Maggie's Farm

From Chicago Boyz on the easily-offended: What Century is This?

The real criterion, of course, would be propensity to violence. If a group shows a propensity to violence when its icons are criticized, then it would in practice receive special protection under the 21st-century blasphemy prohibitions. Those advocating for such rules either don’t understand the incentive system this would create, or don’t care.

Last Wednesday, Zbigniew Brzezinski–yes, that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the one from the Carter administration–added his voice to the chorus of those calling for restrictions on free speech:

“I would like us to make it more explicit to the Muslim world: we not only condemn (the YouTube video), but if there are evil forces at work trying to provoke violence between us and you, we have the obligation to investigate and crack down.”

Be careful, Zbig. You are making me very angry with that kind of speech. Maybe we need to crack down on that kind of disturbing speech.

Mitt Romney stuck a stick into a hornet's nest by ripping off Obama's mask. John McCain never dared do that, or chose not to.

Get Ready for Chicago Rules - Mr. Romney has exposed the weaknesses in the president's re-election strategy. We can now expect nonstop vilification.

Watch for things to get uglier and more dishonest than you can imagine. It's already begun. The ends justify the means.

After five years of being coddled and protected by intoxicated fans, the MSM, and the slobbering hosts of the TV talk show carnivals, Obama has no clue what to do when his facts and positions are challenged: Barone: Thoughts on the first presidential debate.

Apparently Obama is a good shmoozer, but he has no idea about what his job is.

The author points out that we all know that "correlation does not indicate causation", but there is an equally important error often drawn from data: The confusion of statistical significance with real world meaning.

Don't confuse statistical and substantive significance! A quote:

As science grows more powerful and government more technocratic, the stakes of correlation—of counterfeit relationships and bogus findings—grow ever larger. The false positive is now more onerous than it's ever been. And all we have to fight it is a catchphrase.

Via SDA, from Cato:

As we've said here ad nauseum, there are three separate subjects here. First, the politically- and financially-powerful Education Industry. Second, the transfer of culture and knowledge. Third, the interest in learning and the capacity of kids to learn (plus, obviously, the value the family places on curiosity and knowledge).

Judging from what I see and hear daily, we have long reached the point of diminishing returns on the public school front.

Harvard Tells the Freshmen What to Read. It sounds like a Middle School reading list to me.

What are they thinking? Or do they have no faith in their admissions office? The students should feel insulted.

Readers know that I have long rejected the notion of a college-level Liberal Arts-focused education as an economic investment. However, I have praised it as a potentially life-enhancing guided exploration more deeply into our culture and into current knowledge than secondary school can do (although good private schools can do it). "Cultivation of the mind" and all that.

In other words, do I do not think of it as utilitarian. (Colleges were designed for scholars and clery - for the cognitive and/ or financially elite.) I learned much in high school and in college which have never provided me with a penny of profit but which I believe have enhanced my life in countless ways: Geology, Statistics, Intro Music History, Ancient Greek History, Russian Lit, etc.

However, when I went to college the ways of learning these things outside college were not as accessible as they are today. The self-informed scholars of the past had to spend hours in libraries, after work, just to try to figure out where to start. Today, you can get the best Music History course in the world from the Teaching Company for $200. and enjoy it at leisure - with no exams.

So we return to my recurrent question: Is Liberal Arts college about job-preparation, for networking, is it a meaningless credential, is it a way to delay adulthood, or is it a guided exploration into our culture and knowledge for the deeply curious and scholarly with high IQ? 

In Obama's economy, the reality hits. Plumbers making $70-150/hr make much more money than most recent college grads and lead more independent and entrepreneurial careers. In fact, more than many recently-graduated professionals.

Insty found this post, How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America, which asserts that colleges should do more to teach the kids how to make money. I beg to differ.

"So here I am, waiting patiently for the vaunted Mitt Romney for President campaign to begin":

Romney needs to learn that, when confronted by a media horde, you don’t have to answer any of their questions. You say what you want to communicate; the media serves your purpose just by showing up. Believe me, should the press corps start to sense that Romney might win this thing, the tone of their questions is going to change in a hurry, as the courtiers begin jockeying for position and currying favor with a new administration. Running from them, in other words, will not cut it — turning and facing them will.

I remember having had this waiting feeling during the Dole and the McCain campaigns. This game requires cojones.

Thanks to our reader who knew about this one: The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894.

We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, to quote a character from a famous British sitcom, “We’re doomed, I tell you. We’re doomed!” Unless, that is, we mend our ways according to the author’s prescription. This almost invariably involves restrictions on personal liberty...

