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.
The racial gerrymandering of college admissions is a world unto itself, one which proceeds by an Alice-in-Wonderland logic. Everywhere other than the courts, the use of racial preferences is frankly acknowledged as a means of increasing the percentage of black and Hispanic students as a goal in its own right. But because the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago declared this form of racial favoritism illegal, the courts operate on an entirely different rationale. Drawing on Justice Powell’s opinion in the 1978 Bakke case, which was eventually turned into law by Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion in the 2003 Grutter case, the courts engage in the elaborate judicial fiction that racial preferences are employed solely to achieve the “educational benefits” of “diversity.”
This puts an enormous burden on an extraordinarily flimsy idea. “Diversity” has no particular educational benefits that anyone has been able to substantiate. We may well, for non-educational reasons, prefer to live in a racially diverse society, but the notion that college administrators are the best situated people in American life to decide the maximum educational mix of “more of these” and “fewer of those” on the basis of race and ethnicity convinces very few. It is just the pretense that the courts have foisted on higher education as the price of maintaining the racial spoils system of college admissions.
That's the Liberal project. Liberals take the long view and the long march. As Ace says,
The state is benevolent.
The state is wise.
The state loves you.
The state would never hurt you.
The state only wishes to help you.
Will you help the state to help you?
The State is God? Addiction to government "help" is sold and marketed in the same way that drugs are. It is, in fact, a drug in the sense that dependency sneaks into the brain and distorts who you are, strips you of your dignity, corrupts your soul by tempting you to focus on what you can get for free, and enslaves you if you let it. In the end, it leaves you just hungry for more.
Welfare includes crony capitalism, tax breaks for businesses, mortgage deductions, bailouts, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid right down to disability and the now ubiquitous EBT cards.
Naturally, we Conservatives think it best to eliminate all forms of welfare and charity from government control except for the most desperate or hopeless of individual cases. Remove welfare from the middle classes and provide a safety net for the desperate: Restoring a True Safety Net
With the promise of health care completing the project of the 20th-century welfare state, liberals need to envision how to meet the needs of a new century.
Apparently Americans have many "unmet needs" which can only be provided by government - or by our neighbors at gunpoint. It's a sorry sort of mess and will not end well. Americans can do better than this if the government would get the heck out of the way of effort and creativity.
was prompted by a survey of freshman composition courses a few years back. Fish read lesson plans for 104 sections at his university and found that "only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues --- racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising." Writing courses taught by writing instructors should focus on writing, period. People should teach subjects in which they have some expertise (what do English graduate students know about globalization?), and materials brought into the course should not obscure stated aims (how does teaching about racism help students write better sentences?). This is to insist upon boundaries between disciplines---another no-no in current thinking---and to divide people into experts and dilettantes. It is also to endorse the goals of general education and examine how well a college curriculum delivers them. Hence the discussion of a new report by ACTA.
Champagne is always right for cocktail hour, but I'm talking about accompaniment to food. As a semi-amateur wine drinker, my advice is to drink whatever you like with dinner, provided that it is red in color. These holidays are not about gourmet cooking, they are about traditional comfort food and so they need comfort wines.
This year for Thanksgiving, I am going for a Brunello di Montalcino Riserva followed up by a nice Chianti Riserva. Why Tuscans, why Sangiovese? Just for the fun of it. Also because they do not overpower turkey and stuffing, but who really cares about that?
Our more mature readers surely remember the cheap and horrible-tasting Chiantis in straw wrappings in spaghetti-and-meatball restaurants. That straw-wrapped bottle is/was called a "fiasco" - a flask. That wine was a fiasco but the bottles made for cute candlesticks.
Well, Chiantis imported to the US can be darn good these days, and the so-called Super-Tuscans (with varying amounts of Cabernet added to the mix) are quite tasty too. The Chianti Classicos and Riservas tend to be tastier than the basic Chianti table wines.
