Maggie's Farm

Sol Stern on Why Catholic Schools Matter - They’re still the best hope for poor, inner-city kids. One quote:

It doesn’t take long, though, for a visitor to discover St. Aloysius’s most powerful asset: the rich content of its classroom instruction. St. Aloysius exemplifies the old-fashioned notion that school is a place where children learn about our civilization’s shared knowledge and values and where teachers remain the undisputed authorities in the classroom, imparting that knowledge and those values through a coherent grade-by-grade curriculum. This traditional approach has stood the test of time and is still proving itself today in many inner-city Catholic schools, in the “no excuses” charter schools operated by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), in schools that have adopted E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, and, to some extent, even in run-of-the-mill Massachusetts public schools that adhere to that state’s back-to-basics curriculum reforms (see “E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy,” Autumn 2009).

Teaching writing is a difficult task, if not a nearly impossible one. Eliminating standards and propagandizing is so much easier. So easy, any idiot can - and does - do it.

The thing is, you don't have to know a damn thing about the craft of writing to propagandize. This is truly appalling: Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years. Crazy, for sure, and utterly out of reality and out of usefulness.

You have to either laugh or cry.

It sounds like going to writing class today is like going to shop class and learning about the oppression of the worker instead of how to use a lathe. Might be useful if you want to become a Community Organizer, but not if you ever want to make anything.

I had to run home this afternoon to meet with my chimney guy. Actually, not my chimney guy, but my semi-local sheet-metal guy.

I never had a sheet-metal guy, but I'm glad to have one now. He can make whatever you need in his wood-heated shop in an old mill building in CT, and he will install what he makes, too. Cheerfully.

Our old farmhouse has three fireplaces. We needed some new flashing, new collars, caps, etc. to keep the rain and the animals out. That was a piece of cake for the good old guy. He promised me that his patch-up job would outlive me, which isn't saying much. In olde Yankeeland, everything is a patch-up job.

I chatted up his 20-something black assistant. He said "Man, we have a beautiful shop. We can make anything - copper, aluminum, stainless, plain steel - whatever you want. Ducts, flashing, roofs, gutters, whatever. Square ducting, round ducting, whatever you need. We have the technology. We built our own wood stove too."

"What do you do for wood?" I asked.

"Oh, our tree guy friends just dump it off for us. Saves them a dump fee. We cut and split it ourselves. We load the stove up at night, and it's as warm as toast when we come to work in the morning." 

So much for dickering over the price of wood.

The latest Marxist trick, cloaked in virtue but a wolf in sheep's clothing: The Sustainability Agenda.

Watermelons: Green on the outside, Red on the inside. They want my money, and to control my life. It ain't going to happen because She Who Must Be Obeyed would not permit it.

It is a fun interview. 

Has America slowly become a greedy entitlement culture, in which there is no longer any shame in taking from one's neighbors? Wish I had written this, by Harsanyi: If Washington Is So Great, Let's All Pay for It. One quote:

If, as the enlightened voices on the left contend, the American people deeply love their federal services, their dependency programs, their regulations, their industrious public education department, let's all pay. Why shouldn't we take on a proportionally fair share in the joy? Even income tax-paying Americans don't really feel the cost of government because of how we collect taxes. But let's create better consumers. Consumers pay and demand results. Dependents, on the other hand, just demand. They have no reason not to.

In my view, we are at a tipping point when half the country has become pure free-loaders, and many more have their favorite freebies. See Poll shows Americans oppose entitlement cuts to deal with debt problem. I am a flat-taxer. No personal deductions either. No business or corporate taxes, and no estate tax. (I also want means-testing for Social Security and Medicare, which is just one reason I am not in politics).

Think of how much money would be saved on lawyers, accountants and tax-planners. That money could be used productively - by us (not by the government).

Of course, if my American Vision were magically realized, the Left would just re-create the whole mess again. The vote-buying, the handouts, the deductions, etc.

Am I the only person who takes no freebies and wants no freebies from anybody else?

The middle class and poor have little access to the choices of K-12 schools that the more prosperous have. Government schools have a de-facto monopoly in this industry - 90% of the business, and the government collects the tuition at gunpoint.