Heather MacDonald on UCSD's expensive new Diversity Czar:

The creation of a massive diversity bureaucracy to police the faculty for bias against women and URMs can be justified only if there is evidence that the faculty need such policing. No one has yet presented a single example of UC San Diego’s faculty discriminating against a highly ranked female or URM candidate because of skin color or gender. The opposite is of course the case: female and URM Ph.D.s enjoy enormous advantages in the hiring market at UCSD and everywhere else. A professor in the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose wife is a UCSD “faculty equity advisor,” sent me a self-righteous rebuke for my initial criticism of the new VC for EDI. I asked him if he knew of any instance where a UCSD hiring committee had merely overlooked a top-notch female or URM candidate because the department was not trying hard enough to “diversify.” He responded that the supply of qualified “diversity” candidates was “so low that the policing of faculty . . . is virtually irrelevant.”

Hall Monitors, at $250,000/yr. It reminds me of how every Russian vessel used to have a Political Officer on board.

Late September and early October is the time to re-seed and fertilize your lawns in the temperate zone. At this point, we have weeds, crab grass, holes from skunks and possums digging for grubs, chipmunk holes, wild strawberry infestations, and all sorts of other lawn miseries. (I do not have lawn irrigation - too much lawn to cover.)

Even though, in theory, we encourage minimizing lawn space (except for a good square for Croquet) and pleasant grass walking paths between gardens and borders, we do believe in pleasing, healthy lawn grass as a part of garden design.

We are all weary of the drearily repetitive claims of oppression and the academic insistence on PC orthodoxy. Everybody is oppressed - especially in America. And white-colored males are oppressed by the "victims." 

From the review:

What is true at Bowdoin is more or less true everywhere. The power of the victims' studies departments lies not in what they say but in their ability to prevent inquiry that runs against their preferred narratives. They need not go to a lot of trouble to make this happen. They are more often like rocks in the stream. The regular flow of academic life simply goes around them. Few faculty members or administrators want the hassle of getting in their way.

Bawer's book is as vivid an account of the history, the shifting rationalizations, and the rhetoric of victims' studies as we are ever likely to have. This owes something to his insider status. An openly gay man whose 1993 book, A Place at the Table, advanced the cause for integration of gays into mainstream society, Bawer is deeply sympathetic to academic work that emphasizes the history of groups who have struggled against prejudice. Moreover, he has been a participant in some of the key debates that shaped these fields. His chapter on how "gay studies" ("a serious academic discipline") was displaced by "queer studies" (a celebration of "oppositional relation to the norm") is the centerpiece of the book. He recounts his own disputes with queer theorists such as David Halperin, who attack him for criticizing the late Michel Foucault, whose view that sex is "socially constructed" is the founding principle of queer theory.

If sex is a social construct, somebody needs to inform the birds and the bees because they did not get the memo.

Interview with Prof. Randy Barnett on the ACA challenge outcome with the Supremes. One quote:

If the Commerce Clause power had been upheld, not only would the enumerated powers scheme have gone away, but Congress could have changed the law to punish this or any future mandates by very extensive penalties, like high fines and even imprisonment. One last way of explaining the difference: Imagine that all the drug laws were justified under the tax power and not under the commerce power. All the drug laws we have are Commerce Clause power. But imagine they were only justified under the tax power, under the principle that Chief Justice Roberts identified. That would mean the only thing the government could do to you for violating the drug laws would be to charge you a reasonable, modest tax. They couldn’t even charge you a punitive tax, and they certainly couldn’t put you in jail. If we actually achieved that reading of the drug laws, it wouldn’t be a perfectly libertarian solution, but you’d have to open up the jails and let millions of people out under that reading of the Constitution.

Fees for services vary depending on the area of the country one inhabits.

I've been collecting some from my area of Connecticut:

- Private practice legal services, paperwork: $300-450/hr, with volume discounts and pro-rated for time
- Private legal services, court time: $500-600/hr
- Home health aide: $20-25/hr
- Home health, Registered Nurse: $40-70/hr
- Nurse Anesthetist: $200/hr
- Prep and insertion of dental implant (not including the crown): $1800. for about 30-40 mins.
- Veterinary check-up (dog) plus shots and lots of labs: $1200.
- Independent financial/estate advisor (non-legal): $200-500/hr
- Auto mechanic: $30-60/hr
- Babysitter: $15-20/hr (more if more kids)
- Live-in nanny: $300-400/week
- Registered Dietician: $125-150/hr
- Brief office visit to Internist (10-15 mins, no tests): $125
- Internist, routine "annual" physical, not including labs/tests: $600.
- Short visit to Dermatologist, with minor slicing and dicing: $250
- Shrink visits: $300-400/hr (pro-rated for time)
- Harpist for parties: $150-175/hr
- Piper (Bagpiper): $150-175/hr
- Electronics repair: $175/hr (rarely worth it nowadays)
- Home computer services: $200/hr
- Master carpenter: approx $50/hr, less with bigger job
- Painter: approx $25-40/hr, more with bigger job?
- Master gunsmith (wood or steel work): $60-80/hr
- Per diem bookkeeper: $35/hr
- Chimney Sweep: $175/first chimney, $125 each additional
- Yard work: $100/man-day

If you wish to share fees of various services in your area, please do so in the comments.

