Maggie's Farm

What our local professional "Personal Organizer" charges:

Home organizing (closets, drawers, clothing, equipment, household clutter, attics) - $50/hr (min 5 hrs)

Office, home office, and personal financial organizing - $70/hr (min 5 hours)

Tech assistance and support - $100/hr

Via Wilkinson:

The basic problem, across the whole range of the human helping relationships (like aid) between what might be called the “helper” and the “doer,” is that success lies in achieving more autonomy on the part of the doers, and autonomy is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be externally supplied or provided by the would-be helpers. This is the fundamental conundrum of all human helping relations, and it is the basic reason, not complexity, why engineering approaches and the like don’t work.

Read the whole post. One can not and would not refuse to give some food to a starving person, but most economic "help" is not helpful to anybody. There is something racist about the idea that Africa, being black, needs welfare and charity instead of free markets and the rule of law.

Because they do not know how to debate the issues with logic and wit. At Althouse.

Of course, we have all seen how rapidly debates with Lefties degenerate into juvenile name-calling.  Most of us gave up trying to do it long ago.

Robin Hanson asks why:

...lowering import tariffs and immigration restrictions would help Africans at a far lower cost to us than most direct donations. Yet direct donation activities usually get far more attention in most discussions of what we here can do for them there. Why?

From Students 'Adrift'? Don't Blame Them, at Minding the Campus:

The recent study conducted by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College shows that only 26 percent of undergraduates at small institutions, and only 18 percent at larger institutions, felt strongly that their professors had high expectations and challenged them academically.

At a state university where I taught, seniors who took my 100-level survey course told me that it was the hardest and most intellectually demanding class they had taken in four years at college. Many were actually grateful for having taken my course and felt cheated by their other professors---although others weren't as grateful and eventually dropped the course or wrote negative comments on Ratemyprofessor.com. In an age when higher education exists for credentialing, and anyone can "get a degree," they wanted an easy professor and a blow-off class.

I refused to accommodate them.

I planned to post one of my dreary links about the modern state of uneducation, but on this cheerless, sleeting day I felt like tackling a more uplifting topic.

Horses, like many large running mammals, lock their leg joints to sleep standing. The reason they are able to do this makes plenty of horse sense.

Matthews: When Agencies Rule Our Lives. He asks:

Am I the only one becoming increasingly concerned about the amount of power federal agencies have over every aspect of our lives?

At Reason - Economist Walter E. Williams reflects on his long career battling Jim Crow, big government, and liberal orthodoxy.

I would offer an enticing quote but my machine is acting up. I like him.

Majority of US Students Lack Science Proficiency.

No surprise there. Those students don't know grammar either. What do they know? I hope they know quadratic equations. I hope they read the Constitution - but you don't need a school to do that.

Well, they certainly know what Howard Zinn thinks - I mean, thought. They aren't necessarily lazy and dumb, they just aren't cut out for the really demanding mental stuff. What they need is solid basic knowledge, learn a job, maybe make a family, and they'll be just fine and as happy as they want to be. How many really smart kids do we need?

Science and math require more disciplined, rigorous, and abstract thinking than most kids want to bother with or, perhaps, are capable of. If a kid says languages - or math, or chem - are "too hard," you know right off that they lack the serious horsepower even if they are "bright and articulate." Most kids like the soft stuff - if they like any of it at all. Trouble is, you don't need a school for the soft stuff: it's all available out there, for free. Everywhere, nowadays.

In our spoiled, decadent culture, most people seem happy to pay others do the heavy mental lifting while they benefit from it all at ridiculously low cost. I know, because I am one of them, although I did plenty of math and hard science in college.

It has always been my contention that nobody should be able to earn a college degree without at least a year of calc, and real college chem, physics, and Bio (also, Econ). Otherwise, however bright you may be, you can't call yourself eddicated because there is too much basic stuff in life you don't understand well enough to have a legitimate opinion about.

Maybe I should have said a High School degree instead of College. If a kid had my kind of High School degree, they would be in a position to learn everything else they were interested in or needed to know on their own, in the library, or from The Teaching Company, or on the job. (Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from getting out there and living and getting into the cage with the Beast of Reality, and taking the knocks and dealing with the BS.)

