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.
The failure of blue social policy to create an environment which works for Blacks is the most devastating possible indictment of the 20th century liberal enterprise in the United States. Helping Blacks achieve the kind of equality and opportunity long denied them was more than one of many justifications for blue social policy: it was the defining moral task that has challenged and shaped American liberalism for the last fifty years.
The Census tells us that in the eyes of those who know best, these well intentioned efforts failed. Instead of heaven, we have hell across America’s inner cities. Blue economic policy has cut the creation of new private sector jobs to a trickle in our great cities, while the high costs of public union urban services (and policies that favor government employees over the citizenry at large) impose crippling taxes and contribute to the ruinously high costs that blight opportunity. All the social welfare bureaucracies, diversity counselors and minority set-asides can’t make up for the colossal failure of blue social policy to create sustainable lower middle class prosperity in our cities.
I do not agree with some of what Mead says in his essay, but it's an interesting piece. I am more of the Moynihan persuasion; to get government out of the way. I do wonder, however, how come every minimart and deli and coffee shop and dry cleaners I see opening is opened by new immigrant Moslems who hardly speak English, instead of by American black folk who have attended American schools and speak English. Despite the Leftist assaults, I suppose, family remains the cornerstone of civilized, structured, and productive life. If you do not build supportive bonds with the people you create, no government can save your life, your soul, or provide you with dignity.
But don’t worry. Individual liberty is overrated and inherently messy, anyway — and besides, who wants to follow a plan set out by dead white European males? Did the stupid patriarchy spell out the right to collectively bargain, or the right to high speed internet access for all?
No. So fuck them right in their tri-corned hats. It’s 2011. Like, over a hundred years after these slave owners scribbled on a parchment. We have computers now. And Twitter. Time to fix shit. You know, for freedom.
Obamacare is like that, isn't it? And Romneycare. And do not forget to smile while you eat that government cheese. "Freedom" means eating what the government gives you: FDR taught us that.
I grew up on The New York Times. Delivered, every morning, even before they had a national edition. Read it every morning, through high school and college. An essential part of breakfast.
The second factor in the Times’s decline was the ascension of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. to the perch of publisher in 1992. Having come of age in the sixties counterculture, Sulzberger moved to shift the paper’s focus from its historical commitment of reporting the news “without fear or favor” to the more activist promise to “enhance society.” In particular, Sulzberger wanted the paper to promote “diversity” and to move beyond what he disparaged as the “predominantly white, straight, male version of events.” As the author of Coloring the News, a critical look at the politically correct mania for “diversity” and its damaging effect on the news media, McGowan writes as an authority on the Times’s transformation. The change was most obvious in the paper’s increasingly strident editorial pages, but the news content, which began taking its cues from editorial, suffered as well. Times veterans groused that the paper risked compromising its news coverage with a newly ideological agenda, but Sulzberger dismissed such concerns, declaring that he was “setting a moral standard.”
A newspaper's job to set a moral standard? Grandiose? How about just giving us the real facts with tough, skeptical, half-drunk cranky journalists instead of metrosexual twits, and we'll take care of the morality part ourselves. We're Americans, not illiterate ignoramuses who need to be taught how to think correctly by our superiors who filter and slant our information "for our own good." Propagandists, exploiting their historic franchise.
I quit The Times years ago because it would make me begin my day in an irritable mood. Irritated with them for quitting their job. Now, I catch up with Maggie's for breakfast, and so does She Who Must Be Obeyed. Imagine that!
How can you rate schools by graduation rates? All a school has to do to raise graduation rates is to pass more people. Give them As for showing up. "When all else fails, lower your standards."
Profs who want to keep their jobs will cooperate with that. Seen it many times. It has become extremely difficult to flunk out of colleges these days, even if you try to major in Beer Pong, and whether you play a varsity sport or not. "All shall have prizes." Then, if you are lucky, you might get a cubicle with a computer screen in some HR department.
Ah get born, keep warm Short pants, romance, learn to dance Get dressed, get blessed Try to be a success Please her, please him, buy gifts Don’t steal, don’t lift Twenty years of schoolin’ And they put you on the day shift...
"Twenty years of school and then they put you on the day shift." Unless you are of an energetic American entrepreneurial bent, and want to make things happen instead of letting them happen to you. People with true grit create jobs, they don't look for jobs. Even in a crappy Obameconomy.
