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.
While America's first colleges were built mainly to produce ministers, by the late 17th- early 18th Century they had evolved towards something akin to a Brit "Gentleman's education," with curricula including math, some sciences including anatomy, Rhetoric, Ethics, Georgraphy, Christianity, Latin and Greek. Thomas Jefferson, an aristocrat more-or-less, attended the College of William and Mary for only two years, but was mainly tutor-educated and self-educated as were most ambitiously-curious folks in the time, and up past Abe Lincoln's time. He, after all, never saw a college.
Gentlemen, would-be clergy, and the rare would-be teacher attended colleges (but did not necessarily bother to graduate). And the prosperous, up through Teddy Roosevelt's time, were tutored at home while the practically-oriented primary schooling was for the working classes. (I don't believe TR ever attended school until he entered Harvard College. He had to pass their Greek and French test, along with other exams, for admission.)
The rise of public libraries, beginning in the early 18th C, had a huge impact on self-education up through the early 20th Century. For those who could not afford to buy books, these were like the internet for learners.
The research room in the NY Public Library. America's libraries are where many accomplished people without means received all of their "higher" education since 1730:
The evolution of American higher ed is fascinating as these institutions attempted to keep themselves relevant and in demand and to ultimately create a monopolistic if meaningless credential. American higher ed borrowed from the European, but has always been quite different. My reading suggests these phases in its evolution:
From a Brit friend I chatted with: "That's one difference between you Yanks and the Europeans. You Yanks truly view government employees - cops, politicians, bureaucrats - as your servants, as your employees. In Europe, we don't see it that way. Different traditions."
What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress’s enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress, but were actually used as justification to extend Congress’s authority over every realm of human life? What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has become a democratically elected, term-limited monarch? What if the president assumed everything he did was legal just because he’s the president? What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming for a special message from him? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without warning?
As you go through your list of end-of-year charitable contributions, please consider adding FIRE to your annual giving list.
They do good work on a shoestring with, as I understand it, quite a lot of volunteered legal time. As I see it, FIRE is continuing the work of the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 60s. In fact, I am considering offering myself to them for occasional free counsel.
In my view, few things in life match the pleasure of giving money for the things one cares about. The freedom to do so is a gift itself, and a privilege. Like many or most of the conservative persuasion, we like to give until it hurts, but without going into debt to do it. The widow's mite: my charitable check sizes range from $50 to $1000, depending on how I feel and where I see the needs, but I have to whittle my list down to 12-15 of my favorite charities.
It's the festive time of year here in the USA. Saturnalia, as I term it - with Advent and the baby Jesus squeezed in there somewhere, out in the barn with the animals, or in our hearts.
Too much festivity packed into too short of a time. Party-hopping, dining out after cocktail parties and open-houses, eating too much tasty stuff, drinking too much, and seeing too many friends, old and new, to do them justice. The whirlwind already began this week, for us. I love it, but it also fatigues me. Even ran into an old prep school classmate at a large party last night, a guy I hadn't seen in around 5 years. "Hey, you look great," I said (lying). "So do you" he said (liar). "Let's go shooting sometime" he said (liar). "Great, love to" I replied (truthfully).
Here's one cool trick to save hassle for your holiday dining reservations: Open Table.com.
When we ask how our current political state of affairs measures up to the Founders’ standard, we usually find ourselves discussing whether a given law or program is constitutional, and soon enough get tangled in precedents and lawyerly rigmarole. But let’s frame the question a little differently: How far does present-day America meet the Founders’ ideal of free government, protecting individual liberty while avoiding what they considered tyranny? A few specific examples will serve as a gauge...
Read it. Wonderful essay. Another quote:
There’s indeed a lot of petty tyranny going around. The question is, at what point do many little tyrannies add up to Tyranny? Likely voters suggested a troubling answer in an August Rasmussen poll: 69 percent of them said they didn’t think today’s U.S. government enjoys the consent of the governed. And in September, 49 percent of respondents, an unprecedented high, told Gallup pollsters that “the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”
Let’s face it, most students want jobs or to get into good professional and graduate schools and therefore care little about useless general education courses and the formative process of education; Corporate America wants skilled workers, not philosophical or reflective employees (who might then question some of its practices); therefore, the marketplace reinforces the economic value of higher education and dictates the nature of the curriculum and the priority of the courses that are taught. To keep up with current trends, many colleges and universities market their product as “a major investment,” as the president of a selective four-year liberal arts college, stated, and then added: “And with returns that will last a lifetime, it’s one of the best investments anyone could make.” But students aren’t buying this highfalutin talk. They are buying degrees so that they can make money because Mass Culture U.—television, music, movies, advertising, celebrities—tells them that that means success. Like religion, the life of the mind can wait until, as one student told me, after she gets a job, gets married, has children, and settles down. Then she’ll have time to think about “art and books and all that stuff.”