High Schools should have oral exams on simple basic facts, because kids aren't ready for wisdom. "What's a subordinate clause?" "What's Avogadro's number?" "What's iambic pentameter?" "Why was Alexander Hamilton important?" "Why was Alexander the Great important?" "How does a lever work?" "Why do we care about the Phoenicians?" "How do you find the volume of a cone?" "How does an airfoil work?" Etc. Send in examining teams to do the testing to see whether a High School degree is justified. Paper testing doesn't do it. Nowadays, there are kids graduating from High School who cannot answer those questions.

It's the elite few who design our software, who design and build our computers and X-boxes and cars and refrigerators and airplanes and bridges and office buildings and coffee pots and power plants and missiles and digital cameras and machine tools and oil refineries and robots and hybrid wheat and permanent paintless house siding and our chairs and tables and new medicines and our Blackberries. Those are the unsung heroes of our daily lives.

It's all I can do to repair a horse fence or to replace a cracked windowpane in the barn, yet I am paid better than the people who design and build those useful things I listed above. Understand the workings on my motherboard? Not likely. Not smart enough, yet I am considered "highly educated."

My point is that the kids don't need to know the challenging stuff: Let them learn the elementary basic stuff, and the soft stuff if they want, and get their lightweight diplomas signifying that "they attended," and leave the challenging stuff to the smart, ambitious kids. Let the rest of us lazies flip burgers or teach school or attend meetings or sit in cubicles or express shallow and uninformed opinions about how life works, because we do not know how to make anything useful.

Let those few precious brainiacs work nights to make the tools and toys for us while we fart around with stuff that "interests us." The rest of us don't have to know anything complicated, do we?

We hate it when our brain hurts.

It's a blizzard right now, strong gusty wind, sleet mixed with snow and gradually turning to all snow. A winter wonderland, and all the kids are excited about a snow day for sledding or skiing.

Not in New Jersey: Slopes behind ropes: fear of lawsuits closing great New Jersey sledding hills. There was an adult in CT who settled for $4 million with a CT town when he injured himself sledding with his kids on a town-owned hill. Is a hill covered with snow an "attractive nuisance"? I don't think I would invite that guy and his kids to a winter sledding party on my hill.

And this one, also from Drudge today, takes the cake - or the sandwich: Rep. Dennis Kucinich sues cafeteria over olive pit in sandwich. I once cracked a tooth in half on an over-done French Fry at McDonalds. Maybe I missed a big payday... but Barrister is an honorable man with still a shred of dignity and decency - I hope.

Remember the bumper sticker: "Please hit me. I need the money"?

Whatever happened to people taking their own chances in life? What happened to "It's my own fault"? Says Prof B, Litigators ruin pretty much everything.

Mead explains New England's - and America's - roots in moralizing governments. A quote:

New England government was charged with the creation of a moral society.  There was nothing that was not its business: how much did a master pay his apprentices?  Who celebrated Christmas?  Who was cheating on his or her spouse?  The duty of government was to make society live right; the university, the pulpit, the newspaper — these were to be the allies of government in the struggle for good.

Even after the old alliance between church and state in New England was broken up for good (the establishment of religion at the state level lasted almost 50 years after the ratification of the Constitution in Massachusetts and Connecticut) the acolytes of New England righteousness worked to make the American government a force for the moral uplift of the American people.  Many of their causes today look prescient: the abolition of slavery and voting rights for women.  Others, prohibition, eugenics and various forms of food-nuttery matching the changing scientific fashions of the day, look weird.

Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations.

At Google News, Climate change: Dogs of law are off the leash:

From being a marginal and even mocked issue, climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.

I tend to believe that ordinary public education, with all of its flaws, shortcomings, and loony political agendas, generally does a pretty good job overall from K-12.

They did OK with me. I turned out literate and mathematically-literate (but I have to give my parents lots of credit for that too. My idea of a Dad was a tall guy with either a book, a chainsaw, a shovel, or a hammer in his hand. A cigarette, also.).

