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.
One’s reaction to Cathy’s remarks shouldn’t turn on views of gay marriage – an issue so far from being a closed conversation that polling routinely shows the public split roughly down the middle on it. Rather, it should be anchored in the simple fact that the Chick-fil-A president didn’t breathe a word of intolerance, bigotry or even derision. In fact, he didn’t even make a political statement.
The poisonous trend at work here is a complete inversion of the traditional understanding of “tolerance.”
As articulated in the great Western tradition of liberalism (the name given to the political philosophy espousing individual liberty before it was hijacked by statists), tolerance means granting others the freedom of their own actions and views so long as they don’t harm others.
This view was ably expressed by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, when, in regard to religious liberty, he said, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Putting normal lives on a leash will be given an ideological aspect. Thanks to the opinion makers, the helpers will occupy the moral high ground. Earthly material interests mute into moralizing excuses. Stipulated justifications will exploit the original purpose of the regulating bureaucracy and thus protect it from criticism because of its claimed service of a higher purpose. Helping the poor might be virtuous. The institutions that fight poverty and thrive as a result, are not quite as noble as is their original goal. Existing values can also be hitched in front of bureaucratic carts. The values that preach helping and solidarity are enlisted to bless whatever the “office“ does. Accordingly, the critics are accused of lacking solidarity, of egoism, or to abuse the environment if, for instance, they dare to articulate the waste of some ecological regulations.
The Lance-Schliesser boycott proposal was endorsed by many of the philosophers who commented on the pair's blog entry. Indeed, "some proposed that the boycott be expanded to include conferences with all-white line-ups or with lack of diversity in sexual orientation or nationality," Inside Higher Ed reported. The notion of merit, aptitude or interest as relevant to scholarly endeavors from majoring in chemistry to speaking at a philosophy conference seems to be falling by the wayside.
The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.
Another:
... these capitalists of the left are concentrated where it counts most. The most visible entrepreneurs of the high-tech industry are predominantly liberal. So are most of the people who run the entertainment and news industries. Even leaders of the financial industry increasingly share the politics of George Soros. Whether measured by fundraising data or by the members of Congress elected from the ZIP Codes where they live, the elite centers with the most clout in the culture are filled with people who are embarrassed to identify themselves as capitalists, and it shows in the cultural effect of their work.
What a great idea! Get rid of languages, too. They're too hard. That way, the division between the smart kids and the less-talented and lower-IQ kids will be even more obvious to colleges and employers.
At the heart of the Ricci case was the doctrine of disparate-impact discrimination, which the Supreme Court first articulated in its 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Company. At issue in Griggs was the requirement that employees hired into service jobs at the power company's facilities had to possess a high-school diploma and achieve a minimum score on an IQ test. The plaintiffs argued that these rules disqualified too many black job applicants, thereby violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
The Supreme Court agreed, ruling that job criteria with an adverse or exclusionary effect on minorities — even if those criteria were "neutral on their face, and even neutral in terms of intent" — could violate the Title VII ban on race discrimination in hiring. The Court further stipulated that employers could escape liability for "disparate impact" only if they demonstrated that their adverse selection practices had "a manifest relationship to the employment in question" or that they were justified by "business necessity." In examining the criteria for positions at the Duke Power Company, the Court found insufficient evidence to satisfy the job-relatedness defense, and so ruled against the utility.
Read the whole thing if you're interested. With all of the Federal legislation in recent years, employment law has become a hot area. A major expense for employers but one more gold mine for lawyers.
Gov. Paul LePage said Wednesday he will propose a bill in the next legislative session that will require school districts to pay for their graduates’ remedial courses in college. LePage cited the number of college students who need remedial classes as evidence of the ways Maine’s education system is failing students and taxpayers. Fifty-four percent of students entering the Maine Community College System need to re-learn basic skills, as do 20 to 25 percent of students at the state’s four-year universities, LePage said. “The parents of this state pay taxes for public education, then they have to pay a second time when their kids enter college.”
That's "higher ed" these days. My question would be "Why are these kids accepted at community colleges if they lack required skills?" (We all know it's all about warm bodies and the money.) I think the Gov. has it backwards, but it is a clever political ploy.
I'm with Charles Murray in thinking that around 5% of kids are "ready" for serious higher ed, unless that "higher ed" means job training. It's all about Insty's College Bubble. Except for the most competitive schools, I think community colleges and most colleges are the new High Schools. Honestly, you would not believe the ignorance and intellectual incompetence of college grads that I have interviewed in recent years.
We have to face the fact that "higher ed" is a government-sponsored industry, just like GM and Solydra, churning out stuff that nobody really needs.
Nothing wrong with core expectations of elementary and secondary school if people can agree on them (but I'd go to the local taxpayers for that advice, not the national educational establishment). However, no standards can cause those who don't want to, or are not interested in or capable of, learning things in school.
He opens with this: "It's no secret that most high school graduates are unprepared for college." Well, duh. But so what? There's no crisis in that area.
