Maggie's Farm

Each year around this time I need to refresh my (poor) fly-fishing skills. I get out in the yard and renew some muscle memory. It's a beautiful, silent form of outdoor recreation. 

This guy is a good, articulate teacher of this delightful sport which is far more challenging - more sporting and more aesthetic - than trolling, lure-casting, or Southern-style bass fishing with a big outboard engine.

As we always say here about fishing and hunting, if you really need the food to feed the kids, go to the supermarket....or put a worm on a line with a lead sinker and a barbed hook.

Fly-fishing is a good sport for gals, too, although some of my pals' clubs do not allow females on the grounds. Guys need their own places to act like kids, free of female judgement.

Tom Wolfe was brilliant in lampooning the fashionably America-hating intelligentsia, among other things.  He was much more than that, of course. 

A Wolfe quote from Continetti's excellent Jonathan Swift in a White Suit: Tom Wolfe's campaign against intellectual idiocy

 The intellectual had become not so much an occupational type as a status type. He was like the medieval cleric, most of whose energies were devoted to separating himself from the mob—which in modern times, in Revel’s phrase, goes under the name of the middle class. … Moral indignation was the main thing; that, and a certain pattern of consumption. In fact, by the 1960s it was no longer necessary to produce literature, scholarship, or art—or even to be involved in such matters, except as a consumer—in order to qualify as an intellectual. It was only necessary to live la vie intellectuellle. A little brown bread in a bread box, a lapsed pledge card to CORE, a stereo and a record rack full of Coltrane and all the Beatles albums from Revolver on, white walls, a huge Dracaena marginata plant, which is there because all the furniture is so clean-lined and spare that without this piece of frondose tropical Victoriana the room looks empty, a stack of unread New York Review of Books rising up in a surly mound of subscription guilt, the conviction that America is materialistic, repressive, bloated, and deadened by its Silent Majority, which resides in the heartland, three grocery boxes full of pop bottles wedged in behind the refrigerator and destined (one of these days) for the Recycling Center, a small, uncomfortable European car—that pretty well got the job done...

another:

 American architecture had never recovered from the deadening influence of the German Bauhaus movement of the twenties. American painting and sculpture had never recovered from the deadening influence of various theory-driven French movements, beginning with Cubism early in the twentieth century. In music, the early twentieth-century innovations of George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and Ferde Grofé had been swept away by the abstract, mathematical formulas of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s influence had faded in the 1990s, but the damage had been done. The American theater had never recovered from the Absurdism of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Luigi Pirandello...

I was curious about why I never see cabooses anymore. 

Wiki explained it. 

Somebody somewhere highlighted the distinctions between the two, especially as regarding political issues, and suggested that we consider which might be guiding our points of view.

Opinions, I suppose, require rational arguments whereas attitudes do not. Attitudes, it seems to me, come from temperamental predispositions, personal experiences, social environment, and the like. Nobody asks you to support a general attitude with data.

What's your view?  Is it a meaningful distinction or not?  I think it is.

In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone (h/t Woodpile) 

Why is this happening? Too much money to throw around? It seems to me that all a school needs is teachers and a few clerks.

Hayek still matters

Taleb believes that individuals require a great deal of autonomy in order to be truly free. In this view, working in large corporations or other hierarchical environments is antithetical to freedom.

Arnold Kling, in a review of Taleb's new book Skin in the Game 

"Respice finem."

Roman proverb, via David Warren 

"Unprepared" is a euphemism with the hidden assumption that everybody, if "prepared," would be higher ed material. Of course, there are countless reasons why the assumption is wrong, but let's start with some of the obvious ones: half of the population has below-average IQ; many people lack the interest or the character traits needed for rigorous high ed (or for high school for that matter, but may want the diploma); many kids float through secondary school while benefiting minimally.

So  Why Do Colleges Admit Students Who Can’t Do the Work?

Since work is one of the main sources of individual dignity, independence, and self-respect, this makes sense to me: Some thoughts on Trump, work, and rest.

It's no different from the Clinton view. Everybody has something to offer, no matter how humble. And the funny thing is that fewer people are retiring these days. It's not the money so much as the need to be useful and productive.

Colonial contacts and their varied effects on primitive societies

A friend recently extended his driveway to put in a Pickleball court. The game is like a cross between tennis, ping-pong, paddle tennis, etc.  It looks like this:

Was Kelo decided rightly or wrongly? The Supremes decided the case against Mrs.Kelo and her little pink house 5-4.  Naturally, the little people of the USA were horrified by the decision which indicated that a local government could take your property for the use of a private business.

Today, as you may know, that land in New London, CT is a barren vacant lot. George Will: Hollywood’s newest action star: The Constitution’s takings clause.

The trailer:

 "This is a shortened version of a speech that the author was due to give last month at King’s College London which was canceled because the university deemed the event to be too ‘high risk’."

It includes a good quote:

 Science is not about finding the truth at all, but about finding better ways of being wrong. The best scientific theory is not the one that reveals the truth — that is impossible. It is the one that explains what we already know about the world in the simplest way possible, and that makes useful predictions about the future. When I accepted that I would always be wrong, and that my favourite theories are inevitably destined to be replaced by other, better, theories — that is when I really knew that I wanted to be a scientist.

