Maggie's Farm

Is school supposed to be therapy?

Is therapy supposed to be a propagandizing school?

Crazy world.

"I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government.  The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work."

Coyote, in his And People Trust Government?. Well, the polls say most people do not. However, America is divided between those who want to be left alone and those who want stuff. At present, that is the gist of what Vanderleun terms The American Argument.

Similarly, Betsy addresses the two visions of government. In my view, too few Americans today see liberty as something precious, and I often wonder how many people would prefer to be slaves and serfs (as long as those terms aren't used) in exchange for life's necessities.

White Lefties go nuts when black Americans leave the plantation. They act like Simon Legree. h/t to Driscoll's Frank Rich Covers All The Bases

Related: Taranto's Why the Left Needs Racism - It serves a political purpose.

Also, at Tiger: Race as a political weapon against the right

Image is Tom's Final Beating, from the 1853 Illustrated Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Tom has been a hero of mine since I first read the book in junior high school. How "Uncle Tom" became a pejorative is beyond me. His infraction, if you recall, was to refuse to whip the other blacks to "keep them down."

The Battle of Lexington and Concord. Those farmers had a lot of nerve to stand up to their government.

I heard "Call your doctor or dial 911 for any erection lasting longer than four hours."

Why? Isn't that normal?

Finally, Maggie's servers are back up again. This is h/t The Swamp:

Not Your Grandpa's Britain Department: "Mr. Davey said he's better off unemployed than working."  Hey, there's the spirit to build a new Jerusalem!

h/t, William Blake:

And to make matters worse, try finding this federal tax on a receipt.

I would be in favor of replacing the federal income tax with a VAT, however.

Addendum: Excellent policy piece on VAT

"In the year 2000, American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA, was one of the worst-performing middle schools in the state."

So what happened?

Robin Hanson begins his piece of the above title, about "forager norms," thus:

Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy

His conclusion: "We signal covertly and unconsciously because our ancestors were strongly punished for overt and conscious signals."

Signaling theory is interesting, but I do not accept the reductionistic notion that signaling is all that people do when they are together (I should say, neither does Robin H.).

Among our link dump Friday morning was a piece on a Cyberspace Bill of Rights.

We need no "rights." We are a free people. Our own Bill of Rights was an unfortunate (if politically necessary) error of the time. Why an error? An error because it made it appear that only the listed "rights" were the rights of citizens. 

In the USA, it is the government which has (or had) strictly circumscribed powers. The rest are ours alone - our individual powers - not our "rights." Americans do not have circumscribed "rights." We are not supposed to need them.

At Pajamas, excellent brief tragi-comic post on Jefferson Co, Alabama. One quote:

Maybe someone can stop Wall Street from corrupting the politicians by putting the politicians in charge of Wall Street. Find someone from Chicago who can do it. Or, if that doesn’t work,  abolishing capitalism will get results so that in the first place there’s no money to corrupt anyone.  Either more government or no business. That’s sure to work in the same sense that you can avoid cancer entirely by having all your organs removed.

Which Side Are They On? American labor unions and how they got that way. It begins:

Labor unions in the United States were not always tied to the Democratic party and to a leftist ideological agenda. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) stood at odds with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the former resisted statist labor law changes and leftist union policies beginning in the 1930s and the latter supported them.

The AFL and the CIO united in 1955, but two decades before, William Green, president of the older AFL movement, denounced the CIO in terms familiar to present-day tea party critics of the Obama administration. On September 7, 1937, as reported in the Washington Post, Green assailed CIO leader John L. Lewis for “subordinating the welfare of workers to personal political ambitions .??.??. and encouraging communistic support.” Green warned that CIO ambitions could “pave the way to a fascist dictatorship.”

At Am Thinker. Readers know how I feel: I want the Feds out of education. Should be a local thing, in the hands of the local taxpayers. 

Teaching should be a calling, not a government-unionized sinecure. What sorts of preachers would you get if you had unionized, government-employed preachers?

Or, for that matter, doctors?

"Professor Arkes discussed the Four Horsemen, four conservative justices on the Court during the 1930s who tried to block many of President Roosevelt's New Deal programs. He examined many of the Supreme Court cases from the Roosevelt era."

Those four guys saved us. Says the Prof: "We are the beneficiaries of the world that Sutherland and colleagues preserved for us."

Video from 1996. (h/t, No Left Turns)

80% of professional (!) philosophers believe in the independent existence of material objects (but only 7% in God). What do philosophers believe?

I am not a philosopher, but I sometimes play one at Maggie's Farm. I sometimes muse that life is a dream of God.

Shamefully stolen from Samiz. It's about the Americans the Left has never met, and does not know:

I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbours. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults. "Take Father Michael down our road a piece. I'm not of his creed, but I know that goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. I believe in Father Mike. If I'm in trouble, I'll go to him. My next-door neighbour is a veterinary doctor. Doc will get out of bed after a hard day to help a stray cat. No fee - no prospect of a fee - I believe in Doc. I believe in my townspeople. You can know on any door in our town saying, 'I'm hungry,' and you will be fed. Our town is no exception. I've found the same ready charity everywhere. But for the one who says, 'To heck with you - I got mine,' there are a hundred, a thousand who will say, "Sure, pal, sit down." I know that despite all warnings against hitch-hikers I can step up to the highway, thumb for a ride and in a few minutes a car or a truck will stop and someone will say, 'Climb in Mac - how far you going?'

I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime yet for every criminal there are 10,000 honest, decent, kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land. I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones. I believe that almost all politicians are honest. . .there are hundreds of politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work.

If this were not true we would never have gotten past the 13 colonies. I believe in Rodger Young. You and I are free today because of endless unnamed heroes from Valley Forge to the Yalu River. I believe in - I am proud to belong to - the United States. Despite shortcomings from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.

And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will always make it. Survive. Endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure longer than his home planet - will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.

R. A. Heinlein.

Bastiat and the politics of plunder. h/t, Lucianne

More good on the topic from Q&O

Shame on you supposedly savvy people down in Fairfield County for electing Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT). Re Medical care, he said yesterday:

"The problem is that nobody knows exactly which of these are going to work, how much and exactly when, because we are talking about changing a very complex industry," Himes said.

So why did you vote for it? Congress can run a complex "industry"? Give me a break. We all know Congress doesn't do "complex" very good. We all know that Congress could not run a corner candy shop. 

Oh, I guess it's just all about hopey-changey... and unicorns fueled by carbon-free pixie dust who crap pure scented rainbows from their behinds.

From Barone's Tea partiers embrace liberty not big government:

Polls and recent election results tell us that racial minorities and the so-called "educated class" -- the people who expect their kind will administer centralized institutions -- still take the side of the Progressives. Most Americans, however, are rejecting the path of dependence and are intent on declaring their independence once again.

I watched a fine male Cardinal grab a sunflower seed from the feeder, then jump down and put it into a female Cardinal's beak.

Must be True Love. Or True Lust...

Or is it just Springtime?