Like GM, this industry is owned by the unions and, as Albert Shanker infamously said, "When the kids vote in the union, we'll be for the kids."

I can think of no principled reason why parents should not be given a voucher for the equivalent of their kid's education cost to be carried to a school of their choice. Not to use Euroland as a good example of anything other than good sightseeing, but they do that in Sweden and people are happy with it.

Furthermore, I believe there should be at least nominal stipends for home schoolers, or reimbursement for the costs.

In USA Today, Why school vouchers are worth a shot.

People want choice. The unions want to keep them on their plantation, and the unions own the Dem Party.

If you have never done so, visit a private school, a religious school, and a charter school sometime. I have seen them all. They are not government McSchools (not that most public schools aren't pretty good for kids and families who have their acts together).

For me, the issue is choice and variety. Home schooling should not be the only alternative.

Via Kristol:

It’s a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody’s grandparents, maybe one of yours, who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities .  .  . so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.

—President Barack Obama, April 13, 2011

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens. .  .  .

—Senator Edward Kennedy, July 1, 1987

You can scare half of the people half of the time, but you cannot scare all of the people all of the time.

Off topic, but I also wanted to say something to those pitiful whining gals at Yale: If you have to run to Mommy every time something bothers you, you will go nowhere in life. Maybe you have been a good girl all of your life, played your sport, did your homework, sat attentively in class, pleased your teachers, studied for your SATs, etc. Now it's time to grow a spine. If a guy pisses you off, give it back to them as good as you get. If harmless Yalie nurds "intimidate" you, you will have a real problem with real life. 

It's called The War Between the Sexes Genders, and it's all good fun. Running to Mommy is not cool.

Who ya gonna call when you're CEO of GE?

I always got a kick out of the short-skirted long-legged gals in NYC who had snappy repartee ready for the construction workers' whistles. It's fun sport for all, and it's all loaded with sex.

An annual re-post -

We always contend that lawns are foolish things to have. Foolish, and unnatural. We prefer meadows and gardens, but everybody needs a place to play croquet or softball, or to lie in the sun with a book, growing your basal cell carcinomas and your liver spots. We reluctantly acknowledge that, in some suburban areas, a sweeping lawn is a social if not an aesthetic requirement.

All the same, we urge folks to consider how much of that lawn they might exchange for some more interesting colorful perennial or shrub borders and ground covers. A nice English garden, whether formal or informal, uses lawn as an accent and for paths - as just one component of design and mentally, I think, as a comforting symbol of safe civilization to contrast with the blooming profusion of the other plantings. Order vs. disorder. Open vs. closed. Safe vs. mysterious. Landscape design is a psycho-spiritual enterprise. This is a garden outside of London:

Here's a brief history of the American lawn. Yes, the lawn is more-or-less designed to imitate the smooth effect of a sheep-grazed pasture on an English country estate.

And here is our world-famous bit on top-dressing and other lawn topics.

Today, a bit about lawn aeration, fertilizer, irrigation, earthworms, and "de-thatching." In reverse order:

"De-thatching" is a completely useless and unnecessary activity. No healthy soil needs it, and a healthy soil is the key to a decent sod. "Thatch" - old grass - will rapidly decompose or be eaten by worms in a good lawn, recycling the nutrients and keeping your worms fat and happy.

Earthworms. We said everything we know about the wonderful earthworm in this post. They aerate and enrich the sod. If your sod doesn't contain plenty of them, something is wrong with it.

Irrigation. No natural lawn requires irrigation. If you try to grow lawn grasses in places they don't want to grow, like the Arizona desert, they will need irrigation of course. Around here, people with money to burn irrigate their lawns to trick the grass into staying green all summer, and not enter their natural summer dormancy when they are apt to turn brown. Lawn grasses grow the way they do because our mowing cuts their tops off while they keep trying to grow to their natural height and to bear their seeds. It must be frustrating to the poor things. In natural conditions, grasses grow to their full height, bear their seeds (say, in early July) and then go dormant until cool damp weather brings them back to life. If you keep them strugging at their Sisyphisian effort through the mid-summer with irrigation, they will naturally need more fertilizer to look photogenic.