Everybody always ought to think about what they can do to build something useful or interesting, now or in the future. That's the American Way. Failure is just a necessary learning experience. I have had costly failures, but I kept plugging away until things worked out and Life knocked some sense into me. Anybody can do that if they want to, and it keeps life stimulating and challenging.
Failure is the best teacher. Success teaches us little - except to keep doing the same thing over and over, like GM and Microsoft and Kodak. Giving up on life's endless opportunities is like a form of death.
- the attitude that society should be governed by an elite group of individuals
- 1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources. 2. (A) The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class. ...
- someone who believes in rule by an elite group
Well, if you perused my pedigree, resume, career, J. Press tweedy and conservative life style, and the respectable, intelligent, accomplished, well-educated, well-behaved and refined people with whom I tend to associate, some might consider me one of America's elite. Given the definitions I found, however, I am not: I have no interest in power or control over anybody, and despise anybody who thinks they deserve that position. I lack all desire to tell anybody how to live other than myself, and I am not even especially good at that. Beneath my superficial aspects beats the simple heart of my free, crusty and cantankerous independent Yankee farmer ancestors who had far more freedom than we have today.
For example, when it comes to politics, the only politicians I trust are the crooked ones. They don't seek power over me and have no plans to make my life "better" - they just want money, chicks, easy jobs without meaningful accountability, and maybe some support for their weak egos. Let them have that if that's what they need, just so long as they leave me, my life, and my hard-earned assets alone. I will not be an obedient and passive serf like some of my Brit ancestors doubtless were, sending most of their grain or wool to their superiors.
We are not an aristocracy here. Let the elites figure out how to run their own lives (in general, I am not impressed), instead of trying to run mine. A few relevant links:
Good video with an IHop owner in Ohio, at Q and O.
He says, interestingly, that his restaurant business profits an average of $3000 per year per employee. Obamacare would put him to -$4000 per employee. Out of business.
...there is also a school of philosophers — in fact, perhaps the majority school — who consider free will compatible with their definition of determinism. These compatibilists believe that we do make choices, even though these choices are determined by previous events and influences. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”
Sometimes I think morality is purely culturally-defined, and sometimes I think there is "natural law." Most of the time I simply try to adhere to God via the Ten Commandments and Christ's teachings (Mark 12:28):
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
If you are a Christian, those are the revealed word of God. If not, they are cultural. I know when I have done wrong because I feel guilt and shame. Sometimes I feel guilt and shame even when I haven't transgressed in any meaningful way. That's me, not God.
Many have already read George Will's fine essay, Pencils and Politics. It's a brief intro to Econ 101. A quote:
Producing this simple, mundane device is, Ruth says, "an achievement on the order of a jazz quartet improvising a tune when the band members are in separate cities." An unimpressed student says, "So a lot of people work on a pencil. What's the big deal?" Ruth responds: Who commands the millions of people involved in making a pencil? Who is in charge? Where is the pencil czar?
Her point is that markets allow order to emerge without anyone imposing it. The "poetry of the possible" is that things are organized without an organizer.
Yes, it's the miracle (or poetry, or spontaneous order) of markets and the free flow of goods and services. Read the whole thing. Another quote:
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
When I think of trade and markets, I think of the paleolithic (500,000 years ago) trade in amber (for jewelry) and flint (for tools). Scandinavian amber being found in Italy. Or obsidian from Idaho being found in Indian sites on Long Island.
But when I think of pencils, I think of the Thoreau Pencil which, in the 1830s, was the finest pencil made in America. Thoreau supported himself during most of his life by working at that Pencil Factory. There is no reason to think that he enjoyed a minute of that work, but everybody has to make money.
We have to give Henry David Thoreau credit for this, though: He was a practical Civil Engineer and inventor and not just a dreamy transcendentalist with a love for nature and a way with words.
What happened in Wisconsin was no less than a fascist putsch, their aspiring oppressors lost only because of the dignified and stubborn leadership of their governor. Its failure was not a sure thing. Americans saw the true face of those who want to rule us. It is a vicious, arrogant and voraciously greedy face, full of disdain and contempt for our institutions and the rights of our citizens. It is in its bones anti-Democratic and anti-American. It will do whatever it takes to take and keep power; it will break any law and crush any opponent if it can.
