Maggie's Farm

Clearly, today the term "disabled" includes many people entirely capable of holding jobs.

Here's the latest on the disabled: Obama administration may soon require all Federal contractors hire 7% disabled workers. There is an interesting hitch, however: "... it is illegal, under the ADA, for employers to query applicants about their disabilities."

From the piece at Minding the Campus:

Melissa Keith, also of KSU, continued the anti-West, anti-imperialist theme by recycling 1970s feminist theory in her paper titled, "Defining the Erotic Mystical Global Paradigm: From Inanna to the Bhagavad-Gita to Audre Lorde." The feminist discovery of the "wild" (thanks to Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Judy Grahn) dismantled the archetypical story of the West, that of the hero, with God as the patriarch. Lorde's rescuing of the "erotic" from its association with the "pornographic" and overturning--again--the old "dualities" of spirit over nature, was enthusiastically hailed. "Reclaiming" and "renaming" private body parts (this was soon after the Vagina Monologues season, after all) leads to staking out "intellectual space." As for implementation, Keith said teaching the explicit poetry of Judy Grahn in a small class of "mature" students provides "quite an amazing experience."

All you can do is to laugh.

Professionals use Milorganite for their lawn fertilizing. It is also a good deer-repellant to put on things like Hostas.

It doesn't smell good for a day or two, but it is slow-release (8 weeks), organic, and it cannot burn a lawn. Milwaukee has been producing it since 1925. It is, basically, made from the pee and poo of the population of the great city of Milwaukee. Big eaters and, one might suppose, big poopers.

People from there say they are from "Mwawkee" like people from NYC say they're from "Nyork" or, if from the boroughs, "Nyawk."

Here's the Milorganite site.

Taranto: The Man Who Knew Too Little - President Obama's stunning ignorance of constitutional law.

Well ok. You might expect a Con Law teacher to remember the date of Lochner but, giving Obama the benefit of the doubt, I think he is simply spewing spin and propaganda, hoping most voters won't notice.

How many voters care about Lochner? Or even about the Constitution? Even the President, who did swear to uphold it, admits he doesn't really approve of it.

Perhaps his back-up plan is to run against the Court - and the Constitution. It could work. Politics ain't beanbag.

Pretty much everything we do, or do not do, in life has some economic consequence. From Barone, Americans Are Worrying About the Constitution Again:

For 70 years, since the court in 1942 said the government could limit the amount of wheat farmer Roscoe Filburn could grow on his own land to feed his own animals, it has been generally assumed that the federal government's power to regulate the economy had no limits.

That assumption survived in liberal precincts even though the court in 1995 overturned a law banning guns in schools and in 2000 ruled unconstitutional parts of the Violence Against Women Act.

But the arguments, developed by Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett and others, that it is beyond the powers conferred by the Constitution for Congress to mandate the purchase of a commercial product -- health insurance in Obamacare -- were certainly taken seriously by a majority of Supreme Court justices last week.

And the government's lawyers were unable to answer the questions of both liberal and conservative justices: If Congress can do this, what can't it do?

That question is likely to linger even if the court upholds Obamcare.

As Ilya Shapiro says:

Economists say that diet and exercise have a greater effect on taxpayer spending on healthcare than rates of ownership of insurance, so if anything healthy-food and gym-membership mandates have greater constitutional warrant than what we’re dealing with now.

So when will the Feds try to mandate gym membership? For the greater good, of course?

The Best Damn Argument For The Unconstitutionality of ObamaCare... A quote:

The government just decided that all insurance must be comprehensive. And that no one any longer had the freedom to choose anything but that -- even its superior competitor, Catastrophic Coverage.

That's not destroying a "stupid" freedom to be self-destructive. That's taking away a very real and sensible choice.

And on what authority, exactly?

This thing that is supposedly done for me, as if I were a moron and incapable of making life decisions, is not what I want and definitely not what I want done for me. I have a better idea. As readers know, I have Major Medical, high-deductible insurance because it works for me. The law will make my policy illegal. I once worked for a firm which self-insured: the firm paid 80% of the employees' medical bills after a $1000 deductible. Doing that would be illegal too.

The Dems passed a law to eliminate our free choice to purchase a personal item. As a favor to us, of course. Because they know what's best for us proles. Or are we serfs now, living for the greater good of the kings?