Well-motivated, bright, and well-disciplined kids can learn all they need there to get a good start, and if they are truly motivated and curious and in pursuit of mastery, they will take what is offered as far as they want on their own time. That's the whole point - to offer a foundation.

The challenge for school rankings (which is what school boards care a lot about) is the kids who are not in that category. They drag down the ranking, and thus property values. It's quite obvious that many if not most kids do not find academic learning to be of particular interest, even something as basic to life as algebra. Our schools aren't "failing;" our expectations are the problem.

Most kids are neither scholarly nor studious (girls are more inclined to sit than boys), and the latest stats that many or most kids learn little in college confirms that. College is whatever somebody makes of it, like everything in life.

When people talk about reforming schools, they generally are talking about trying to "meet the needs" of those who aren't very interested, talented, pushed, encouraged, or able - for whatever reasons. For them who wants it, basic eddication ain't expensive at all. For them who don't want it in youth, they can go to the internets or the library and learn all they want when they are older and more interested in things. For kids, the internets are a total time-waster and brain-killer, same as TV used to be. Well, if you have the Britannica online, maybe that might be an exception. I was raised to always review the Britannica before venturing into any new topic, for the overview and context.

So who thinks they are smart enough to change schools? Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools.

These people don't have a clue.

I proposed a bit of Latin to make us appear more intelligent than we are. My proposal:

Fortunatus sum! Pila mea de gramine horrido modo in pratum lene recta volvit!

(For the ignorant mouth breathers and gun-and-Bible clingers, it translates roughly Isn't that lucky! My ball just rolled out of the rough and onto the fairway!)

Fact is, BD and I agreed (provisionally) that it might be better simply to show what Maggie's is than to have to say what we are, hence the (provisional) removal of our age-olde blurbe. They told us, in writing class, "Show it, don't say it." Or did they say "Depict it..."?

From Bastiat's What is Seen and What is Not Seen. It's basically The Law of Unintended Consequences:

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

1.3

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that
when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are
disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist
pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to
come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk
of a small present evil.

Topic comes up via Williamson's What Is Seen and Unseen: Obamacare Edition, which begins:

The Democrats’ strategy on Obamacare is cynical, and kind of
embarrassing: “Meet Jimmy, who will get something from the health-care
bill. How dare you take it away?” But there is the seen and there is the unseen. The beneficiaries of Obamacare are easy to find. They are what is seen. What is unseen?

From his Dependence Day:

Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?

The Englishman is all about milk right now:

 Organic milk is full of female hormones.

‘Breastmilk evangelists’ stifle debate on feeding babies, scientist says

Image is Mary Cassatt's Mother Nursing, c. 1907

Steinberg debates the late great Moynihan in Poor Reason - Culture still doesn’t explain poverty. Steinberg claims that the behavior of the black poor is a consequence of poverty, not a cause. But what about the white poor?

This is from Wiki (US poverty rates, as I understand it, are calculated prior to government or charitable monies, goods, or benefits):

21% of all children in the United States live in poverty, about 46% of African American children and 40% of Latino children live in poverty.^[37] What is unclear is why so many minorities live in poverty. The poverty rate is 9.9% for black married couples and only 30% of black children are born to married couples (see Marriage below). In 2007,11% of black women aged 30–44 without a high school diploma had a working spouse.^[38] The poverty rate for native born and naturalized whites is identical (9.6%). On the other hand, the poverty rate for naturalized blacks is 11.8% compared to 25.1% for native born blacks suggesting race alone does not explain income disparity. Not all minorities have low incomes. Asian families have higher incomes than all other ethnic groups. For example, the 2005 median income of Asian families was $68,957 compared to the median income of white families of $59,124.^[39] Asians, however, report discrimination occurrences more frequently than blacks. Specifically, 31% of Asians reported employment discrimination compared to 26% of blacks in 2005.

