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.
In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990’s moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care.
Why the remarkable proliferation of law schools? Because schools make a lot of money from them. In my youth, in the 1800s, we learned law from books and apprenticeship. Law school was not a requirement for joining the bar until 1906, which is long after I was admitted to the bar. Why they jumped from 0 years to 3 years of formal education, I do not know.
I happen to believe that legal training is good training for all sorts of things that a person might want to accomplish. However, the legal field is looking a little shaky these days unless you want to chase ambulances and have strange hair like John Edwards. The Obama recession is hurting everybody, dentists and lawyers, plumbers and electricians, doctors and churches, handymen and builders.
I like these dinners not just because I get to hear from supporters like you, but because they're part of what makes our organization different.
Other campaigns save seats at the table for special-interest PACs and Washington lobbyists -- and you can see the effects in the decisions they make and the priorities they set.
Our campaign rejects all contributions from Washington lobbyists, and we refuse all money from corporate PACs. That means we're accountable only to the people, not special interests.
Instead, we're relying on millions of people like you giving just $3 or whatever you can pitch in.
Dan Kahan of Yale Law School discusses Cultural Cognition and the Challenge of Science Communication.
His lecture is basically about confirmation bias, which he discusses in terms of "cultural cognition."
While he acknowledges that at least some of what he terms "cultural" is in fact psychological (eg a person's fearfulness or curiosity about life) rather than groupthink, it is still an interesting approach to opinion formation.
I get the sense that he thinks people should believe what the experts say. I also think he has a slight case of Asperger's, which makes listening to him an interesting experience. As a Maggie's person, my tendency is to be skeptical about what experts say (which places me in his hierarchical, individualistic categories).
Well, I suppose that, to be up to date, I should say "Working with those to whom one is or becomes attracted."
Guys used to have affairs with their secretaries. Today, there are no secretaries, and women are working in every field from the military to police forces to trading floors. When it was a Man's World, there was less temptation.
It is no surprise that people form attractions and attachments with co-workers - after all, most people spend more time with co-workers than with their spouse and family. Some emotional connection is inevitable.
I won't even bother asking whether you have had this happen to you, because it is universal and frequent. (Years ago, a co-worker of mine told me that he only wanted assistants who were ugly or old, so he would not be distracted.)
My question for our readers, if they wish to be open about this topic, is this:
How do you deal with it when you feel turned on by, attracted to, or in love or lust with a co-worker?
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined.... [T]he powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
This division of labor accords with the venerable principle of subsidiarity, which allocates governmental responsibilities to the lowest levels able to exercise them. The effect is to ensure that governmental decisions most immediately affecting people's lives will be made by officials who are the closest to them and have the most intimate knowledge of the relevant facts and conditions. This design served us so well during the first 150 years of our national existence that the eminent British historian Lord Acton, declared that our constitutional development of federalism "has produced a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other which the world has seen." Over the years, however, our federal government has engaged in massive raids on the constitutional prerogatives of the states. Today there is virtually no governmental responsibility beyond the reach of federal authority. As a consequence, our nation has been converted into an administrative state overseen by unelected officials who issue regulations that reach into every corner of American life. Few appreciate the extent of this transformation. In 1935, at the outset of the New Deal, the United States Code consisted of a single volume containing 2,275 pages of statutes. Today, it comprises 30 volumes of statutory law. When I was in law school, Title 42, which contains the federal laws relating to public health and welfare, consisted of just 128 pages. Today it contains over 6,200 pages, more than twice as many as the entire body of federal law at the beginning of the New Deal.
Bureaus and agencies issue endless marching orders to administer those federal statutes. By 2010, the Code of Federal Regulations contained over 166,000 pages of detailed, fine-print regulations that have the force of law and affect virtually every aspect of American life.
People have to spend tons of money on lawyers just to know what is in those pages. What a waste. Good for the legal industry, however.
With all due respect to the Bible and to Shakespeare, I say that it is obviously acceptable in casual and conversational English, and in poetic English, but not in formal English, and the same goes for run-on sentences.
Here's something you don't have in common with 10,873 other supporters of this movement who tell us they live in Connecticut.
That many of your neighbors have decided to own a piece of this campaign by making a donation of whatever they could afford. For some, that meant just $5. For others, it meant $100 or more. But each had their own personal reason for giving.