Every Thanksgiving, we kids sang this merry song on the way to our Granny and Grampy's Connecticut house: four of us, bouncing in the back seat of the Chevy station wagon on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Their house was a mansion to us, filled with mysteries. Owl andirons with eyes, bathtubs with claw feet, a real ice box in the basement, a big family Bible from the 1700s, a jar of formaldehyde with a dissected human heart, old medical texts, Tiffany lamps, a Chickering grand piano, Persian rugs, the first EKG machine in Connecticut (German made, in a mahogany cabinet, which still worked and which works to this day), the rooms my Dad and Aunt grew up in with all of their books - and my Granny's Mom, sitting and knitting. She died at age 103. An old Yankee, raised on a hardscrabble farm and who worked as a nurse, she never said very much. She was half Iroquois (her Mom), and looked like an ancient squaw with her hair tied back.
They had a cranky, humorless Polish widowed cook called Mrs. Wos (which was an abbreviation of her last name which I never knew) who helped them in the kitchen and who would smack your hand hard with a spoon if you tried to grab something. Granny was not much of a cook, to put it mildly, but she would help Mrs. Wos when asked. Mrs. Wos kept a filled bird-feeder outside the kitchen window for entertainment, and banged on the glass when a squirrel got into it. Come to think of it, she banged all sorts of things: hands, windows, pots and pans, cabinet doors.
And they had an old widower black guy moved up from Mississippi who did chores and yard jobs, and helped with the garden - the sweetest and most dignified Christian guy you could ever know. "Uncle Ed," who my Granny called Mr. Evans, sang hymns while he worked, and read the Bible and philosophy (and W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Schweitzer) when he was off duty in his cozy apartment above the garage - with a wood stove (in addition to real heat) - and walls of bookshelves. He believed that fiction was the work of the Devil but he never refused whiskey.
Being alone in life, both family helpers joined us at the family tables for Thanksgiving dinner. Ed was always given the honor of offering the prayer which came from the depths of his heart. He went on for quite a while, as the soup got cold. Deep and yet simple, which are the things I still aspire to. He prayed for his country, for the enrichment of his and our spirits, for the soul of his dead wife, for his two boys in the service, and for the glory of creation.
I miss him because he was a dear buddy to me. He was the first black guy I knew. He had worked as a railroad Porter, and he said the railroad was the true friend of the black man. He knew the blues, and he knew the hymns. He taught me to fish, with great laughter and jollity. Bait-fishing from a rowboat, for food, with a bamboo pole. No fancy stuff. Long gone, now, but never forgotten.
Happy Thanksgiving, readers. Thanks to God, and God bless us, every one, living and gone - and our free country.
Photos: Station wagons were the SUVs of their time: if you had kids, you had one. '55 Chevy, of course. The '50 Buick? My grandparents drove theirs until the mid-1960s. Old people used to drive old cars. I recall theirs as having been brown, not black, but I couldn't swear to that. My Gramps, who was a doctor, totalled it into a tree while making a house call late at night in a snowstorm at age 84. He was OK, but the car wasn't. Bought a white Oldsmobile with power windows and began to cut back on work and grumble about socialism and socialized medicine. Johnson was President, with Medicare on the table - and he accepted vegetables, flowers, firewood, and labor as payment from those without money. He felt his poorer patients would feel demeaned by charity, so he expected something. I remember a bushel basket of fresh-dug potatoes on his back porch, with a note scrawled "from Sam." Another time, a bushel basket of sweet corn.
- For $100, you can get an American Global Entry card "that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States." Again, no lines and you just walk through. I believe it speeds things up for domestic flights too.
Both of these programs do a little vetting of you before issuing their passes. Worth doing, if you travel much. Definitely a form of profiling. These passes put you in the "guaranteed good citizen" catgory, same way that a carry permit does.
Many people believe that the state is responsible for everything. According to Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at Harvard University and administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, “Government is ‘implicated’ in everything people own. . . . If rich people have a great deal of money, it is because the government furnishes a system in which they are entitled to have and keep that money.”