From the liberal Mead's The Health Care Disaster and the Miseries of Blue:

 Obamacare so far is a political flop and shows ominous early signs of being a policy misfire as well. The benefits don’t seem to measure up to the hype, more people are going to lose their existing insurance, premiums are going up and the impact on the deficit is going to be worse.

This is a horrible piece of legislation — as misbegotten and useless to its friends as it is menacing to its enemies. The question is: why? Why did the blues write such a bad law? Why, given a once in a lifetime chance to pass a program that Dems have longed to achieve ever since the New Deal, did they craft a sloppy mess that nobody understands and few admire, and then leave their law so unnecessarily vulnerable to constitutional challenge?

The answers tell us much about why blue progressive thinking is losing its hold on the body politic — and why blue methods generally aren’t working as well as they used to.

Here.

It's quite remarkable to me that Polical Correctness, widely mocked ten years ago, has taken over in the academy. More satire is needed, but now there is fear of free expression. It is creepy.

Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

At Commentary, Joseph Epstein's Old Age and Other Laughs:

“Thanks all the same, Jack, but we have no need for assisted-living insurance,” I said. “We have pistols.”

“Great,” he replied, nicely on beat. “I just hope when the time comes to use them you are able to find them.”

The more governments prove themselves incompetent to do something, the more resources they demand to do it. From Hubris heading for a fall:

Until the 1930s, or perhaps the 1960s, there was a "legitimacy barrier" to federal government activism: When new policies were proposed, the first debate was about whether the federal government could properly act at all on the subject. Today, there is no barrier to the promiscuous multiplication of programs, because no program is really new. Rather, it is an extension, modification or enlargement of something government is already doing.

and

James Q. Wilson, America's late, great social scientist, noted that until relatively recently, "politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything." Until the 1930s, or perhaps the 1960s, there was a "legitimacy barrier" to federal government activism: When new policies were proposed, the first debate was about whether the federal government could properly act at all on the subject. Today, there is no barrier to the promiscuous multiplication of programs, because no program is really new. Rather, it is an extension, modification or enlargement of something government is already doing. 

And

"There has been," Wilson writes, "a transformation of public expectations about the scope of federal action, one that has put virtually everything on Washington's agenda and left nothing off." Try, Wilson suggests, to think "of a human want or difficulty that is not now defined as a 'public policy problem.'"

Approaching death, rising taxes. The Sun.

I would say that if you can understand every detail of the Wiki piece on old Mr. Sun, your basic, math-free science is in fairly good shape.

I did not know that the sun, with its Solar System, orbits about the center of the Milky Way galaxy at approximately 251 km/second. We are racing around our galaxy which is, in turn, racing through space at somewhere between 100 and 600 km/second.

And yet we do not feel the speed.

South Carolina photo by our pal Capt. Tom Francis

Mark Levin made a good point on the radio recently. While pointing out that government takes 25% of all income in the US - and still cannot come close to paying their bills, he said what I felt was important: We're all at fault.

Well, maybe not individually, but all at fault as a voting mass because, since FDR, we have been demanding and taking more and more goodies from the government - ie from eachother. The candy bowl was emptied, so we started borrowing candy from China.

China is making money from those loans, from our labor. But as our commenter Bob said here this morning:

The reality is that a majority of Americans want socialism. They want Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, unemployment benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, and regulations on the environment, work, housing, food and drugs, zoning, etc etc etc. All that is modern, parliamentary socialism. The old socialism of worker dictatorship and state ownership of the means of production died in WWI when the workers supported the war instead of revolting.

But Americans have been conditioned to hate the word socialism.

Also, Americans, like people everywhere, don't want to pay for it. They keep trying pass the costs on to someone else. There is no one else. The American middle class and working class will have to pay a lot more in taxes to get what they want. A very lot more. Probably at least double.

If taxes aren't raised dramatically, benefits will have to be cut. That will not happen until economic collapse occurs. Greece is everyone's future. Most of the welfare state benefits go to the elderly. If you cut benefits, you will reduce your own grandparents to poverty and you will deny them medical care. In other words, welcome to 1910.