I agree about the value of a "useless education." I also agree with his distinction between "liberal arts" and "job training." I think Prof. Anderson is likely an inspiring prof.
However, I think liberal arts education has become insanely and unnecessarily expensive, so that people feel forced to regard it as a financial investment. Ask me whether I think higher ed is a credentialling racket, or expensive babysitting for superannuated adolescents.
Also, I do not think "the life of the mind" is for everybody. Seems to me that we have many people feeling obligated to "attend college," whatever that means, when they would feel more motivated and engaged in "training" to do something practical instead.
I am highlighting a weekend link about Fred Siegel that might have gone overlooked in the shuffle: 'The New Tammany Hall' - The historian of the American city on what Wall Street and the 'Occupy' movement have in common, and how government unions came to dominate state and local politics. One quote:
The future of his city worries Mr. Siegel. Forty years ago, New York had the most manufacturing jobs in America. But as the finance sector's share of the national economy grew to 23% in 2007 from 7% in 1980, New York turned almost into a one-company town. Meantime, the growing claims on the public purse by those who make little to no contribution to the economy have driven up taxes and the costs of doing business. The city creates jobs in tourism, hotels and restaurants at the lower end of the scale. "What we don't create are private-sector middle-class jobs," says Mr. Siegel. "We have a ladder with the middle rungs missing."
Government workers make up a growing share of the middle class. And perversely, says Mr. Siegel, unions can justifiably claim to defend the interests of the middle-class worker. "That's because the costs that they've imposed have driven out the private-sector middle class. They are the disease of which they proclaim themselves the cure."
...colleges are in many ways outdated. At one stage in history a college education required a physical plant where scholars could interact among themselves and with their students and where students could find the necessary resources for their studies such as libraries and labs. Now, however, libraries are largely obsolete and classes, even graduate seminars, can be conducted online. In many disciplines scholarship can be conducted in complete independence of the physical resources of a university.
The original progressives of the early 20th century, just like today’s seemingly incoherent liberals, were populist and technocratic — they argued both for direct democracy and for expert rule. Even as they called for enlarging the scope of the federal government and putting a class of educated specialists in charge of it, they also called for radical democratic reforms of our constitutional system. In the 1912 election, the Progressive-party platform proposed not only the direct election of senators but also the enactment of federal laws by public initiative, and even advocated allowing the public to overturn some court decisions by referendum.
And the progressives generally did not see a contradiction between their technocracy and their populism. They expected their technocratic ideas to be popular, and so they expected populism to lead to more expert government.
Progesssives hope citizens will sell their independence to the expert technocrats, without their realizing how venal and power-hungry those pols and technocrats are. Cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and there is no fool like an educated fool.
My always-fragile trust in self-anointed experts and elites diminishes daily - see the EU, or Washington, DC, for plentiful current examples.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
Think about what this means. All of the money and power would be focused in the state, but then the state would not do anything with that concentration of power. The state was innocent. There would be no cronyism, no corruption, no bureaucracy, and no concentration of stupidity so as to make mistakes much bigger.
This is precisely — without the proletarian aspects — the Obama worldview. Good citizens with high levels of education will be the philosopher kings, telling everyone what to eat, drive, and do for their own good. Naturally, these people would have no interests of their own. Naturally, their learning from books and theories rather than from real life would not lead them into really big mistakes.
Then, there is Marx’s view of what later became known as the withering away of the state:
“When…all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. … If the proletariat…makes itself the ruling class…then it will…thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”
What we have here today is not the triumph of the proletariat but the triumph of the managerial-bureaucratic-intellectual-cultural elite. The best describer of this is not Marx but James Burnham, a former Marxist whose writings in the 1940s were the basis for George Orwell in writing 1984. Then there is Karl Popper, who pointed out that the greatest threat to freedom (the “open society”) were those who thought they knew everything.