That’s the academic formulation of a concept that was restated recently in a popular form. “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. . . . Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” That was Sunstein’s boss, President Obama.
and
The evolution of freedom has involved a long process of bringing power under law. The imposition of force has nonetheless left a powerful imprint on our minds. Alexander Rustow, a prominent sociologist and a father of the post-war revival of liberty in Germany, meditated on the origins of the state in violence and predation and its lingering imprint: “All of us, without exception, carry this inherited poison within us, in the most varied and unexpected places and in the most diverse forms, often defying perception. All of us, collectively and individually, are accessories to this great sin of all time, this real original sin, a hereditary fault that can be excised and erased only with great difficulty and slowly, by an insight into pathology, by a will to recover, by the active remorse of it all.” It takes work to free our minds from our dependence on the state.
"Politics is downstream of culture." That's what the man says, and it certainly seems true these days. It's what I have been thinking. Sales, marketing, and branding matter.
Optics, rhetoric and perception matter. Though the new Democratic Party’s economic policies are based on antiquated ideas of early 20th century progressivism and European welfare states, it, not the GOP, is perceived as party of forward looking ideas.
If Republicans have any hope of persuading independents, they’ll need charismatic people, people who look and sound like a modern America and not a boardroom of Brahmin, because real-world competency is no match for fresh packaging and a good slogan. Welcome to democracy.
The fact is that the same people who run around instructing Republicans that they need to appeal to Latinos, blacks and women are aghast when exactly that happens. Are liberals agonizing this week over the defeat of Florida's Congressman Allen West -- a black man -- by a whiter than vanilla liberal named Patrick Murphy? Are they made furious by the defeat of a conservative black woman named Mia Love by yet another liberal white boy in Utah? Hardly. They are doing somersaults. Are they celebrating the fact that a woman --Michele Bachmann -- will be returning to Congress after defeating yet another one of those damnable white men, Democrat Jim Graves? Are they signing up for Palin in 2016? Are you kidding? They are beyond teeth-gratingly depressed and angry at the mere existence of both Bachmann and Palin
I finally have my power back (no thanks to government but with thanks to private industry who had a big job to do) just in time for a cold Nor'easter with snow blowing in and, while deeply disappointed but not surprised about the national elections, I am finding them interesting to reflect upon.
A few things I have been thinking about are these:
- the MSM runs interference for Dems, with passion and without regard to their professional integrity. They have done so since Nixon. It's worth billions in campaign funds or, really, it's priceless. They still have vast reach and influence in the culture at large. Just ask Obama.
...there is the fact that relatively few Americans actually pay for the government they consume. To a greater extent than any other developed nation, we rely on upper-income people to finance our federal government. When that is combined with the fact that around 40% of our federal spending isn’t paid for at all–it is borrowed–it is small wonder that many self-interested voters are happy to vote themselves more government. Mitt Romney proclaimed that Barack Obama was the candidate of “free stuff,” and voters took him at his word.
- What's with Hispanics? Are they a solid voting bloc? Would Rubio have made a difference? Who knows. He was my choice.
- I give Mitt Romney a lot of credit for the nature of his campaign. A good man, not a rock star.
...when all was said and done, the lines of people who feed off the political machine were there, and the handlers of the machine cast their multiple votes and carried off their manifold frauds because their own private economy depended on it.
Every time people ask me why the left has such a grip on this country, my answer is because they worked for it. It's the answer that most people don't want to hear, but it's true. The left has been planning this for a while. They have been playing the long game, building the infrastructure and indoctrinating generations. And to beat them, we will have to do the same thing.
The right is 40 years behind the left and it remains a disorganized collection of potentials seeking a compass point.
We lose our power fairly often in late fall and winter storms. Besides flashlights and candles, I have a good supply of oil lamps around the place. I don't have a generator, and don't plan on getting one like the yuppies do.
When we bought this house, we found a couple of old Victorian oil lamps in the attic, similar to this blue one. Perfect for a whorehouse, we feel. This site sells repro oil lamps.