It's about time somebody wrote this essay. Prof. Thomas Reeves at Mercator: What do professors want?. h/t, Mankiw. He is harsh about the academic life:
On the Left and Right money means power, and we "pointy heads" and "eggheads" are on the outside looking in. One thinks of Arthur Schlesinger Jr swooning over the Kennedys for the rest of his life because they gave him a title and a silent seat in some White House deliberations. Those making as much money as, say, an experienced furnace repairman account for little in this world, despite the PhD. How many academics even sit on the governing board that sets policies for their campus? It is all most humiliating. (To see how intelligently and objectively academics use the authority they have, examine the political correctness the suffocates the employment practices and intellectual lives of almost all American campuses. Aberlour's Fifth Law: "Political correctness is totalitarianism with a diploma.")
and...
One way to compensate for this bleak and futureless existence is to become involved in left-wing causes. They give us a sense of identity in a world seemingly owned and operated by Rotarians. And they provide us with hope. In big government we trust, for with the election of sufficiently enlightened officials, we might gain full medical coverage, employment for our children, and good pensions. These same leftist leaders might redistribute income "fairly," by taking wealth from the "greedy" and giving it to those of us who want more of everything. A "just" world might be created in which sociologists, political scientists, botanists, and romance language professors would achieve the greatness that should be theirs. It's all a matter of educating the public. And hurling anathemas at people of position and affluence we deeply envy.
I am sure Prof. Reeves has tenure, but he might need police protection too, after writing that honest piece.
...perhaps the most troubling aspect of this new federal intrusion in the higher education marketplace is its underlying assumptions about the best way to control college costs. Whether it has been efforts to increase Pell Grants, or now this student loan fix, President Obama and his allies in Congress, driven I believe by the best of intentions, have assumed that increasing federal aid will help students better afford college. And there is no doubt that college costs have skyrocketed recently, more than doubling the rate of inflation over the past twenty years. However, every time the federal government has increased aid to students, colleges have turned around and raised tuition and fees accordingly.
Aided by the government-encouraged extension of credit, education costs have skyrocketed. In fact, it is fair to describe today's higher education price tag as having been reduced to a formula - where tuition seems to equal all the money a student can pay plus all the money a student can conceivably borrow. And, this same access-for-all government policy has made loan-eligible middle- and lower-income students easy prey for aggressive higher education and student-loan marketing. The end result has been an unprecedented, debt-fueled wealth transfer from students of modest means to the increasingly affluent higher education industry and its student-loan lenders. Unfortunately, as this damage continues to reveal its depth, its consequences are likely to become more evident by the day.
A generation of students has been reduced to the equivalent of the underwater homeowner: resigned to a fate where the amount owed to finance their schooling might be greater than the value of the education they received (and, therefore, beyond their capacity to repay it).
Government student loans and grants are little more than indirect handouts to the academic institutions in whose pockets they end up.
Lawns are dumb things to have, but almost everybody has some. It's expected nowadays, but gardens and plantings are more interesting, look more natural, are more inviting to birds and other friendly critters, and offer more privacy - and shade. On the other hand, everyone needs a space for croquet and badminton.
Once the preserve of the wealthy, lawns became de rigeur for the aspiring middle class during the 20th century, as new homeowners attempted to create miniaturized versions of grand English estates on 1/4, 1/2, 1- and 2-acre building lots.
The orgin of lawns was sheep-grazed fields. Sheep are the primitive machine which transforms grass into wool and mutton.
But the subject assigned to me is top dressing. (Bear in mind that I am talking about Northern and mid-western lawns with Bluegrass and fescue in them. That's all I know about. Southern lawns are an entirely different breed.)
I top dress my lawns every spring, and I know Bird Dog does too. He does it casually, but I do it methodically. I mix about 1/4 leaf compost, 1/8 light sand, 1/8 topsoil or potting soil, 1/4 peat moss and 1/4 composted manure in the big wheelbarrow and toss it around the ground after around the second grass cutting of spring. Probably plain peat moss or composted manure would do the trick just as well. Ideally, it all should be rather dry, but life is never ideal. Then I lightly rake it in - or have the lawn guys rake it in - so it doesn't compress the grass. I apply it rather heavily, and use around 40 wheelbarrow loads for the lawn areas I care about.
It's about stewardship of the land, and not a cheap nitrogen-intoxicated superficial green. We have to remember that lawns are not natural things, but they aren't plastic either.
How come everybody else understands that business taxes harm consumers (who ultimately pay them) and harm job-creation? Everyone, except American Democrats. There should be no corporate taxes despite the fact that it would put a lot of tax lawyers and accountants out of work.