A free college education, at MITx:

Revolutionary, indeed. As I have written earlier in this space, the ground has moved beneath the feet of higher education, much of which will look very different in but a few short years.

It will be fascinating to see what good competition will do to the higher-ed government-industrial complex. In time, I think it will blow it wide open for better or worse. Not just in STEM, but in everything.

It's about freedom from the power of the state:

The main brief says: “The individual mandate rests on a claim of federal power that is both unprecedented and unbounded: the power to compel individuals to engage in commerce in order more effectively to regulate commerce. This asserted power does not exist.” If regulating inactivity were a “necessary and proper” means of regulating commerce, they argue, we would expect to see more of it, but in 220 years, Congress has never required individuals to purchase particular goods or services as a condition of being alive. The government, of course, denies that it is trying to regulate inactivity; rather, they repeat the argument they sold to several lower courts, that the mandate regulates “economic decisions.”

The states also argue against the mandate on the basis of federalism...

The American population, as a whole, is a bit adolescent, isn't it? Welcomes freebies, but doesn't want to be controlled. "Dad, can I borrow your car tonight?" "OK honey, just be back by 11:30." "Dad, stop trying to control me."

That darn commerce clause has already been abused to death. It's time somebody finally closed the door.

Will the left side of the Supremes decide that the Feds are all-powerful over every aspect of our lives, including the most personal? The voters are overwhelmingly opposed to such power.

Chart via Zero Hedge's Infographic: Reevaluating The Costs And Benefits Of (Debt Bubble-Funded) Higher Education:

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

Orson Welles

And on where you start it. We may not be professional scientists here on the Farm, but we've all read the classic How to Lie with Statistics, and I assume we've all studed at least basic calculus.

(And we all also know that computer modeling depends on the parameters you chose, or adjust ex post facto: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." - John Von Neuman. In science, if data fails to fit models, they adjust the models to fit the data, and keep their jobs and federal grants. In finance, you get fired or lose your bonus.)

Sticking with Orson Welles for today, my point is elementary math: If you select your end point (and your starting point), you can extrapolate out any line from any piece of any graph or curve you want. That's termed "cherry picking." That's why they say that, if you extrapolate the curve of the log graph of the population of Houston from 1950 to 1980, Houston would shortly contain the entire population of the USA.

Climate alarmists are famous for extrapolating from small, selected pieces of data - and also for continual realignment of modeling parameters (which is not science, it's computer gaming).

Let's accept that post-glacial global warming has been going on, with dramatic bumps up and down but generally beneficially for humans (not for Wooly Mammoths), for 10,000 years, with the resulting 120-150 meters of ocean rise. (There are many Neolithic villages underwater in the English Channel and the North Sea, many Indian villages underwater 50-60 miles out from the coast of Virginia, etc.) This will continue until the climate tide changes back to the next glaciation in the next few centuries or millennia. Given recent predictions, we are warned to expect at least several decades of global cooling around now. Will it be the Big One? A warning to go long Key Largo real estate?

Here's an amusing alarmist example which is being fed to our benighted, innocent kiddies: Warming Doubles Extreme Coastal Flood Risk Across U.S. They begin:

Global warming has raised global sea level about 8 inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges.

As if it all began in 1880. It's probably closer to 6 inches in the past 200 years, but let that pass. The real question is why they picked 1880 instead of saying "Rising seas since 1800 increase the risk of damaging storm surges"? The line would be less scarey. Or better yet, why not say "Rising seas since 15,000 BC increase the risk of damaging storm surges"?  Look at this graph. Why not draw your average beginning at 1800?

Aha. they picked a low point and a high point on the curvacious historical graph, and are extrapolating from that teensy piece of it to instill terror. If you picked 1800 as your starting point, your line would look different.

And, as we posted yesterday, if you picked 18,000 years ago, your take on the data would be quite different again. You would relax and turn on the basketball game. Go Huskies - and we may need real Huskies here soon:

Call me paranoid if you want, but my view is that there is an unspoken alliance (not a conscious conspiracy) between greedy scientists and greedy governments of all sorts to make a big deal out of a big nothing. I hope to survive the big chill to see that finally people will have admitted, as they finally admitted about the imminent Ice Age scare of the 1970s - that it is pure hype.

