provision of the comforts, partnership, social circles, and supports needed in life in general and for child-rearing in particular. Single women emotionally look to government for what they once looked to men for. She believes that American acceptance of dependency has reached a tipping point, predicted for over 200 years, which will forever alter American politics.
Her somewhat defeatist view is to hunker down and just to take care of your family as best your can, and to stay away from the news.
Been in the City lately? I have. Love the vitality of it, the spirit, the pretty people. Best place in the world at Christmastime when everything and every corner is hopping. It is uplifting, invigorating, inspiring.
McSorley's is one of the great old pubs, but there are so many.
McSorley's allows ladies to enter nowadays, but it's really still a guy place. I puked in their bathroom one time as a youth. "Boot and rally," as we say. Not a sacred place - just old, uncomfortable, dusty, and rickety. Perfect.
I often hear complaints that many colleges appear to have limits to how many Asians they want to accept. I have heard it said that "Asians are the new Jews", recalling when elite colleges elected to keep their Jewish component low.
It's understood that no competitive college wants to fill a class with nothing but kids with perfect SAT scores (just joking about the stereotype) who play concert violin, but at what point does discrimination against eyelid contour begin to exist?
I'd like to see color-blind and ethnicity-blind admissions. We all know what colleges are looking for - bright, curious, and hard-working kids who are likely to be a credit to the school and who can fill some sort of slot in the construction of a class, eg they will want a few lacrosse players, a sailor or two, a cellist, some literary types, some genius science geeks, some kids who have shown unique initiative in life, etc.
Previous findings suggest that informal, cultural rules underlie constraints on government predation. Following this logic, this study asks how contract enforcement is achieved – through formal or informal mechanisms?
I am not sure I understand their answer to this important question.
Like many profound books. Coercing Virtue does not attempt to say anything new. Instead, it does something that is at once more valuable and more difficult:It reminds us of old, familiar truths—so familiar that they are everywhere neglected. “Democracy” means the rule of the people and its duly elected representatives,not the rule of unelected judges. Professional do-gooders, intoxicated by the emotion of virtue, are dangerous threats to public tranquility.Traditional morality became traditional largely because it provided sound answers to the hard problems of human frailty. Custom and convention are generally not the enemy of freedom but, on the contrary, something closer to its precondition.The single-minded pursuit of self-fulfillment is self-defeating. Individuality, like freedom, thrives best when limited by commitment and respect for values that transcend the individual.
It is a difficult time in central Connecticut, but it is almost Christ's birthday party. Being fresh out of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, what can we offer? We can offer receptivity.
We can offer anticipation of a mystery, new life, birth and re-birth, gifts of the spirit to be delivered by FedEx or Santa or the Holy Spirit on Christmas Eve, or any other time, to each heart open to those precious gifts.
...the animating principle of the modern university is a focus on the image and “brand” of the university, rather than the underlying substance of the education experience received. Governance of the modern university is almost completely absorbed by how to market the school’s brand rather than how to improve its underlying quality. The focus of every discussion is what impact a particular action (or inaction) will have on the school’s brand.
Well, I have never heard of a "national curriculum." The very idea of that creeps me out. Parents and local schools ought to be entirely competent to figure out what sorts of readings are good for primary school. It's not rocket science.
My larger point, however, is that parents can and should guide their kids' reading. If you turn off or throw out the TV, get rid of computer games, most kids with any intelligence or curiosity will read anything at hand. Even "informational texts." Sometimes people talk as if "curricula" is where learning begins and ends. Thank God, it is not.
Of course, current colleges (at current rates!) are not necessarily delivering much bang for the buck either: According to Richard Arum and Josipha Roksa, authors of the 2011 book Academically Adrift, 36 percent of college students fail to “show any significant improvement over four years” as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment.
In my view, expressed frequently here, the higher ed bubble is a result of the democratization of the higher ed industry. Colleges, designed for scholars, compete for "customers," standards drop, and prices rise to whatever level the market, subsidies, and student loans can bear. A degree is a mass market product, which means that the customer must be kept happy. That represents a complete reversal of historical approaches.
I spoke with a recent state college grad who told me that he never read a book in four years. He told me he mainly got by on what he had learned in high school. I think many people are not aware of how low expectations have dropped outside of the elite schools and non-elite STEM programs.
There must be thousands of profs out there who are teaching well-below their levels of competence due to the requirement to dumb down their efforts.
Underlying all of these issues is a simple fact: learning is not something that can be "delivered," something you "get" or can buy. The life of the mind cannot be bought. It can be ignited, but not bought. A degree can be bought today, but its economic value today as a mass-market product, and its price, are out of sync.
