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.
Toon on top via Althouse. Image below via the article.
Is academic language in the humanities and social sciences designed to obfuscate, is it just packaged cant from people with nothing to say, or is it smoke-signaling?
One prof claims "As a professor ... one seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”
The use of words without fixed or clear meanings is a major part of what makes academic writing so terrible. People often complain that academic writing is “obscure” or overly convoluted and complex. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with either complexity or obscurity in themselves; research papers in the sciences have to be complex and technical, and introducing people to obscure and unfamiliar words or concepts can be a key part of developing human knowledge. The problem largely comes when words are vague and unclear, admitting of many possible interpretations. Infamous academic terms like “phenomenological,” “intersubjectivity,” “embeddedness,” “hermeneutical,” and “discursive” are not bad because they describe complicated concepts, but because it’s often not clear just what an author means by them...
The guys began work on one like the one in the photo but with fieldstone not cut stone. It will be on the edge of our bluestone patio. Have to keep up with the Joneses.
Actually, I like any reason to be outside, day or night. On these global cooling summer evenings, a fire, a cigar, and a little whisky make for the perfect contemplative moments. And the smoke keeps the bugs away.
I might decide to learn to make home-made pizza too. How difficult can it be?
Even amateur statisticians can correlate two random things. Often, a news article can be based on that because few journalists know anything about stats. Example from Spurious Correlations:
This is Part 1 of the PBS series School Inc. It's a good intro to the history of American education, and a mind-opening intro to what education can be. I would not say that the South Korean system is great, or right for Americans, but competition and choice in education is a good thing.
Clearly, viewing education as a civil service job is not the best route.
Is there any fix for unmotivated kids? Well, yes and no. Watch it, if only because the teachers' unions hate the series. You might get hooked and watch the rest of the series. Enjoyable and...educational.
That is no biggie for his company. The story got me looking into the game of Baccarat. I have never played it. It's a card game, a game of chance with some more complicated versions like Chemin de Fer which I believe is what James Bond enjoyed. Punto banco is the common version of the game.
Is any skill involved in the betting component? I am not clear on that but it mainly seems to be about the adrenaline.
Photo above is Tranby Croft, site of the famous Royal Baccarat Scandal of 1890. A great story.
The Closing of the American Mind turned 30 this year. The fact that every five years now there is a retrospective is a testimony to its staying power, though it may also say something about the number of middle-aged writers on the right who cut their teeth on the book in their salad days. I count myself a member of that motley crew, having read and superficially understood it as a college junior and then periodically gone back to it many times over the years with gradually increasing background knowledge.
Higher ed will spend every penny they can squeeze out of citizens or out of government. It is about sales and marketing, and whatever the market will bear. Higher Ed is now a business, and tries to operate like one. Example: Colleges Stop Exorbitant Price Increases After Congress Caps Student Loans
Somehow, over time, and no doubt due in part to government involvement, the historically non-commercial areas of hospital care and higher ed have become commercial enterprises.
Consider the different careers of the terms “democracy” and “populism.”
Do you know any responsible person who would admit to being opposed to democracy? No one who does not enjoy a large private income would risk it. But lots of people are willing to declare themselves anti-populist. The discrepancy is curious for several reasons...
In my mind, there are at least three founding principles of the United States that are far more important than the right to vote.
...
Government is our servant. The central, really very new concept on which this country was founded is that an individual's rights do not flow from government, but are inherent to man. That government in fact only makes sense to the extent that it is our servant in the defense of our rights, rather than as the vessel from which these rights grudgingly flow.
Stanley Fish is a very smart guy and like most such people, he occasionally says silly things.
There is this: Stanley Fish Says Free Speech is Not an Academic Value. That is correct in a very narrow sense, in the sense of his imagining a monkish medieval university, relatively insulated from society and politics, seeking knowledge, wisdom, and truth. Modern American higher ed is mostly anything but that.
Really, free speech and crazy debate is a fine tool in higher ed, in scientific research, and everywhere else. The highest value in academia? No. In society in general, surely its good outweighs the bad.
"This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." What follows is a brick of a volume summarizing moments both great and curious in the history of science, covering already well-trod territory in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and so on. Bryson relies on some of the best material in the history of science to have come out in recent years. This is great for Bryson fans, who can encounter this material in its barest essence with the bonus of having it served up in Bryson's distinctive voice. But readers in the field will already have studied this information more in-depth in the originals and may find themselves questioning the point of a breakneck tour of the sciences that contributes nothing novel. Nevertheless, to read Bryson is to travel with a memoirist gifted with wry observation and keen insight that shed new light on things we mistake for commonplace. To accompany the author as he travels with the likes of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton is a trip worth taking for most readers.
Adolescence became a social construct. Most of the research into adolescence, often viewed in pathological terms, began in the 1940s. Removed from genuine, real-life experiences and confined to a restrictive, artificial mass schooling environment, it is no wonder that adolescents often respond with apathy, angst, and anger. But this is not how teenagers have historically behaved, nor how they behave today in many parts of the world.
What makes it all worse is that summer jobs have disappeared with the volume of low-skilled immigration. Even relatively-prosperous kids have trouble finding the sorts of manual work they need to learn about life. I did summer "landscaping" each year during high school. It was an excellent education.
Jimmy Buffet, multi-multi-millionaire, once mentioned how rewarding it can be to discover a $5 bill in the pocket of some old jeans. Funny how that works. When my Dad would visit me at college, he would slip me a $50 - "walking around money." Small gestures and unexpected small rewards can mean a lot.
Our early Spring Cleaning has resulted in small hills of those black leaf bags filled with old magazines, old books, old clothing, household clutter, obsolete paperwork, lots of shredded old financial records and tax records, etc etc. Some fairly heavy, some not, but far beyond the usual.
We are required, more or less, to separate bags of theoretically-recyclable garbage from other garbage, but I believe it all ends up in a dump in West Virginia. Regardless, when we have large piles I always scotch-tape a $10 or a $20 to the pile.
To the sorts of people who say "He gets paid to do it anyway," I say "Bullshit." The piles of snow and ice do not make the job any easier. My theory is to always tip people who do personal work for you unless they are the owner of the business. When you give a tip, you make life better for a little while and you feel better too. Even if it's only beer money.
For some very occasional household jobs like rug cleaners, window-washers, or annual barn-cleaning crews, I will tip before the job begins. Try it sometime. I make a point to always have some $5s, $10s, and $20s in my pocket to show gratitude and to create small moments of good cheer and more positive helpers.
Toon on top via Althouse. Image below via the article. 
The guys began work on one like the one in the photo but with fieldstone not cut stone. It will be on the edge of our bluestone patio. Have to keep up with the Joneses. 
The 