Our rule of thumb at Maggie's: Never trust any human who wants any form of power, especially over you. No matter what they say, they do not mean well. If they claim they are doing it for your own good, run the other way as fast as possible. I am with George Washington:
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Whether the "research" is about medicines, climate, sociology, or whatever, greedy human nature always finds a place for itself. This is why we, at Maggie's, always assume a skeptical posture towards "studies."
Most "studies" show that researchers want to get money and jobs for doing studies.
In the past year, we have been overwhelmed with the sleaziness of the warmist crowd and the social psychology crowd, but today we find pay to play in university education research.
Almost everybody has an agenda, even scientists. It's human. That's why we remain skeptics about everything. Call it cynical if you want, but we think it's being realistic.
Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective.
I realize that some of our readers own more firearms than can be easily listed (obsessional collectors, with too much money), but some just own a few.
I don't collect firearms, but I have two friends who are serious collectors, with hundreds of functional and valuable antiques of all sorts.
I have an ugly Savage 110, a Glock 9 mm (and a carry permit), a pile of old .22s, one lovely old Abercrombie & Fitch 20 ga s/s for grouse and woodock, a pretty Belgian Browning 12 ga o/u which I use for clays, a Rem 12 ga semiauto for deer, turkey, ducks and geese, and a few other nice old field shotguns in the back of the closet which I can't remember. I don't go for fancy: guns are tools, meant to be used and banged around.
While Italy is bickering over just how inhumane it is to raise the retirement age by 2 years in a 15 year span (which works out to a whopping 48 days per year) and will likely lead to mass riots and bloodshed in Rome before the idea is ultimately scrapped, things in America's own back yard, the country that now that the EFSF is finished will have no choice but to come to Europe's rescue via the IMF, are looking horrendous to quite horrendous. In fact when it comes to retirement, 80 is, we are sad to say, the new 65, at least according to Wells Fargo. And with average life expectancy in the US peaking at 78.1, it means that the typical American will have to work for an additional 2 years after death to pay for not only not having any retirement savings (thank you Bernanke ZIRP and VIX>30 stock market), but to make sure Europeans have theirs. You think we jest? Nope.
Read the whole thing. Years of cheap money, the housing bubble, and other bubbles resulted in a 20-year party built on credit and spending. (Of course, governments did the same thing.) Although most people continue to work after retirement, it is more pleasant when it is semi-optional.
On the other hand, if you spend most of your life drearily putting money into savings instead of living, you will get sick before you ever have a life with some fun and adventure in it. Sailing in the Med, fly fishing in Patagonia, hunting Ptarmigan in Alaska, cruising around the world, riding horses in Montana, golfing in Scotland - none of these things are (yes, "none" takes a plural verb) much fun to do when deaf, half blind, and with a colostomy bag, two bad knees, and a touch of dementia.
Honestly, I'd rather be working with the latter and have some of my fun in advance. Buy now, pay later. Health, like youth, is wasted on the young, and idleness wasted on the old. During my two years of zombie working, I'd like to be a WalMart greeter, just adding some good cheer to the world for a humble wage.
As an old-fashioned person, I always claim, whenever I do something wrong (and I do), "The Devil made me do it."
At the same time that I mean that, I also accept the notion of human agency. Every waking second of life offers choices, and I think a college bs post about Free Will would be sophomoric. All I will say is that what we feel, and how we chose to behave (absent severe mental illness) are entirely different things. Human dignity and civilization itself requires a distance and a delay between the two. Even animals exercise that delay.
A human without a reliably moral, executive "I" is a dangerous entity, an entity to be avoided if not locked away.
We have been warned that the world is in for a long period of deleveraging from debt-driven economies. This via Zero Hedge:
This is not a bump in the road; it is the exhaustion of the entire model of growth that we have depended on for the past 30 years. Once the debt saturation point has been reached, adding more debt subtracts from the economy rather than adds to it. This is reflected in the decline of employment by every metric: total number of jobs, civilian participation, payrolls per capita, and employment as a percentage of the total population.
We are past the point of debt saturation, and so we need a new model of employment, and indeed of “growth” itself. Sadly, as discussed in a recent report, the Status Quo financial witch-doctors have only prescribed more debt and more unproductive friction.
What the researchers omitted, as they went on to explain in the rest of the paper, was just how many variables they poked and prodded before sheer chance threw up a headline-making result—a clearly false headline-making result.
The odds of statistical bogosity grow when researchers don't have to report all the ways they manipulated their data in exploratory fashion. For example, the researchers "used father's age to control for baseline age across participants," thereby fudging the subjects' actual ages. They factored in lots of completely irrelevant data. And, rather than establish from the outset how many subjects they would test, they tested until they obtained the false result.