At Claremont, Noah's replies and Voegeli's responses on American democracy and economic inequality constitute this installment of "Upon Further Review."

It includes some good, friendly discussion of social equality vs. economic equality, and of economic mobility which I see as one of the wonders of American society.

Here's one bit from Voegli, speaking to Noah:

I close by remarking on your wistfulness about the absence of internal radicals or external Communists who might prod us to equalize incomes. It is in keeping with your hopes, now certainly flagging, that Occupy Wall Street would catalyze a politically irresistible redistributive movement. In your book's final sentence-"The worst thing we could do to the Great Divergence is get used to it" - you are trying to say something to the Americans indifferent to that great crusade. But perhaps they, in their reluctance to enlist, are trying to say something to you about their abiding desire for economic vigor and absolute mobility, and their abiding fears about the power and decency of redistributive government.

The average US income, per person, in 2011 was about $45,000. Make that an income cap, with anything above taxed at 100%. As a start, I suggest that this example of equality begin with Washington politicians and federal employees. It might catch on.

Why stop with income? Let's address assets too, which are much more important for economic equality. The average American's net worth in 2011 was $77,000. Let's bring the pols and bureaucrats down to that too, and take the rest away from them for equality and the Common Good. Bernanke, too, and Obama, Harry Reid, John Kerry, The Clintons, Elizabeth Warren, etc. Maybe throw in Krugman, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates just for giggles, and confiscate all trusts.

I suggest that the same apply to the owners and staff of The New Republic and The NY Times. If it requires force, so be it.

For my plan to work, obviously the government will need to set the prices of everything because otherwise nobody could afford stuff. Hey - it might just work!

A mid-air collision on February 1, 1943, between a B-17 and a German fighter over the Tunis dock area, became the subject of one of the most famous photographs of World War II.

Story here.

From Simon Schama's Why I Write:

Orwell’s four motives for writing still seem to me the most honest account of why long-form non-fiction writers do what they do, with “sheer egoism” at the top; next, “aesthetic enthusiasm” – the pleasure principle or sheer relish of sonority (“pleasure in the impact of one sound on another”); third, the “historical impulse” (the “desire to see things as they are”), and, finally, “political purpose”: the urge to persuade, a communiqué from our convictions.

To that list I would add that writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing.

No mention of the income at all?

What exactly are we getting for the time and the billions of dollars we spend on higher education? A quote:

Professors are often put in an impossible position: Their students, regardless of IQ, typically have few actual academic skills when they arrive, and they know next to nothing substantive; yet they have an almost unassailable confidence in their belief that they are highly skilled and extensively knowledgeable. If a professor gives them honest feedback about the quality of what they produce, who would support him? The administration? The parents? The education school establishment? No, he would be on an island.

That is a lonely place, and it is expecting too much that more than a few outliers here and there would persevere. The students whom professors do care about are the small fraction who want to get Ph.D.s. Those students professors nurture. For all the other students, however, professors’ feelings tend to range from mild irritation to thinly veiled contempt.

But we cannot be too hard on the students, either. Ask even the serious ones what proportion of their classes they believe is actually worthwhile. Their answer: maybe 25 percent.

What is higher ed these days? Any of the above, or maybe sometimes all of the above along with a delayed adulthood.

From Stephanie Blanchard:

By the time I was college-aged and supposed to be "finding myself," I didn't want to pursue a degree; I wanted to work. Instead of searching through course catalogs, I found a better-paying position with a large insurance company. At that time, the early 1990s, no one demanded that I have a degree or even wondered how young I was. (I'm guessing because it was illegal to ask.) Someone in Human Resources put me in a temp spot, and before long, I had a permanent job followed by a promotion. It took me a while, and working for a few small businesses, before I finally found my true calling, newspapers, but by the time I became a weekly reporter, I already had ten years' office experience, at just 24 years old.

This would be impossible today.