I don't blame teachers or curricula or standards for the fact that many kids do not learn much. It appears to be the case in colleges, too. Pretending that most kids are natural scholars defies all known reality.
Education is not a "product" that can be purchased, any more than "health" is. Such things are not passive purchases. No gym membership can give you six-pack abs, alas.
It’s painful, charge our critics, for the families that these schools serve to see the contrast between their dreary classrooms and ours, which we spruce up with cheery paint jobs, new carpets and extensive technology.
Actually, it’s far worse than that: 88 percent of our students read proficiently; fewer than a third do at these district schools. Our students also get two hours more instruction per day, science daily and teachers who receive far more professional development.
And they do it for less money, with no admissions process other than a lottery. No union bosses, no political pay-offs.
What is college for, and why is it so expensive? From John Leo:
Where does all that money go? Much of it to lavish spa-like facilities and grand new construction, including $100 million or so for multicultural centers and sports stadiums. The debt taken on by colleges has risen 88 percent since 2001, to $307 billion. Jeff Selingo of the Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a “lost decade” of wild campus spending: “The almost insatiable demand for a college credential meant that schools could raise their prices and families would go to almost any end, including taking on huge amounts of debt, to pay the bill. In 2003, only two colleges charged more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, and room and board; by 2009, 224 were above that mark.” And now many are inching toward (or past) $50,000 a year...
I am old-fashioned. I think college should be spartan but spartan doesn't sell. It's about branding and sales.
To the slight extent that our higher education has increased social stratification, it is due to the mania for college credentials the system has helped unleash. Some people who can’t obtain the credentials that are increasingly required of job applicants—even for work that calls for nothing more than basic trainability—are shut off from good career paths. That is something of an obstacle to social mobility and if the higher education industry wanted to make amends, it could work toward alternative credentials that would be less costly and better indicators of employability. (There is already movement in that direction, but mostly from outside “edupreneurs.”)
I think the edupreneurs will own the future, especially for those who seek education mainly as an investment in their careers. Traditional colleges don't know whether they are centers for life-enrichment or job-training centers. They are confused about their mission because they do not want to see themselves as credential-salesmen. I have no problem with janitors with college degrees. Why not? I do have a problem with college for people who do not treasure the life of the mind.
The French Revolution proved a dry-run for the twentieth century. Fanatics systematically liquidated internal enemies. They exported revolution to those unlucky enough to share their borders. They ignored all of history and believed all of posterity would see them as the starting point. Words, such as “Committee of Public Safety,” conveyed the very opposite of their meanings. The inability to attain the glorious ends that rationalized their terrible means left just the terror.
Somewhat similar to Charter Schools, the academies get a flat rate per student, and run themselves. Britain modeled these after the Swedish system which offers an abundance of choices free from the governmental and union system.
Free choice is always a good idea. Here's another good idea: Schools That Work, Literally. Jobs in the real world.
When I was in boarding school, all students were assigned to work crews all year long. That was good, but the above is even better.
What work crews were we assigned to at school? Leaf raking and landscape clean-up, kitchen duty (dishwashing mostly), prep and maintenance of the outdoor hockey rinks, preparing and serving faculty teas and faculty meetings, working in the printing shop and the mail room, cleaning the chapel after Sunday service (we had daily chapel) and waxing the chapel floor, working in the gym's laundry room (gross), shelving books in the library, snow-shoveling, early morning newspaper delivery to faculty, preparing the skeet and rifle ranges, raising and feeding the pheasants for the shooting club, and so forth. Work crew averaged out to around 7 hrs/week. Most of the work was under the supervision of rough-edged townies who didn't mind calling us spoiled brats and sissies who didn't want to get our hands dirty. They did not give a damn about how you felt, and rightly so. That attitude was motivational and, I believe, endorsed by the administration.
Looking back, the work crews did us all a lot of good. Bear in mind, we had plenty of rich kids from NYC who had never seen the inside of a kitchen or touched a rake, much less a snow shovel. Education takes many non-formal forms.
Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obama’s potential organizees as ludicrous. “Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people?” a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. “Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall.”
The article is deeply depressing. The concepts of planning and of delayed gratification seem to be lost. It's consistent with my theory that many or maybe most people will go feral unless raised to civilization. Lord of the Flies. Is this the product of government policy? I think so. Nobody lived this way before The Great Society, and now it has become its own multigenerational subculture.
It also seems clear to me that these teen mothers do not want husbands anyway. Why would they want to marry unreliable losers, drop-outs, or gang members? Or anybody? In my view, government can do nothing to fix what they have irretrievably broken in the name of compassion. Rich, poor, or in-between, big government programs lock people into things and inhibit change. Tragic. Another quote:
Some members of Chicago’s Left will argue against holding fathers or mothers responsible for their children. “To blame it on the family is totally unfair,” says Gwen Rice, a board member of the Developing Communities Project. “I’m tired of blaming the parents. The services for the poor are paltry; it boggles the mind. Historically, you can’t expect a parent who can’t get a job to do something that someone with resources can do. These problems have histories; there are policies that have mitigated against black progress. What needs to happen is a change in corporate greed and insensitivity.” Rice corrects my use of the term “illegitimacy”: “There are no illegitimate births,” she says.