Our records show that you aren't one of the 10,873 people in your state who have stepped up for 2012. Now's your chance to change that.
Here's why you should join your neighbors in supporting this campaign: We've been running the numbers, and with hundreds of thousands of individual donors across the country -- we are now well on our way to a million people.
In the 2008 campaign, it took us more than a year to reach that milestone. This time around, we could cross it as soon as October -- just six months after the launch of the campaign.
Between now and then, we have an important fundraising deadline.
Our opponents have significant operations on the ground in key battleground states, full-time candidates without day jobs, and a lot of media attention to fuel their campaigns.
President Obama has you. And when you're building a grassroots organization from the bottom up, the first person gets the next one involved. And the first 10,873 provide the foundation and inspiration for the next 10,873.
Support the campaign before the deadline, and bring us closer to one million donors -- give $3 today:
The people don't owe Warren and her vast government machine anything. She owes it to them.
For over a century, the public has paid far more into government than it has received back in benefits. That extra money has gone to people like Warren. It has gone into the entire rotten machinery of crony capitalism, welfare state machine politics and massive bureaucracy. So let's be clear about this. We don't owe Warren and her ilk anything. She owes us.
I guess you can store them right next to your secret stash of incandescent bulbs, your stash of salt, your guns, your Bibles, your tobacco, your home-grown medical pot, and your gold coins.
Okay, now you people know, you are well aware one of the reasons you listen is I know liberals. I know them. I know them like every square inch of my glorious naked body. Dealing with liberals is like dealing with a one-armed lunatic.
He wonders who has been producing the money to pay her salary all these years in non-profits, government, and academia. Read the whole thing - with half his brain tied behind his back, just to keep it fair.
There is a parasitic mind-set out there, and lots of people want to get on board. As I like to say, "Ask first what your country can do for you..." No heavy lifting, no accountability. In Warren's world, who does the real work? Slaves?
I have been a de facto slave to government (taxes) and academia (tuitions) most of my adult life. I give more than I can afford to non-profits and my church too, but at least that is voluntary.
Glazer is one of those people whose thinking we have always admired, whether we agreed with his conclusions or not. I say this while quite aware that he is somebody who has never really done anything other than think and study things, and has probably never lifted an engine from a Chevy, built a stone wall, or shot a deer, and really probably knows little about life.
President Obama’s revival of an ambitious social policy agenda makes this a good time to reexamine the work of one of the most brilliant critics of the first wave: Nathan Glazer, now 88, a Harvard sociologist and one of the last of the founding generation of neoconservatives (a term often applied to him, though he has never really embraced it). In his bluntly titled 1988 book, The Limits of Social Policy, Glazer examined two decades’ worth of programs and reached a sobering conclusion: “Against the view that to every problem there is a solution, I came to believe that we can have only partial and less than wholly satisfying answers to the social problems in question. Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”
What gave that conclusion special power was the intellectual journey that Glazer took to reach it.
It took Glazer a while to realize that liberty and freedom might be a better social policy than anything that the DC and Ivy brainiacs can design "for us." I could have told him that 40 years ago when I first realized that there are sick people in the world who enjoy power and control, and who have the delusion that they deserve those things because they imagine that they are smarter than I am. They are not. I want to be the master of my life.
Wood stove heat, two bedrooms, and lights and a hot shower when they turn the generator on at 5 am. They serve a heck of hearty breakfast - lots of bacon, meat, eggs, pancakes, and home fries - and a tasty, simple supper. They will cook whatever you bring them from the woods. BYOB - and we do. No phone, no cell service.
Our usual hunting cabin at Bosebuck Camps, 13 miles down a rutted dirt logging road with Moosies usually trotting down it, not far from the Quebec border.
Dogs in the lodge, dining room, and on the beds, of course.
The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government. For most of our nation’s history, education was considered preeminent among those reserved powers, and for good reason. Teaching and learning are quintessentially local activities—the thought never would have occurred to our founders that a bureaucrat in Washington is more capable than parents or teachers of creating an educational plan appropriate for an individual child.
James Pethokoukis explains it. Wealth-creation is not in their lexicon. They view government as the font of The Good. I definitely do not. If government does not protect my liberties and my property, I oppose it.
Government protects itself, grows itself. It is subject to all of the flaws of human nature, but has unique and potentially dangerous powers. It has become a big monopolistic, parasitic industry, but one with guns and cops and jails. Anybody who thinks that big government is altruistic is sorely misguided, delusional, naive, or stoned. Drunk on power and perqs, our public servants dread having to return to real life.
