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.
With actual threats from their Committee of Public Safety. Somebody needs to remind them that this is America, the land of the free and home of the brave, and not North Korea.
My hate and hate speech is directed to those totalitarian idiots at Wellesley and everywhere else they work their malevolent schemes. At an earlier point, my reactions were of amusement but at this point my hate for this sort of crap is fierce, ruthless, and righteous.
There is another circle of hell for the spineless administrators who aid and abet this sort of nonsense by not standing up to the crybullies. They should know better. On the other hand they might be quietly on those kids' side (See Tenured Radicals).
We recently heard a performance of Bach's St. John Passion, with the same small-size choir that Bach had (but with far better voices now, for sure), and with the original instruments. Bach pretty much always bitched about the lousy choirs he had to work with. Bitched about the musicians too.
Loveliest live music I have heard in a while and, even though you know the story by heart, and when Pilate asks Jesus Was ist Wahrheit? you get a chill. Pilate was a good guy, really.
Bach wrote St. John Passion in 1774 to be performed on Good Friday. The experts say it is as close as Bach got to operatic music. It was designed as an entire Lutheran church service, with a break between Part 1 and Part 2 for a homily. Some of the choruses were familiar German hymns. It's a shame to perform it outside a church.
As with all ambitious and complex music like this, it takes me more than 3 hearings to begin to get it.
A question to which I cannot find an answer is whether Bach wrote the notes for the recitative sections, especially by Evangelist, or whether they are singer's choice. Can a reader find out?
Below, St. John Passion with a larger choir and orchestra than Bach had. Why did Gardiner use an organ instead of a harpsichord in this performance?
If you want to fertilize gardens, shrubs, lawns, trees, etc, we recommend doing it in March or early April before there is any significant budding or growth. In any event, as soon as the soil thaws. Why is that? It is because roots wake up and get hungry before anything appears visibly on plants. Some years I have fertilized right on top of a late snow.
Also, because it can take time (and plenty of rain) for surface fertilizer to dissolve and to get deep into the soil.
Well-established perennial and shrub borders in half-decent soil only need a sprinkling of all-purpose fertilizer. I imagine that it makes for better blooms. In nature, the fertilization would come from rotting leaf litter, etc. and, besides, the plants would be growing where they want to grow instead of where you want them to grow.
Do plants grow at night? Not much because they prefer to be solar-powered. However, roots do reach out in the dark (obviously) on stored energy as soon as the soil thaws to provide the nutrients to produce later foliage and bloom. Think of Sugar Maples, or spring bulbs. Sugar Maples (and all trees) have enough deep roots below the freezing level to begin sending nutrients up the tree while the surface soil is still frozen.
For later Spring, seasonal vegetable gardens do need fertilizer of any and all sorts. They love it. Vegetables are so far from natural that they would never survive without special care. Same goes for ornamental plants. Never fertilize herbs, though, because their fragrances benefit from poor nutrition.
The college’s conduct was craven. The fact that leftists planned to disrupt Mac Donald’s speech was well known, and the administration had plenty of time to prepare. It made a conscious decision to let the barbarians rule. Hiram Chodosh, president of Claremont McKenna College, said in a statement that “the school will develop strategies to make sure a mob of students cannot shut down a sanctioned campus event again.”
It's unclear what in particular they wish to resist about Washington, but it is quite clear that they wish to support gay Palestinians. Pathetic. And to build bridges between gay American blacks and gay Palestinians to change America. Good luck with that. As if there were any gay Palestinians left anyway.
I am afraid that they have no idea what this sort of thing sounds like to ordinary Americans. It sounds psychotic, out of reality, worse than Portlandia.
On-campus attitudes to sex are, by Kipnis’s account, growing ever more sharply contradictory. As in the wider world, sexuality is often on public display. But people are also ready to be offended, and students ready to sue: hence the cautionary “dear colleague” emails. And into this mess has stepped officialdom, in the form of Title IX, whose guidelines are at once so vague and so all-encompassing that Kipnis could be accused of “creating a hostile environment on campus” simply for having written an essay.
People need to be heroes and to stand up to the PC terrorists. It must be frightening, though, if you need your job.
His legal advice: "God back to your safe little life and shut your mouth."
Academia is becoming a dangerous profession these days. Toe the party line or else. It's not an environment for free-thinkers. Seems like Mao's Cultural Revolution. Academics feel intimidated, and they need their jobs. Seems like Mao's Cultural Revolution. Academics feel intimidated, and they need their jobs so they behave like fearful mice.
I’ve been with my spouse for almost 15 years. In those years, I’ve never been with anyone but the mother of my son. But that’s not because I am an especially good and true person. In fact, I am wholly in possession of an unimaginably filthy and mongrel mind. But I am also a dude who believes in guard-rails, as a buddy of mine once put it. I don’t believe in getting “in the moment” and then exercising will-power. I believe in avoiding ‘the moment.’ I believe in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not; why I am going to a party, and why I am not. I believe that the battle is lost at Happy Hour, not at the hotel. I am not a ‘good man.’ But I am prepared to be an honorable one.