From my doc and from my reading, I think it is fairly well-established that total cholesterol levels have little directly to do with cardiovascular disease, but perhaps LDLs do (LDL bad, HDL good, supposedly, and all more heavily genetically-determined than dietarily).
Dietary LDL may or may not have a meaningful impact on cardiovascular disease. For what it's worth, LDLs are found in poultry (even lean poultry skinned), all dairy, fish, shellfish, and red meat. Docs like to recommend salmon because it helps HDLs. Heck, it's all theoretical, but I do like salmon (with the right LDL-laden sauce, of course).
In my view, obsessing about food is neurotic, and it's Christmastime too. Who would go to a party where they served "healthy" crap? Not me. Just take your damn Lipitor, skip the carbs, hope for the best, and live it up.
Eggnog must surely be evil because it tastes good, but I do not know a doc at my club who will turn it down. We make it with Wild Turkey bourbon, fluffed eggwhites floating on the top, with tons of freshly-grated nutmeg abundantly on top of that. The recipe we use is very close to this. (That article also has a brief history of Eggnog. Rum is in fact more traditional in Eggnog than bourbon whiskey, but I prefer it with bourbon.)
Traditional New England clubs always put out a bowl of eggnog every cocktail hour between Advent and New Year's Day. We chill it with a block of ice in the middle of the punch bowl, but it can be served just as made without chilling it. My family has traditionally made it a little too strong, but without some booze who would want to drink pre-cooked scrambled eggs? Still, it's really all about the freshly-grated nutmeg.
In the (deep) South, they make Milk Punch. I've never had that.
What are our readers' favorite Eggnog concoctions? Or do you just pick up a half-gallon of the pre-made at the store?
When Isaac Newton went to the University of Cambridge several centuries ago, he studied seven days a week, at least ten hours a day, and actively avoided the revelry that some Cambridge undergraduates engaged in even then. No one expects American undergraduates to work as hard as Isaac Newton or as medieval monks. However, what seems to be happening on many American college campuses is the development of such a powerful "fun" culture that a quarter of the students or more arrive thinking that having fun is the main reason they are at college and that the pursuit of knowledge should be resorted to only when they have nothing better to do.
There was a time when the upper classes approached college casually, more as a rite of passage than anything else because they were confident about their futures, while the aspiring classes put their noses to the grindstone the way Newton did. That was in a time, however, when probably 1% or less of the population even considered higher education. It has been democratized, which might be another way of saying that many colleges are now glorified high schools.
I suspect that many of our readers are seeing this happening around them these days. It is a terrible time to be a graduate, whether of college or of grad school, and this seems unlikely to change any time in the next four years. There will be a glut of job-seekers such that a job - even a job without great career-building prospects - will feel more like a privilege than like an opportunity.
It's sad to see eager talent going unused. What young people in this economy need to do is to ramp up their job-seeking skills to a level of intensity rarely required in the past 40 years, or to make something interesting happen themselves, on their own initiative. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Compared to these youngsters, I feel like I had it easy. And I didn't because I went eight years going from place to place with little kids, never with a real or even semi-permanent home, trying to find my right niche, never making much money at all. Constructing the life or career one dreams of is never easy and often impossible, but it's far more difficult now.
Since when does the federal government control school lunches? When I was a kid, my Mom made my lunch and I carried it in a lunchbox. Mom controlled it. Apple, banana, or plum, a sandwich on white bread, a couple of cookies. Usually baloney sandwich, Fluffernutter, or PB&J as I recall but sometimes ham and swiss as a luxury. With four of us kids, it was the early morning lunch-box assembly line. School provided only those little cold cartons of milk, chocolate or plain, with a straw. I turned out just fine.
And since when does the federal government control school curricula? Catcher is a dumb book and not worth the read, but who decides these things?
Since when do the feds have anything at all to do with local education anyway?
Today, I am doing layered winter clothing, which is only of interest if one is spending more than just a few hours out in the weather.
Dressing for spending hours out in cold weather is a tricky business, because it depends so much on what you are doing and how active you are. If you dress too warmly for a day of aggressive skiing in 10 degree (F) weather, you can easily get soaked with uncomfortable and chilling sweat. On the other hand, underdressing for a 6-hour stint sitting in a Maine duck blind can ruin the entire experience. When it's cold out, you want to be cool enough to enjoy the weather - and maybe just a little bit cold. It's all about layers.
I have spent many hours cold, wet, and happy in Yankee winters, but I have become more of a pussy as I get a bit older. It's impossible to get it right, because if you are hiking uphill at 15 degrees, you get too hot, and when you are sitting, you get too cold. But that's why you aren't being a sloth, sitting by the fire.