(BTW, I'll be in Bermuda the rest of the week. Business plus pleasure, ie golf and maybe tennis.)
The world of gender studies has never before had to confront anyone quite like this solitary rogue male professor of politics. Critics will rail against his excesses and feminists will be indignant and offended. But many women will be charmed by his effrontery, and grateful for the truth and wisdom in Mansfield's elegant treatise.
Every guy aspires to be a strong, gallant, valiant fellow. It's not easy to do.
Haidt is the Liberal academic who has shaken up the academic world with his self-analysis and self-criticism. He applies the tools of his discipline to his own stifling academic world. From Neili's Two Bombshells for Social Psychologists:
It is almost impossible to overstate the courage, intellectual clarity, and simple wisdom involved in Jonathan Haidt's challenges to his social psychology colleagues. His message is as uncompromising as it is uncomplicated: open up the discipline to viewpoints outside the narrow, left-liberal mainstream, learn from people who have political and moral views different than you own, treat religion more fairly, and stop acting like an insular tribal cult and act more like the open-minded science profession you claim to be.
Apparently it takes "great courage" not to think in lockstep nowadays, in academia. It's a fascinating essay.
Governments are packed with foolish and self-important jackasses who mostly could not run a corner candy store. I tried to link this article at Pajamas again, and the link still doesn't go through. It's What We’re Talking About When We Talk About Big Government - Behold: the structure of redundancy, stupidity, and unconstitutional power the 100-year fog of leftism has created.
Scroll down a bit at Pajamas, and read it there in the left-side column. One quote:
Conservatives — Originalists — speak of Big Government always: an aversion to it is deservedly the driving intellectual thesis behind conservatism. We despise Big Government, more than anything, and I can’t emphasize strongly enough that I don’t believe the left has any clue why. They have theories about guns and fear, psychological weakness, bigotry, and the like, and these are all weak arguments against Big Government, which makes them easy to dismiss and continue to be a leftist. They are not, of course, our arguments. There is a disconnect between what we say, what we mean when we protest Big Government and what we are thought to mean by our political opposition.
Editor Dog addendum: Government needs to support the cause of cowboy poets. Sheesh. If cowboy poets want a handout, we are done for as a country. Kaput. I do not recall Robert Frost asking for taxpayer money - but he was a New Hampshire fellow: Live Free Or Die.
Moving from “time-served” processes of certification (four year BA degrees, three years in law or divinity school) to certification based on achievement can make education dramatically cheaper. It is sheer madness that most students spend 12 years in school, and another four in college. Why exactly should all kids the same age be in the same grade? One size does not fit all; why shouldn’t high school kids go free when they can pass the equivalent of a GED? And for that matter, shouldn’t school districts encourage and reward teachers and schools that are able to graduate students faster? Among other things, this would allow some of the resources not spent on babysitting high-achieving kids to go to kids who really need the help. How “right wing” is that?
The same goes for college. Oxford and Cambridge graduate their students in three years — yet few people think British college grads are less accomplished than their American peers. What is sacred about the four year BA? Wouldn’t a shift to an exam based system (students who make qualifying scores on the appropriate exams would be certified as graduates) allow more people to advance farther at less cost? And there’s an element of social justice here: the kid from a no-name school who scores high on the exam will have an edge on the Ivy League kid who partied through college and just scraped by.
A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching theme if not obsession in the Obama presidency. In Iowa, a day after signing health care into law, he put himself into competition with history. If history shapes men, "We still have the power to shape history." But this adds up to one thing: He is likely to be the most liberal president in American history. And, oddly, he may be a more effective liberal precisely because his liberalism is something he uses more than he believes in. As the far left constantly reminds us, he is not really a true believer. Rather liberalism is his ticket to grandiosity and to historical significance.
Of the two great societal goals freedom and "the good" freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence if not superiority on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.
Are all photographers just people who like to make pictures but are too lazy to learn to paint? Who just want immediate gratification?
That topic came up over cocktails with a friend last night. He is an avid amateur photographer who has been taking a watercolor course at night. He told me painting is teaching him to see.
Many have already read George Will's fine essay, 
That is, of course, the title of 
Lawns are dumb things to have, but almost everybody has some. It's expected nowadays, but gardens and plantings are more interesting, look more natural, are more inviting to birds and other friendly critters, and offer more privacy - and shade. On the other hand, everyone needs a space for croquet and badminton. 