But, what the heck, let's step even further backwards from the frame for the really Big Picture. I'll bet teacher never told you that we remain in a cold spell, historically-speaking. Yes, indeed. Polar ice caps are not normal for planet Earth. The earth doesn't have a fever - it has a very bad cold right now:

I guess you could call it "Occupy Sandra," but that sounds a little bit disrespectful of her natural feminine sex drives and desires, and I'd hate to get into a brouhaha like Rush.

She still wants me to buy her condoms, and yet I've never even met her,  much less taken her out to dinner at a nice French bistro and gazed deeply and soulfully into her eyes with deep sympathy (for her inability to afford needed condoms). Lib Hero Sandra Fluke: Free Birth Control Is a Natural Human Right – I Won’t Be Silenced.

It occurred to me that, as an act of charity, caring Americans ought to each mail her a box of condoms from the minimart. She is begging, after all, and she, bravely, heroically, will not be silenced until she gets them. As pictured on the right, they appear to come in three sizes: Tall, Grande, and Venti so maybe one pack of each size, just in case.

Let's all show some compassion for this 30 year-old single law student and bury her Georgetown apartment in ultra-ribbed lubricated Trojans so she can have the fun she deserves as an American citizen.

I am a believer in freedom from government power, a believer in self-governance and self-determination. I am deeply skeptical about the notion of "rights to free stuff"  because that always entails government power and usually government coercion by our betters.

We already have seen Obamacare become politicized, and that is just the beginning. It will get much worse, because I need daily cigar aromatherapy to maintain my mental health and count on my fellow citizens to provide it for me for free. Habanos, please.

This whole topic of "positive rights," ie entitlements, is a strange thing, isn't it? Come on, people. Do you want the government in your sex life and your cigar life, or out of it?

(Condoms For Sandra, aka Occupy Sandra,  is not a 501(c)3 company, but it is coming soon through your government on your nickel - for Sandra)

Ace had this insight: In the Future, Socialism Will Advance Through "Insurance":

The endgame is just that no one actually pays for anything; the government, or a co-opted government-controlled industry which provides the functions of a socialist government ("insurance companies" which no longer insure anything, but merely send checks to people), simply takes over almost all costs in life.

As long as they call it "insurance," people can pretend they aren't mooching off their neighbors.

Coffee Is an Essential Benefit Too - Here are some other health-care mandates that government should impose on employers.

Definitely the free gym memberships

Codevilla's America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution (with thanks to Never Yet melted for reminding us of this essay). On the faith in (or of) the ruling class, he says:

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one's self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it "the old serpent, you work I'll eat." But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke .

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by "science." By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes' deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach's rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx 's formulation, that ethical thought is "superstructural" to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called "all men are created equal" "a self-evident lie," much of America's educated class had already absorbed the "scientific" notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era . When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill." Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world's examples and the world's reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to "teach [them] to elect good men."

It depends on how you define "thinking." If "thinking" means an effort to form a logical progression of thoughts and ideas, words sure come in handy whether you intend to communicate the thoughts or not. In my experience, most people tend to avoid the effort that this requires unless they are trained to do it in some area of life such as diagnosing a car breakdown or a legal case or a medical complaint.

But if "thinking" refers to all sorts of mental activities, then of course words are not required for most of it. Impulses, gut feelings, images, daydreams, movement, musical ideas, etc. are all wordless mental activity (I exclude mathematics, which is just another language). Furthermore, unconscious mental activity, which may be the bulk of mental activity, is all or mostly wordless.

The question is raised: To what extent do our words shape our thinking? Here's an effort to study the topic: Language doesn't influence our thoughts ... except when it does.

Speaking only for myself, I find that my words and my thought stream seem to do a sort of dance together, and a fresh new word or verbal concept can add new color or shape to it all. What is most fun is when a fresh word or phrase or concept crystallizes a dimly-thought thought.

"Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943)  (h/t Carpe Diem)

Lots of good food for thought here.

The Chaotic Legacy of the Classroom Radicals. He begins:

Halfway through my first year as a history teacher at an inner-city comprehensive in England, I am reeling from the volley of abuse and misbehaviour that makes up my daily grind. I can be sure that at some point in my day I will be aggressively confronted, blithely disobeyed, and probably sworn at. Restless nights are common, and nervousness ongoing. Still, talking to my friends from teacher training, I feel I'm having a comparatively easy ride. I have not yet been physically assaulted, and so far I have avoided the much-feared mid-lesson breakdown.