The picture of this disadvantage is dramatic. Based on 2007 - 2010 data from the 76 institutional members of the six largest athletic conferences, black men were 2.8% of full-time undergraduate students but 57.1% of football teams and 64.3% of basketball teams. 50.2% of black male athletes graduated within six years, compared to 66.9% of student-athletes overall, 72.8% of undergraduate students, and 55.5% of black undergraduate men overall.
We should just do an open thread on the topic of the big-time college sports industry.
From The Crisis of American Self-Government - Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's 'pet dissenter,' on the 2012 election, the real cost of entitlements, and why he sees reason for hope:
'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency."
and
(The) project began at the turn of the previous century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr. Mansfield says. "Social scientists and political scientists were very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives. And still to this day we see in the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s and victims."
and
Mr. Mansfield is optimistic. "The material for recovery is there," he says. "Ambition, for one thing. I teach at a university where all the students are ambitious. They all want to do something with their lives." That is in contrast to students he has met in Europe, where "it was depressing to see young people with small ambitions, very cultivated and intelligent people so stunted." He adds with a smile: "Our other main resource is the Constitution."
Is it possible that Harvard University, whose entire existence is dependent on capitalist benefactors, has only one non-Marxist on its faculty? Or is there a psychological issue about feeling dependent on the production of others which drives faculties to Leftism as a way to maintain a bit of pride? After all, it must be a little humbling to have to feel that one's career is built on the charity of others, however interesting or useful that career may be; "on the kindness of strangers" as it used to be said by, or of, high-class hookers like Blanche DuBois?
Americans like to work hard, long hours. We are not like the lazy Europeans. In America, people who do not work hard feel a little ashamed of themselves. We proudly retain ye olde work ethic and energy here. Most of us, anyway, hate to feel unproductive.
We should forget about the lower-level government employees. They are mostly union workers working real, useful jobs on fairly short hours plus overtime which most ordinary people do not receive. They are just working for their generous pensions and benefits, far beyond what private employees earn. Don't worry about them too much because they are just people seeking safety and money in a challenging and highly competitive world in which opportunity still abounds for those who want to find it. I still bill about 60 hours/week. But I am essentially self-employed despite being a member of a farm firm. People who work in business work as long, or longer, than I do. People on Wall St. work 7 days/wk, as do people who own corner news shops. Most people do not choose that and do not want to work that long and hard, or do not have the choice to do so. And there is no way to calculate the time of all the folks who travel for business 2-3 days/week, which many of my pals do.
With a little luck, we all work as long or as hard as we choose to do.
Our Editor here reports to me that he happily works around 60 hrs/week including Saturday mornings, weekend duties, and paperwork. He is an eager beaver, and happy to do his job whenever he can. That choice is American.
If you want to tax us too much for our efforts, we'll cut back on vacations, cut back on work, and go fishin' and huntin'. I will not work a single day for a net of 50% of my billings regardless of how interesting or challenging the job may be. I hate idleness, but I require compensation for my talents.
I think the Feds should get entirely out of the Big Education industry. They screw up everything they try to do because government is a self-serving idiot and has become, in fact, a (non-profit) but highly-profitable mega-industry unto itself. Just consider how many Americans make a living off of government.
Gotta hate it when the bow digs down into green water. The ocean is not your friend, always wants to kill you, but you want to accomplish something, or have some fun, and survive. That's the game.
Homeland Security was one of Bush's dumb moves. Totally unnessary expansion of non-functional federal bureaucracies. Whenever government screws something up, they find a way to hire 10,000 more people to complicate it even worse. That's called "doing something."
... what should Republicans do? If I were John Boehner, I'd say: "Clearly there's no mandate for small government in the election results. So, if you milquetoast pantywaist sad-sack excuses for the sorriest bunch of so-called Americans who ever lived want to vote for Swede-sized statism, it's time to pony up."
OK, he might want to focus-group it first. But that fundamental dishonesty is the heart of the crisis. You cannot simultaneously enjoy American-sized taxes and European-sized government. One or the other has to go.
I have attempted to lure readers with some Christmastime totty ( I just do not have it in me to post any half-nude hunky guys in Christmas outfits for our gal readers), but I would suppose that most Christians are now either frantic with last-minute gift- or food-shopping, or preparing for evening church services. 
I have nothing new to post about today. 
From my doc and from my reading, I think it is fairly well-established that total cholesterol levels have little directly to do with cardiovascular disease, but perhaps 
Today, I am doing layered winter clothing, which is only of interest if one is spending more than just a few hours out in the weather.