After reading Steinberg's essay, I am more convinced that Moynihan was right. There is substantial white poverty in the US too. Regardless of racial differences - Asian, black, Hispanic, white - (and excluding penniless new immigrants who rightly expect a challenging beginning) - I'd be willing to bet that poverty in the US can be understood mostly in terms of bad luck, character (including tendencies, interests, abilities, and personal inclinations), parental role models, or, most often, life choices. (Behavior is a choice, as a human being.) These things are not all "culture", but they are part of it.

I believe that many people choose poverty, in the broad sense of "choose". And, as a reader notes, if X% of the population is below the poverty line by definition, it's impossible to get rid of it no matter how much money people take in.

Furthermore, in my opinion, if you have heat and a roof over your head, a TV if you want one, a functioning vehicle if you need one - or a bus pass or a subway token, beer money, and funds for clothes and Big Macs, you aren't really poor.

We have all lived hand-to-mouth at some points in our lives. I decided that it wasn't for me, so I made a plan for my life. And then another one when the first plan didn't work. Eventually, I made a plan that worked and I could afford a family and a wife who likes horses. Still, I need to work every day and plenty of weekends too, to support Casa Barrister.

Final word: I suspect that all of these opinion pieces about black poverty have the agenda to support the notion of "institutional racism." With a black guy in the White House, it's getting difficult to maintain that invention, just like it's getting difficult to maintain the notion of "institutional sexism" with Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton as presidential contenders (on some days, it seems that women are the real stars of the Conservative movement).

This is a bit old news, but still not widely understood. Education loans: The Sweeping Federal Takeover You May Not Know About. One quote:

 ...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.

An Englishwoman talks, anonymously, about her recent years in Birmingham. It's about "societal suicide," and it seems to be a disease of Western Civilization. A quote from her report:

To a London reader, born and bred with multiculturalism, I know that my stories may come across as outlandish and exaggerated, and that I must surely be a BNP voter — I have observed people's expressions as they have listened to my tales of life in Brum. When I recently told a friend how a large Taliban flag fluttered gaily on a house near St Andrew's football stadium for some months, her cry of "Can't you tell the police?" made me reflect how far many of our inner cities have been abandoned by our key workers: our doctors and nurses drive in from afar, the police, as mentioned before, have shut down their stations and never venture in unless in extremis — they and ambulance crews have been known to be attacked — even the local Imam lives in a leafier area.

I wonder what our readers use for high-quality computer speakers. I am using my machine more and more to listen to music while doing paperwork, even though I have a fine real sound system in my office for radio and CDs. I won't use headphones, and I do not waste time with computer games: engaging in real life offers more than enough games for me - and the result counts.

A friend told me the Bose stuff is good, but I have no clue.

Advice requested. Price, within reason, is no object.

Via Dino:

One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did. “They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”

And politicans wonder why people do not respect them.

A reference to Nagel's classic What is it like to be a bat?: What is it Like to be a Man?  A quote from the essay:

If science offers a complete account of nature, then it must be able to offer a complete account of human conscious experience, since human conscious experience is a feature of nature.  It must be able to say something about what it is like to be a man.  Accordingly, for several decades, a relentless effort has been undertaken by those in the disciplines of cognitive science and philosophy of mind to conceptualize such an account – an explanation of the mental in terms of the purely physical.  The results of this endeavor are unambiguous – it has been a complete disaster.  One would be hard pressed to identify, in all of intellectual history, a philosophical detour more obstinately barren, more improgressive, more tangled up in empty verbiage, more devoid of genuine insight, more irrelevant to life as it is actually lived, than is to be discovered in contemporary philosophy of mind.  John Searle described the futile history of this materialist project as follows:

One sees this pattern over and over.  A materialist thesis is advanced.  But the thesis encounters difficulties; the difficulties take different forms, but they are always manifestations of an underlying deeper difficulty, namely, the thesis in question denies obvious facts that we all know about our own minds.  And this leads to ever more frenzied efforts to stick with the materialist thesis and try to defeat the arguments put forward by those who insist on preserving the facts.  After some years of desperate maneuvers to account for the difficulties, some new development is put forward that allegedly solves the difficulties, but then we find that it encounters new difficulties, only the new difficulties are not so new – they are really the same old difficulties.