Famous quote to Stalin from Lavrentry Beria, head of Stalin's secret police.

I continue to recommend the (depressing) Three Felonies a Day by Prof. Harvey Silverglate. You can count on it. You are a felon. There are 6000 federal crimes (including owning an owl or eagle feather), and nobody knows all of them until somebody looks one up to pin on somebody they decide to target.  That's not counting the 40,000 pages of federal regulations.

Feel free to confess in the comments for your trivial crimes which might be past the statute of limitations.

From Sports Illustrated:

 Nack was a towering figure in the history of sports journalism, a literary wordsmith and tireless reporter whose distinctive and soaring prose is revered by his peers and generations of younger writers. He stands among the best sportswriters in the history of the genre, and in many ways, among the best writers of any kind. When he stopped typing, he was a giant personality, full of endless good charm, disarmingly well-read and all times, given to entertain...

I was asked this weekend "In what ways are Trump's policies any different from Bill Clinton's, and how is Trump's character any more reprehensible than Bill Clinton's?"

I replied that their policies were similarly moderate, and that Trump was not a rapist.

Probably a pointless gesture. I hope it is a parting shot. Re the commentariat, however, I consider that if Trump sent the bombs it would be "Insane warmonger Trump playing Wag the Dog," and if he didn't it would be "Proof he's working for Russia."

I see no compelling US interest in Syria. Assad is just one of 50 terrible rulers, but Syria probably needs him. And I do not care what Russia does. That crappy country is destroying itself anyway. 

Powerline: "For someone who grew up in the era that I did, it is hard to believe that the FBI has fallen so low. " You get the impression that today's FBI is filled with liars with political agendas. Not good. Was that always the case? I suppose it was with J Edgar Hoover...

We await the FBI's IG report, although we still wonder how the FBI can inspect itself. 

Restaurants are cooking your steak wrong on purpose

Occasionally I want a rare ribeye, but usually medium-rare. I usually get it right on a cast iron skillet. 

Steak doneness photo below the fold, but I do not like that image. To me, rare means some blue in the meat - 

Via American Digest:

 “Another way in which I tried to define the crank was that he always begins at the wrong end. He never knows the right way to take hold of anything, as one takes hold of a cat by the scruff of the neck. He always tries to catch his cat by the tail; especially if it is a Manx cat. The thing he begins with is always the thing that is last — and least. Thus, if he is talking about the ancient and lawful bond between man and woman, he will talk about votes before he talks about vows. Thus, if he is talking about children, he will be genuinely interested in the children’s schools; it will never so much as cross his mind that children, as a class, generally belong to families. If he is interested in Shakespeare, he will not be interested in Shakespeare’s poetry; he will be interested in the extraordinary question of who wrote it. If he is interested in one of the Gospels or in one of the Epistles, he will not be interested in what is written there; he will be interested in some bottomless bosh about when it was written.”

GK Chesterton 

The college screechers disparage manliness, but the real world continues to value specific, ideal manly qualities because they are so useful in life and helpful to others. Young men, listen up.

Historically, the path from boy to man was hard-earned and marked by specific achievements. With the modern invention of adolescence and "extended adolescence", the lines are blurred.  Like the song says, a "mannish boy" is not a man. Puberty does not make a man, nor does sexual activity.

Are the ideal "manly" qualities today very different from those of the past? I don't know. I can tell you what qualities my friends aspire to and work towards as a life-long project: providing for and protecting family and progeny, independence, courage and shame for weakness, the willingness to take risk, the willingness to be tough and forceful when needed, a seriousness about life while remaining cheerful, physical fitness and athletic development, mental fitness, spiritual development, skill development of all sorts, community involvement, responsibility and integrity, kindness and being a good friend, having constructive life goals, generosity of spirit, etc etc.  We discuss these things in our men's Bible study group.

It's a tall order, and that is exactly the point. We all raise boys to aspire towards these qualities, knowing full well that it is a challenging and difficult path with many speed bumps and disappointments. (How different or difficult the path is for women is not something I feel qualified to discuss.)

When I went off to prep school at 13, on the first day the Headmaster said to us (paraphrased from memory): "Welcome, boys. You have said your goodbyes to your parents and have had a nice lunch. We are delighted to have you now officially join our school. I am sorry to tell you that we will make it very hard for you and you will suffer many disappointments but we expect that you boys will become adult young men who are a credit to this school when you graduate. One more warning. Disappoint us too deeply and you will be sent home to your Mom. Please do not do that. Since we picked each of you carefully and personally, we expect that each one of you will have victories too in whatever areas you choose. If you have troubles with something, let us know. We are on your side but we will be tough in expecting and demanding your success, so get ready for the adventure. Give everything your best. You have one hour to settle into your rooms, and then report to the Field House for your health and physical fitness and sports assessments. Good luck, boys, and I will see you tomorrow morning in Chapel." 

Good little speech about male privilege. Although the intellectual challenges were intense, overall it seemed secondary to their focus on personal development, to expand oneself to become the best, most developed person you could be.  School, or parents, same message.

At Qulllette, this: Becoming a Man 

Related, quotes on What does it mean to be a man?