My favorites are a few 50 year-old Dietz wagon lanterns that I keep in the garage and down in the barn. They still make them, but in China now, and are distributed by Kirkman, which has tons of lamps and lanterns of all sorts.
When I was a kid in CT, we kept a spouted barrel of kerosene in the garage. It had many uses (including for burning the garbage in the garbage pit - think Hell - Gehenna).
Tides are not all that easy to understand. For example, can you explain why there are no tides at the equator? It's complicated because the earth revolves and rotates, the moon revolves on an angle to the equator, and then there's the sun too. Lots of moving parts. Plus local factors.
My need to refresh my understanding arises because hurricane Sandy, who will likely be visiting the northeast somewhere between Chesapeake Bay and Boston at the end of this weekend, is coming during a full moon - the Hunter's Moon as the redskin Injuns termed it.
(The latest tracking guesses show it mostly missing New England and turning inland somewhere between Delmarva and Jersey. Meteorologists love this sort of unusual weather event. I heard one on the radio saying that he had always wondered why conditions were so rare for a storm to make a left turn due to a low cold front sucking in a storm. The Weather Nerd is following things, and posted this pic showing the Clash of Titans - the polar cold front and Sandy:)
Full Moons indicate that the moon and the sun are on the same side of the earth, illuminating the moon, and New Moons when they are pulling from opposite sides. Thus both of these phases exaggerate the tidal effect by combining lunar with solar gravity. They're called Spring Tides.
In Maggie's Farm's part of the world, high tide and low tide vary from 6-10' in each tide change, and increase around 20% during Spring Tides. Thus a storm surge during a Spring Tide is likely to cause more damage and flooding to structures (ie, structures which are built where they don't belong in the first place - on coastal beaches, waterfronts, flood plains, and on old marshes covered with a thin layer of fill back before the laws were changed).
Storm surges in New England, whether from Nor'easters or the occasional hurricane, can be 5-10 feet above high tide. A very large or slow-moving storm can effect more than one tide cycle.
Re storm prep, I fetched a fresh bottle of Dalwhinnie, some smokes, charcoal for cooking, good veggies to grill, and I topped off my gas can for the chain saw so I don't get trapped here by fallen trees and limbs. Firewood? Check. My ancient, second-hand diesel generator seems to be on the blink, but we can cope. Sometimes it will start if I kick it in the kidneys while pushing the button.
Meanwhile, I eagerly await the first lunatic to blame the storm on global warmingclimate change HotColdWetDry, as the Pirate terms it.
...a growing body of research controlling for variables outside of aid supports the hypothesis that aid has an appreciable inflationary effect, though study results vary by type of aid and institution.
Like most individuals, institutions can always find new "needs" to spend money on. About three years ago, my alma mater announced a $600 million bequest. Two months later, their fund plea arrived in the mail, hoping I would increase my annual donation.
Did they lower tuition? No. For greedy government and greedy non-profits, it's never enough and never will be.
Instead of seeing college as a private investment, we must consider it a public good. If we remember the generation that was educated after World War II, generous public support meant that they could afford -- economically -- to spend four years studying the subject that most interested or spoke to them, and then they took their education and did millions of things with it that helped us develop a richer society, not just in terms of wealth but in terms of knowledge, art, and citizenship. That generation could do so because they did not have to take on thousands of dollars in debt and to worry all the time about how to pay for it. They could do so because public support for their education -- meaning low tuition for students thanks to tax support for America’s colleges -- gave them the freedom -- the leisure -- to study.
While I am somewhat sympathetic to the feeling of the article, I also find it foolish in several ways.
First, it is not only the elites who have access to the liberal arts. With 70% of current job seekers holding higher ed degrees, that no longer applies.
Second, any public high school offers an abundant introduction to the liberal arts, enough to prepare anybody to pursue their intellectual interests for the rest of their lives.
Third, "leisure to study"? That's ridiculous. Full-time college offers leisure to drink, to attend football games, and to pursue the opposite sex. Best students I've known had no leisure.