At schools such as this, the deprived background of the children is routinely presented as a catch-all explanation for bad behaviour. The pupils' chaotic home lives, their lack of prospects, and an absence of aspiration in the local community are all popular excuses for the pandemonium that pervades inner-city schools. These factors undoubtedly have an effect, but such thinking lets schools like this off the hook. The endemic discipline problem within the state sector is in reality self-inflicted. At least half a century of "progressive" thinking on pupil behaviour has had disastrous consequences. In the competitive field of follies wrought by 1960s radicalism, there is a very good case for progressive education being the most socially destructive.

Butler at National Journal: The Coming Higher-Ed Revolution. He begins:

In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations — shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T's "Ma Bell" system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade — often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.

The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced — keeping many people out of the market — and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms — with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.

If this transformation does come to pass, it could have profound and beneficial implications.

A discussion in the NYT: Should College be for Everyone?

And about high school, from Lulu at Bookworm:

When a struggling student getting D’s or F’s hears over and over that the only future for him is college, but college is an unrealistic expectation because the student isn’t academically oriented, resists school work, and has no educational career plans he can achieve without intense support and personal motivation (which he lacks), the student has only one alternative, and that is to drop-out. The F student who never studies or does a shred of homework often has no plans for the future. The lack of a life goal often leads to dropping out. The student who cannot or will not study sees a professional, college trained career as unattainable because all these professions require academic effort and knowledge, and this is a student who is academically behind appropriate level, sometimes by a significant gap. This leads to a “why try?” attitude. “Why try/” leads to quitting, floating along and letting life happen to you, teen pregnancy, dropping out, and gangs.

By insisting that everyone should attend college, college stops being a training place for the brightest minds. When everyone goes to college, it doesn’t elevate the unmotivated, non-studying student. It lowers the bar for everyone else.

Another consequence of the belief that everyone should go to college is that the high school student who graduates and gets a job is therefore seen under this paradigm as a failure. This is grossly unfair. This country has always valued the person who labors honestly, starts his own business, or provides people with desired goods and services. Historically these backbone working people have not needed a college degree. To this day many successful store or restaurant owners, plumbers, contractors, mechanics, and on and on, thrive despite never having graduated from, or perhaps never attending even a day of college. These people and their contributions should be valued. They obviously have all the education they need to create a business, provide needed services, and to succeed.

From Heather MacDonald's review of The City That Become Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, It's the Cops, Stupid!

A quote:

New York’s safety surge torpedoes all conventional understandings about crime. To be sure, the country as a whole experienced its own record-breaking crime drop in the 1990s, but New York’s crime freefall was twice as steep—80 percent, as opposed to 40 percent—and lasted twice as long. Whereas America’s crime decline stalled in the 2000s, New York’s continued, cementing Gotham’s previously unimaginable status as the safest big city in the country.

You might think that criminologists would have flocked to New York to study how such a paradigm-shattering development happened. Instead, for the last decade and a half, the criminology profession has tried to look the other way. A favorite criminological pursuit in the 1990s was finding cities that equaled New York’s crime decline on a single front—homicide, say—in order to diminish the significance of what was happening in the nation’s largest city. San Diego and Boston were favorites of New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield and his professional sources, no matter how wildly different those localities’ demographics and overall crime rates were from New York’s. When, by the late ’90s, the crime drop in the rival cities had petered out or, as in the case of Boston, reversed itself, the profession lost interest in New York entirely. The city, after all, had two counts against it: it was presided over by a crusading Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who was targeting New York’s welfare culture as well as its violence and disorder, and all early indications suggested that responsibility for the crime decline lay with the newly focused, assertive tactics coming out of the New York Police Department.

Read the whole thing. I suspect that one reason NYC's success (and it is palpable when you visit these days) is not widely imitated in the big urban areas is because it doesn't fit Blue Social Theory. Blue Social Theory wants to deal with the "root causes of crime," when we already know the cause of crime is people - often bad people or addicts - behaving badly.