The authors of that provocative paper were Joseph P. Simmons and Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania, and Leif D. Nelson of the University of California at Berkeley. "Many of us," they wrote—"and this includes the three authors of this article"—end up "yielding to the pressure to do whatever is justifiable to compile a set of studies that we can publish. This is driven not by a willingness to deceive but by the self-serving interpretation of ambiguity. ... "
Many attorneys and many law profs generally assume that the Commerce Clause is dead and, indeed, was laid to rest many years ago. Whenever I bring up my sentimental and quaint views of the Constitutional limits on federal power, colleagues often see me as a naive artifact from a former age. Which, perhaps, I am.
Lawyers rarely deal with Constitutional issues, just with ordinary civil and criminal laws and rules and regulations (of which there exist more than anyone could possibly know or even be dimly aware of, thus providing people like me with tidy incomes).
Fact is, the late, lamented death of the original meaning of the commerce clause (designed mainly, as I understand it, to eliminate then-existing obstacles to inter-state commerce) opened the door to the Feds regulating and controlling everything and anything they want to. One might wish that the FFs might have been a little more explicit in their definitions and intentions, but they could not have anticipated every single language loophole the feds might have decided to exploit in their reaches for more and more power, control, and money - even though that was their greatest fear and the reason they bothered to write the thing in the first place. King George lll would envy the power of our current federal government. Loopholes are always for the Common Good, naturally. Antique that I am, for me freedom is the ultimate Common Good. To me, the meaning of "Freedom" is freedom from the power of the state far more than it is freedom from external threats to security, or German threats to Europe, or Islamist insanity.
I predict that much or all of ObamaCare is upheld by the Supremes, in deference to Congress. I deeply hope that I am wrong because the feds have shown little ability to run much of anything effectively or flexibly except the armed forces, much less 17% of the American economy. We'll all end up with USPS medical care, and it will be frozen in law so it can no longer adapt or innovate, or even try to help me and you outside of government guidelines.
The idea first conceived back in the 1920s by two senior officials of the League of Nations – Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, a British civil servant – was a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats like themselves. Two things were anathema to them: nation states with the power of veto (which they had seen destroy the League of Nations) and any need to consult the wishes of the people in elections.
Even as the Eurozone cracks, however, such leaders as Germany’s Angela Merkel are calling for greater political integration.
“It is time for a breakthrough to a new Europe,” she said. “That will mean more Europe, not less Europe.”
She’s dead wrong, and the failure of the euro proves it. What Europe needs is less faux unity and more honest division — free nation-states united by a common Western culture, not a centrally planned, bureaucrat-run pipe dream.
Good for Cameron. He can see that Germany (and maybe France) want to use the crisis to consolidate and build power, a la Rahm Emanuel. Given the track record, one wonders why anyone would want to go along with that plan. I always thought the Common Market seemed reasonable, but it was just a first step towards some crazy utopian vision created by people with little experience in the real world but who think they know what's best for everybody else.
By the way, what's the difference between a technocracy and a dictatorship?
What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity. Collectively the Boomers continued to follow ideals they associated with youth and individualism: fulfillment and “creativity” rather than endurance and commitment. Boomer spouses dropped families because relationships with spouses or children or mortgage payments no longer “fulfilled” them; Boomer society tolerated the most selfish and immature behavior in its public and cultural leaders out of the classically youthful and immature belief that intolerance and hypocrisy are greater sins than the dereliction of duty. That the greatest and most effective political leader the Baby Boom produced was William Jefferson Clinton tells you all you need to know.
But gee, Prof Mead, those stuffy old moralities and values like honor, integrity, self-restraint, self-reliance, duty, sacrifice, loyalty, etc. are so...inauthentic, hypocritical, uptight, old-fashioned - and no darn fun.
It's the festive time of year here in the USA. Saturnalia, as I term it - with Advent and the baby Jesus squeezed in there somewhere, out in the barn with the animals, or in our hearts.
From J.M. Anderson's 
From Yuval's 
Whether the "research" is about medicines, climate, sociology, or whatever, greedy human nature always finds a place for itself. This is why we, at Maggie's, always assume a skeptical posture towards "studies." 
I realize that some of our readers own more firearms than can be easily listed (obsessional collectors, with too much money), but some just own a few.
Listen Up, Boomers: The Backlash Has Begun