Fourth, the idea of a "public good." Last I heard, that just means that somebody else ought to pay for it, preferably my neighbor via taxation. Why my neighbor should pay for my kid to "pursue at leisure the things that speak to him" is utterly beyond me.
A pleasant ramble through the topic of hurricanes of the past, engineering, beaver dams, and related topics from a guy who enjoys stormy weather: Hurricane Warning; McKibben Alert. A quote:
At age twelve my interest in hurricanes was largely motivated by two things: First, hurricanes made things go crash, smash and boom, and I was the sort of kid who could endure “The Bridge Over The River Kwai,” (including the intermission,) just for the train wreck at the end. (I was not alone. It might not be politically correct, but the entire theater burst into wild cheering and applause, when that train finally, finally wrecked.)
The second reason was that a hurricane might cancel school. I hated school. McKibben apparently loved what I loathed, for he went to Harvard, and there became ignorant where I became wise, for he doesn’t even know what I knew at age twelve: The precedent has already been set. Wicked awesome hurricanes have hit New England in the past.
Amtrak has around 20,000 employees with an average income of $90,000. I thought that the government takeover of passenger rail had been meant to be a temporary rescue measure, but I guess I was wrong.
Now I am not sure why passenger rail should be viewed any differently from the also-government-supported interstate highway system, or government-supported airports, but Clark Whelton claims Amtrak is a jobs program on wheels.
Where should one draw the line on taxpayer support of life amenities? I must confess that the high-speed Boston-Providence-NYC-Philly-Baltimore-DC Acela service is a very fine and heavily-used amenity for those in the Northeast corridor, as are the New York area commuter trains.
Home schooling has been around forever. Whether it was the wealthy with education via Moms and tutors, or poor immigrants working all day and then educating themselves in the New York Public Library, or pioneer kids like Abe Lincoln, it was all home schooling.
As one example, Teddy Roosevelt - who wrote more books and articles than any President ever - never attended any school until he went to Harvard College. (As I recall, though, he did have to cram his Ancient Greek and Chemistry a bit for the Harvard entrance exams. At home, of course.)
Here's a good update on the topic, explaining why the Education Establishment is hostile to home schooling.
Related to the topic is the latest educational egalitarian wackiness coming out of France. Schneiderman does a good semi-rant on the topic: Dumbing Down Education in France. Many are not aware that there are similar Harrison Bergeron movements afoot in the US.
The admissions officers seem to believe that those planning to attend college view it largely as a signaling device that directs the best and brightest young Americans to the best and highest-paying jobs. It is not primarily about acquiring knowledge ("human capital"), critical learning or leadership skills, or better perceiving the difference between right and wrong, but more about achieving the American Dream of a comfortable, moderately affluent
I had more good recent links on the topic, but I lost them in cyberspace. The governments of the world, and the UN, seem to be on a big censorship kick these days. While we can assume that governments love censorship to protect themselves, it seems to me that the latest excuse is fear of Muslim barbarianism.
Muslims deeply offend my Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist friends daily. Let them, as long as it is just hateful and crazy words. Good manners cannot be made illegal: we'd all end up in trouble for talking with food in our mouths.
Governments always make an excuse to exert control and power over their citizens. For their own good, of course.
The challenge to American education is to provide a useful education to the large number of Americans who are unlikely to benefit from a college education or from high school courses aimed at preparing students for college. The need is for a different curriculum and for a greater investment in these children’s preschool environment. We should recognize that we have different populations with different schooling needs and that curricula and teaching methods should be revised accordingly.
"Investment in the preschool environment"? What does that mean? It's been proven many times that Head Start accomplishes nothing other than to employ expensive babysitters on the taxpayers' dime.
I'm not sure whether I agree with all of the judge's thoughts, but definitely with some of them. It reminds me of those hospital ratings that came out a few years ago. NYC's Memorial Sloan-Kettering came out at the bottom. Too much morbidity and mortality. Of course, it is the world's pre-eminent cancer center for research and care.