Joesph Epstein: Who Killed the Liberal Arts? A quote:

When I was about to graduate from high school as an amiable screw-off, ranked barely above the lower quarter of my class, my father, who had not gone to college, told me that if I wished to go he would pay my way, but he encouraged me to consider whether my going wouldn’t be a waste of time. He personally thought I might make a hell of a good salesman, which was a compliment, for he was himself a hell of a good salesman, and a successful one. I eschewed his advice, not because it wasn’t sound, but chiefly because I felt that, at 18, I wasn’t ready to go out in the world to work.

In those days, the University of Illinois was, at least for residents of the state, an open-enrollment school. If you lived in Illinois, the school had to take you, no matter how low in your high school class you graduated. Lots of kids flunked out, and my own greatest fear on the train headed from Chicago down to Champaign-Urbana, in white bucks and reading The Catcher in the Rye, was that I would be among them.

This is good fun: Dad, I told a boy at school that any number to the power zero is one. He said that was idiotic.

The comments on that post show some eddication, too. Math is the best test of intellectual rigor because, up through Calc 3, it doesn't require talent. Just IQ (ie pattern-recognition, pleasure in the application of logic, and ability to handle abstraction), some humility in witholding one's own precious opinions and bullshitting skills learned in high school as in soft courses, and good study habits.

That's why tough colleges use Calc as "weed-out" courses for so many majors, and why so many grad school entry exams include Calc and advanced math (eg Med School, Engineering, Accounting, Computer, Biz School, Bio, the hard sciences obviously, etc). It's about capacity for mental discipline.

However, many Prep Schools and large High Schools in the US today offer Calc 2 and even Calc 3 so brainy kids don't have to waste college time on them and can jump right into real "Higher Ed."

The sad thing is that many bright kids' brains do not mature at the same pace (due to myelinization and other things), and sometimes can process things easily at 20 which they could not have done at 16.

As they say, eddication - like sex - is wasted on the young. I have friends who have taken up higher math, Chinese, and accounting in adulthood, just for the enjoyable challenge and for life-enrichment. Even writing books about obscure 16th Century Dutch artists. Reading fiction and watching TV and movies do not suffice for the active, adventurous mind. In fact, I have a 65 year-old (not retired) golfing buddy who is taking up Sanskrit. I admire people like that, and do not particularly admire people who do not have serious intellectual, artistic, or religious pursuits, regardless of their age.

I might like or love them, but don't admire. Precious grey matter should not be put out to pasture, because it is a gift. Very rare and fortunate are those who can combine vocation with avocation.

If your kid doesn't know Calc 1 or Stats 1 in High School, your government is ripping you off. That does not happen in India, China, or Singapore.

Jane Shaw: I’m dumbfounded. Two professors from UNC-Chapel Hill actually said it: Not everyone should go to college.

Charles Murray guesstimates that something between 1 in 10 and 1 in 30 can make the best use of Liberal Arts higher ed (ie, not as a credential but for the intellectual growth which is more difficult, but entirely possible - to do on one's own). For the rest, it's credential-buying, a rite of passage, an extension of high school, checking a social-advancement box, and/or delayed adulthood.

Mike Rowe in his letter to Mitt Romney touts the needed skills that yuppies don't want their kids to learn.

Investing in Higher Education Will Not Bring Democratic Equality:

Most public officials are mesmerized by the egalitarian fantasy. They insist that investing more in higher education will even out inequalities by helping those at the bottom get an Associate's Degree to compete with Ivy League graduates. No Virginia, Santa Claus cannot help those baffled by Algebra I to earn millions doing mind-boggling Wall Street swaps and derivatives. And take heed, Occupy Wall Streeters: next year's 1% will be even smarter and richer than today's 1% as the pool of applicants to top colleges expands as a resul tof growing worldwide wealth. In fact, thanks to this relentless upward pressure from an ever larger pool of applicants, today's 1% may eventually be displaced by those with even higher IQ's.

Those who wave the bloody flag of "fairness" in the income distribution are doomed. Exceptional talent, as any sports fan can tell you, does not come cheap. Bill Gates was once asked to identify his greatest competitor. He said Goldman Sachs. A puzzled interviewer asked why, and Gates responded that both Goldman and Microsoft competed for the same prime intellectual talent at the very edge of the bell curve's right side. Finding and rewarding top intellectual ability in today's global economy is incompatible with economic leveling though, ironically, this "unfair" meritocracy that looks nothing like those below will bring greater prosperity to everyone.

 

At The American. He begins:

Many news articles are starting to note that middle and upper-middle class parents are having trouble paying for their children’s college educations. Most of these articles see this as a new development. But the story is actually more than 50 years old.

Throughout the 1950s, and with the best of motives, Americans gradually adopted a policy of allowing—even encouraging—colleges to use what economists call first degree price discrimination. Here’s how this price discrimination works...