The SAT was designed to produce a more egalitarian, less elitist American college student, yet few are ever really happy with it. I tend to view it roughly as an IQ test, but one which conflates the upper end to eliminate the upper outliers (it's not fair to the others to be too good).
...once the Ivy Leagues started trying to find the most promising non-upper class kids from the rest of the country, they needed something more objective about individuals than just grades. Another issue is that high school grades have certain inherent shortcomings. The future Nobelist in physics might not care about his social studies class and thus wind up with a lower overall GPA than the well-adjusted grind. Plus, grades have a ceiling. Even an A+ in physics doesn't really tell you that much. Moreover, lots of future successes are alienated in high school. Some people who get all As in high school might not have the upside to continue to do so in college. Incentives toward grade inflation at the high school are built in. And so forth ...
... thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb.
...the state's aggregate public sector employee compensation grew a robust 54 percent from 2000 to 2007, and another 13 percent from 2007 to 2010. For the decade from 2000 to 2010, it grew from $10.5 billion to $18.2 billion, or a whopping 73 percent.
Average compensation per worker reflects this dramatic dichotomy. In 2000, a private sector worker earned about $3,600, or 8 percent, more than a public sector employee. By 2009, the relationship had reversed: the average public sector employee out-earned his private sector counterpart by almost $9,000 or 15 percent.
The stumper of a question is what can be done to resuscitate a private sector stooping ever lower with this ever-weightier monkey on its back.
Well, we might start by segregating the "Class Apart" from the citizenry. Government employees and citizens are certainly not "in this together."
Study after study has shown that massive increases in spending for education per student have not shown any appreciable improvement in student achievement.
When one's kids get their own places, they tend not to have a lot of space. Few kids move out into 5000 square foot houses or apartments with giant closets and storage rooms. For both practical and sentimental reasons, their stuff tends to hang around, collecting dust and taking up potentially-usable space.
Even when you love them to death, at some point you want their stuff out. Baby birds have to fly. They will accumulate their own mountains of stuff, in time, and the cycle of stuff will repeat.
I remember when my Mom advised me to empty my old bedroom of anything I wanted to keep before it disappeared. I thought that sounded very cold at the time, but I now realize that it wasn't. They had done their job, and done it very well indeed at considerable sacrifice.
My old bedroom was destined to become a guest room - and a room where the grandkids could stay to visit. However, to this day it has a large ceiling to floor bookshelf with my old books on it.
As of yet, there's no market mechanism to reward high levels of student success for the least possible cost. This is irrational. Thiel’s critique is based on an unstated assumption: market forces are starting to unleash on institutions that have not had to learn to thrive in a post-Internet, mobile device-oriented, and competitive marketplace. Indeed, few are currently asking themselves the important questions and embarking upon the dramatic transformations that will allow them to thrive.
America contains lots of cultures and subcultures.
In Yankeeland, men never seem to want to retire. It's a point of masculine pride in a part of the country where work and masculine pride and vigor have traditionally been equated.
Our tradition has always been a little suspicious of, and uncomfortable with, leisure. Perhaps "ambivalent" is the right word. People with Yankeeland roots tend to find some work to do when they find spare time on their hands. Idleness is a sin, and "relaxation" is not in the lexicon. I am not saying that this is right or wrong - it's just a cultural thing hereabouts.
Furthermore, Yankee women tend not to like having an idle guy around her domain.
Here's a link at The American: Entitled to Leisure? The growing length of retirement for men in part reflects a decline in the number of years spent working. Is this a good thing? One quote:
That men age 20 now devote only two-thirds rather than 90 percent of their remaining lifetimes to paid work will be regarded by many readers as a sign of progress. But would we be better off if such men “caught up” to women by devoting only half of their remaining lifetime to paid work? Or would it be better if instead women caught up to men by devoting two-thirds of their remaining lifetimes to paid work? From the standpoint of financing entitlements, the answer is clear. But whether that answer maximizes social welfare will be a topic of heated discussion in the months and years ahead.
The 92-year old who bags my wine says he keeps working so he can pick up chicks. He goes for the lonely 80 year-olds.
Well, I suppose that, to be up to date, I should say "Working with those to whom one is or becomes attracted." 