Do they "care" at Sloan-Kettering? They sure do. Wonderful people, doing God's work. I know. They have world expert teams for every kind of cancer.
Forty years ago, affirmative action (designed for Americans With Some African Genetics) was instituted on a temporary basis in an effort to make up for years of presumed socio-economic marginalization, or as compensation for a history of American slavery, or as a political maneuver, or something.
As a concept, it seems unconstitutional on its face. Today, it seems like insidious nonsense (eg, Is Obama more a black man or a white man? Or does the one-drop rule apply?).
The progressives on the Court are likely to desire to continue this unconstitutional entitlement for another 40 years or, God knows, forever. Why? Who knows? A reflex to condescension? Justice Kennedy is probably the swing vote. Here's Justice Kennedy and Affirmative Action.
I think affirmative action is insulting and condescending. Some related items:
Fire Dept of NYC required by judge to alter entry exam until racially balanced. I've seen plenty of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic NYC firemen, some black guys, but never an Asian fireman (are Indians also Asians? At some point, one can begin to sound like a Nazi with all of this genetic obesession).
NAACP goes after admissions policies at NYC's three elite high schools (once majority Jewish, now overwhelmingly Asian): NAACP Tries to Kill the Golden Goose.
Because of all of the bright and ambitious new Asians, the gene counters are beginning to categorize Asians as "White." It's all insane because we're all the same species of ape: Homo semi-sapiens.
It must be clear that I hate the idea of racial or ethnic discrimination in academia or in employment of any sort, but it doesn't happen these days because people will hire anybody who can get the job done. However, I think there are two subtle factors which might be holding back opportunities for Americans with African genes: 1, you can't be sure they aren't affirmative action applicants and, 2, if they don't work out in a position, there can be hell to pay to get rid of them because of their privileged situation. Just ask any HR department about this.
Firing Barack Obama for poor performance would go a long way towards integrating Americans with Some African Genes into the normal mainstream of American life. The Peter Principle knows neither skin tone nor gender.
The despairing but amusing and detailed post at Zero Hedge begins with this fine paragraph:
The majority of Americans seem OK with just waddling through life, accepting the lies and misinformation blasted from the boob tube and their various iGadgets by their owners, gorging themselves to death on Twinkies and Cheetos, paying 15% interest on their $10,000 rolling credit card balance, and growing ever more dependent on the welfare/warfare state to provide and protect them from accepting personal responsibility for their lives. A minority of critical thinking people have chosen to question everything they see and hear being spewed at us by the propagandist mainstream media, the corporate fascist government, and the powerful banking cabal that has an iron grip upon our throats as they choke the life out of the global economy in their never ending desire for more riches and more power.
Read it all. He predicts decline, mostly due to American character weakness and degeneracy.
That's the Liberal project. Liberals take the long view and the long march. As 
Our more mature readers surely remember the cheap and horrible-tasting Chiantis in straw wrappings in spaghetti-and-meatball restaurants. That straw-wrapped bottle is/was called a "fiasco" - a flask. That wine was a fiasco but the bottles made for cute candlesticks.
Every Thanksgiving, we kids sang 
Being alone in life, both family helpers joined us at the family tables for Thanksgiving dinner. Ed was always given the honor of offering the prayer which came from the depths of his heart. He went on for quite a while, as the soup got cold. Deep and yet simple, which are the things I still aspire to. He prayed for his country, for the enrichment of his and our spirits, for the soul of his dead wife, for his two boys in the service, and for the glory of creation. 
We lose our power fairly often in late fall and winter storms. Besides flashlights and candles, I have a good supply of oil lamps around the place. I don't have a generator, and don't plan on getting one like the yuppies do.
My favorites are a few 50 year-old Dietz wagon lanterns that I keep in the garage and down in the barn. They still make them, but in China now, and are distributed by 
Tides are not all that easy to understand. For example, can you explain why there are no tides at the equator? It's complicated because the earth revolves and rotates, the moon revolves on an angle to the equator, and then there's the sun too. Lots of moving parts. Plus local factors.