Fertilizer and top-dressing. Our lawns do need fertilizer because they are deprived of natural sources of nutrients (fallen leaves, animal droppings, clover and other wild legumes with their nitrogen-fixing bacteria, silting from flooding, etc). When you bag or blow the clippings, then even more so - and you starve the worms, too. My top-dressing program not only fertilizes organically, but also improves the soil texture. I also fertilize lawns in June and September/October. I don't use water-soluble nitrogen, because most that will end up in the stream. I use mowing machines that mulch the clippings and fallen leaves. I don't need to use herbicides, because the grass is happy. And I don't use pesticides because there is no good reason to waste the money and to poison Creation.

Aeration. In nature, earthworms, moles, woodchucks, and other digging critters keep the topsoil loose and in motion. Loose soil is need for root growth, water and nutrient penetration, and to provide air for aerobic soil microbes. Our lawns tend to get compacted, and people try to kill their happy moles because they interfere with the "perfect lawn" (which, of course, is meant to be a reflection of our perfect selves, right?). Aeration of lawns and sports fields is essential, and should be done depending on how heavily the grass is tromped on. Some lawns, every two years. Sports fields need twice per year. There are two kinds of aerators. The spike aerators (like this) do nothing useful. What is needed is the plugger type (like this one, in photo above), which pulls out forty-fifty per square yard 2-4"-deep plugs out of the sod and deposits them on the surface. (it makes a temporary mess, but one good heavy rain removes most evidence of the plugs.)  Plug aeration is commonly done in the Fall, but I like to do it in the Spring, after the grass gets growing thick and vigorously (May), and combine it with my biennial top-dressing project and with any overseeding that seems needed.

The downside of plugging is having dogs with muddy feet on your bed for a couple of days.

From Yuval Levin's essay of the above title:

...this vision has never been implemented in full. But it has offered a model, for good and for ill. For the left, it provided long-term goals, criteria for distinguishing progress from retreat in making short-term compromises, and a kind of definition of the just society. For the right, it was a foil to be combated and averted — an archetype of soulless, stifling bureaucratic hubris — and it helped put objections to seemingly modest individual leftward steps into a broader, more coherent context. But both ends of our politics seemed implicitly to agree that, left to its own momentum, this is where our country was headed — where history would take us if no one stood athwart it yelling stop.

It is no longer really possible to think so. All over the developed world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social-democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.

Here, with her strong message and her darn screechy voice.

Here 'tis:

Rhetorical devices are cool, but I do not know enough about them. Ward Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric.

I bought a used copy, as it seems to be temporarily out of print.

Do you think we could first try serious high school for all? From Does the Academic Left Understand Human Nature?:

If you have college for all but don’t dumb down the standards, the dropout rate will stagger the imagination. If you have college for all and lower standards so that most can earn a degree, then you devalue college by transforming it into something more like a longer and (much) more expensive high school. So then the high-achievers will feel an even greater imperative to go to the next level. High school becomes middle school, college becomes high school, graduate school becomes college, and our prolonged adolescence continues and worsens.

Much of college has already become glorified and expensive high school. See An Academic Hit Man Brings More Bad News.

I always thought it was a German thing. Not exactly. It's Sam German's Chocolate Cake, and as American as Apple Pie.

I do not care for chocolate cake of any sort. I do like home-made chocolate frosting on a home-made yellow cake.

William Tecumseh Sherman's warning, via NYM:

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing!

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides where are your men and appliance of war to contend with them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with on of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors.

You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people would stop and think, they must see that in the end you will surely fail.

Robert Samuelson begins his Big Government on the Brink thus:

We in America have created suicidal government; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean that government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can't easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government's very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.

Few Americans realize the extent of their dependency. The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal benefit: 46.5 million, Social Security; 42.6 million, Medicare; 42.4 million, Medicaid; 36.1 million, food stamps; 3.2 million, veterans' benefits; 12.4 million, housing subsidies. The Census list doesn't include tax breaks. Counting those, perhaps three-quarters or more of Americans receive some sizable government benefit. For example, about 22 percent of taxpayers benefit from the home mortgage interest deduction and 43 percent from the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance, says the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

"Once politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything," writes the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson in a recent collection of essays ("American Politics, Then and Now"). The concept of "vital national interest" is stretched. We deploy government casually to satisfy any mass desire, correct any perceived social shortcoming or remedy any market deficiency...