Maybe we need laws to prevent Corporate Greed from impregnating innocent teens. And we need more government services. That would solve it all.
People prone to collectivist fantasies seek to escape the struggles of their present life and transport themselves to a place where mankind has triumphed over the adversities of the “mundane” to frolic like gods amongst the stars.
Now, imagine you are one of these desperate men or women, and someone promises you in a rather convincing manner that their system of social structure and governance will bring that sterling-silver-gravity-defying-Star-Trek-future to you. What would you be willing to trade for even a glimpse into the next epoch? Some, sadly, are willing to trade everything, including their freedoms...
As one who also teaches at a community college in New Jersey, I agree with Chuck that you feel the heat at that level for a variety of reasons, including the increasing pressure from administrators and state legislators who want to see evidence of “success.” Students, after all, are “customers” who’ve paid for their courses, and “customers” deserve satisfaction. Whether or not they've learned anything seems secondary to the need to stick diplomas into their hands.
I've never done blind tastings, but I'd like to try doing it sometime. All wines do not taste the same. I have had my share of borderline undrinkable, or undrinkable, wines, and my share of mind-blowingly delicious wines too.
It's hard to believe, but we've all read, and Lehrer confirms, that in blind tastings few can even distinguish a red from a white. I'd be a skeptic on that.
I think the meaningful question is whether the average wine drinker can tell the difference between a pretty good cabernet, for example, and a very fancy one, and whether the difference matters much.
The world only has so much room for geek geniuses. The rest of us need regular jobs, regardless of all of our above-average IQs and our As in Calculus.
As if academia were a misogynistic, Muslim-style environment. These policy-makers are morons, panderers, idiots.
On some days, I feel that the world has gone mad and that we should put Thorazine into the drinking water along with fluoride. One such days, I think the government should require that the NY Rangers be 45% female, 5% mixed vegetable sexual orientation, and 11% black. Same for the Knicks. That would make for a circus, for sure.
I have told you several times in the past about my local master gunsmith, Italy-trained in some of the finest hand-made gun shops in the world, who put up ads in our high school for seven years inviting applicants to apprentice with him. He never got a single reply, and gave up the effort.
When he died a few years ago, alas (when he was charging $175/hr for labor and had more work than he could handle), all of his skills in wood and in machining gun parts died with him. A damn shame. An expert shot with rifle and shotgun, too.
Mike Rowe claims that people look down on people who know how to do real things. Do they really? Most people seem to admire or envy people who can do real things. Nobody admires people because they can use Powerpoint. Anyway, this via Eratosthenes:
How did it happen? We know how many of our public schools teach no serious American history or civics, that our toniest colleges preach left-liberalism, that 40% of American babies are illegitimate and the rate keeps rising, that too many thriving young Americans worship money and casual hedonism and are too ignorant of religion even to be proper atheists, that President Obama rejects outright the heart of America’s Creed: American uniqueness, the American Zion, the city on a hill striving to be a beacon to mankind. How did this happen? When did we decide to swap America for America Lite? We can’t undo these changes unless we know how they came about.
The neoconservative approach posits that universal peace is achievable by engineering a world of democratic institutions and that, if history does not move quickly enough, we can move it along by military force. My concern is that this ultimate goal is in practice so remote, and the method of reaching it so uncertain, that it leads to an interventionism exhausting our society and ultimately to abdication, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The difference is less one of destination than of pacing. The point is not that what exists is unalterable, but that the effort required to implement change will be more sustainable, if we temper the visionary aspect of policy with a recognition of the variety and complexity of circumstance.
The current situation in the Middle East is instructive...
There are two sorts of Americans, the "What can I get?" Americans and the "What can I do?" Americans.
Some folks might wade through the Rio Grande for "What can I get?", but I think most of them, like the ones who immigrate from further afield, come because of "What can I do?" Nowadays, it's mostly smart, ambitious Asians who can write code but are also willing to do the night shifts at the minimarts (kind of crazy to see work-free Americans on welfare in the minimart lines while the Asian or Haitian keeps busy at the check-out counter practicing his or her English and studying some textbook between customers).
Land of Opportunity, and all that. Whining and whinging not allowed here. There is still more freedom here to pursue your life goals than anywhere on earth, and leisure is not a traditional American life goal. In fact, the original Americans considered leisure to be disreputable if not shameful except on Sunday, after church.
It was the banks that first felt the lash of Mr Hollande’s tongue when he declared that his “true adversary” was not Mr Sarkozy but “the world of finance”. The president, who has spent almost his entire career in the public sector or working for his party, once said: “I don’t like the rich."
If you hate the world of finance, don't borrow and don't invest. It's simple. Also strange, since Hollande has become very wealthy working all his life for government and in politics, and all of his friends and girlfriends are rich. He has the parasitic mind, and parasites hate their hosts because they are ashamed of their dependency.
School bullying: 
U.S. pushes for more scientists,