The only reason I care about politics is because politics cares (too much) about me.

Taxpayer Alert: The Coming Postal Service Bailout.

Among the reasons government agencies cannot run things efficiently are these:

1. The incentive structures are irrational, and there is no profit motive

2. There's always taxpayer money to fill the gaps, so you don't worry about costs. In fact, they are sort of expected to run at a loss.

3. Politicians always intrude on the operation for their own purposes

4. Giant unions like the Postal Workers run the workplaces

I don't know about you, but I always send my packages at my local mail shop via FedEx or UPS, not at the PO. I do not want to wait in line while people take their coffee breaks, and the clerks at our PO, though friendly enough, move as slow as molasses. With email and with commercial competition, I think the USPS is near-obsolete.

The same people want nothing more than to run my medical care. Say I: "Over my dead body."

This gets right to the point I have been making for years: A Succinct Look at the ‘Great Degree Scam’.

Listen to Prof. Vedder's interview. I always enjoy Vedder, and he nails it.

A college degree is not an entitlement to a "good job" - whatever that is. People are confused about what college is. Is it a paper credential, job preparation, citizen-building, or simple life-enrichment? Certainly a Liberal Arts degree is the latter.

Brooks' Moment of Truth, today:

The Ryan proposal will help settle the fight over the government shutdown and the 2011 budget because it will remind everybody that the real argument is not about cutting a few billion here or there. It is about the underlying architecture of domestic programs in 2012 and beyond.

The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

From Minding the Campus:

...consider a student who arrives for the first day of class and sees a professor who resembles a 1960s hippy-like graduate student (Levis, rumpled un-tucked shirt etc.) and if male, scraggly facial hair wearing a baseball cap and if female, tacky “folk” jewelry and a permanent bad hair day? It could be worse—the political billboard tee-shirt to remind today’s uninformed youngsters that “Bush Lied and People Died.” It makes no difference that this instructor may have a doctorate from Harvard and is being fast tracked to an endowed chair. Cultural conditioning is inescapable and ubiquitous: respect is given to those who dress the part and when they refuse, deference is not forthcoming. Professors should not look like janitors or stand-up comics. A sky-high tuition bill only adds insult to injury—$40,000 or more in tuition to hear superannuated hippies?

Medical schools, these days, are up to around 50% diligent, perfect-student, rule-abiding boring females. Tons of Asians, too. Doctors are no longer mainly the smart Jewish guys and the patrician WASPy guys of the past.

The Association of American Medical Schools wants to change the tests for more diversity. As such things tend to be, I'd guess they want more black and Mexican kids and more gays, and fewer grade-grubbing Asians and white girls.

If I recall, it was a while ago that they changed their tests: they eliminated the "General Information" part of the MCAT, which dealt with history, literature, psychology, culture, etc. That change must have altered the general make-up of medical school classes too: more science nerds and fewer of the potentially-wise priestly class.

But maybe that's what people want from docs these days: expert technicians. It's not for me. I want expertise, but with a heart and soul and some wisdom and flexibility.

It will be airline pilots, next in line, for all of this.

Is Startup America Bound to Fail?

Naturally, they will do it politically, not rationally. What would anybody expect? How many experienced venture capitalists do they have on board?

Fact is, there is a ton of loose venture capital out there, looking for things to invest in and to support, from hi-tech to low-tech. Scouring the entire planet for interesting opportunities and good ideas. The difference is that they know what to look for, and the government is just looking to buy votes and to throw our hard-earned money at crap. It's not a joke, but it is.

From Mead's The Shores of Tripoli: Our Latest Wilsonian War:

We have had Wilsonian wars before and I have no doubt we will have them again.  You can, sometimes, wage Wilsonian war.  What you cannot do, at least not yet and probably never, is build a Wilsonian peace.

Woodrow Wilson discovered this almost a century ago. 

Re things like Libya, via Uncle Norm:

I invite you to consider the limits of simple moral impulse as a sufficient justification for making a choice. The fashion for assuming that to discover how we should act we need only look within our own hearts has gone too far.