It's a a good piece about the apparent assumptions about basic human nature. Avoiding problematic temptation isn't just about Christianity though. It's also about maintaining self -respect and reputation. I believe that, with humans, sex, personal advantage, neediness, money, power, dominance, etc. are always at work but that there are many other more admirable things at work too. This is all quite obvious.
Outside Hollywood, public figures have to be especially alert to seductions by star-f-ers, blackmailers, users, and the like, so they have an extra character challenge. Happily being a non-public figure, I meet with women colleagues and clients all the time. Never had a problem with myself but I have had to awkwardly handle a few attempted seductions when I was younger.
It is no longer in fashion to talk about how women take advantage of men for their own purposes. Women have power of many kinds, but the current batch of Lefty women prefer the victim image.
Imagine you are a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy processing the news that Jim Webb—Annapolis class of '68, recipient of the Navy Cross, former senator and secretary of the Navy, former member of the Annapolis faculty, bestselling novelist and acclaimed journalist—has been forced by political pressure to decline an award for distinguished alumni at your school this week...
We are witnessing the second great era of speech repression in academia, the first coming during the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. One force behind the new wave is a theory of truth, or a picture of reality, developed the first time around. This theory, which we might call “linguistic constructivism,” holds that we don’t merely describe or represent the world in language; language creates the world and ourselves. A favorite slogan of our moment, “Words have power,” reflects that view.
Yes, it is interesting. I remember dorm room bull sessions, often pot-smoke- filled, on such topics. Also, beer cans, pizza boxes, Haagen Dasz. Very difficult to separate the social construction of reality from propaganda.
Anyway, this is all kid stuff. Reality is when you stub your toe on a rock and enlightenment occurs.
Closely examining how the 11 percent decline of middle-income families was distributed between the upper- and lower-income categories, he points out that not only did 7 percent move into the upper-income group, but that Hispanic immigrants accounted for three-quarters of the 4 percent that enlarged the lower-income category. Absent the influx of lower-skilled immigrants between 1971 and 2015, the share of middle-class households in the American population would have experienced only a 1 percent shift downward at the same time as the number of upper-income families increased by 7 percent. In other words, middle-class people did not so much experience a downward shift as immigrants enlarged the data set. And for many if not most of these immigrants, gaining a foothold in the lower-income group represented a significant economic step upward compared to their position before coming to the United States.
His op-ed is partly right, partly wrong. His naivety about human nature, especially late-adolescent/young adult nature, is where he gets things wrong. Opinion writers tend to be naive about the college youth, and take them far too seriously. Perhaps they identify with them. College administrators are even worse castrati.
For a subgroup of kids that age who are in fancy schools and usually lack jobs, creating mayhem, especially when cloaked in some imitation of higher virtue (but is also fun when it is not cloaked in anything as in mayhem in Fort Lauderdale or Nassau), it's an attempt to unleash their warrior, reckless natures without fear of being shot by an enemy. It is a sort of play warfare, really. Paintball.
In almost all of human history, it would have been real clubs or arrows or spears or bullets at their age. No safe spaces for anybody.
Can I earn distinction among my peers by shutting down Charles Murray? Seems rather pathetic to me but these are bubble-wrapped kids with the Teenage Diseases. Some of their profs, for sure, never recovered from their own by avoiding the Big World Outside the bubble.
In elite schools, this play war is mostly for kids who didn't make the sports teams. In non-elite schools there is little of this foolishness because there is a diploma to be earned and they have side jobs or their parents are stretched to pay for them to have a positive experience to graduate with a supply of useful skills and enough socio-cultural tools to maybe handle a managerial role and a mortgage at some point.
Were I a college president (which I would not mind being), I would have any disruptors expelled and/or arrested (which is just one of many reasons I am not a college president).
Who was it who said recently that what America needs is a Good War? With a co-ed, or, should I say, pangender draft. There must be people worth suppressing more than a refined, gentle, scholarly grandpa like Murray. Where is the heroism in war against Grandpa?
The people who have an explicit legal obligation to work not on our behalf but on behalf of their shareholders do a pretty good job of giving us what we want; the people who vow to work on our behalf do not. That is a paradox only if you do not think about it too much, and not thinking about it too much is the business that politicians are in.
If capitalism – which is to say, human ingenuity set free to follow its own natural course – is a kind of social machine, then politicians are something like children who take apart complex machines without understanding what they do or how to put them back together. (At their worst, they are simply saboteurs.) When they rail against capitalism, automation, trade, and the like, they resemble nothing so much as those hominids at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, shrieking hysterically at something that is simply beyond their comprehension.
Of course, most politicians really do know better. They are just bullshitting people, which is their mission if they want to keep their easy job.
All examinations discriminate among people. That's their purpose. The purpose of bar exams is to discriminate on knowledge and skills. Medical licensure examinations discriminate on knowledge and skills. And let's discuss commercial pilot's licenses.
When you look for something that tests discriminate on, you can find it. IQ, study habits, educational background, character traits, family background, race, age, height, etc. You can find whatever stats you look for, but all the tests are looking for is to see who can do the thing, and who can not do it. That is discrimination of the able from the unable. It's the individual that matters.
For Christ's sake, if you can't understand simple written English, how can you be paid teach it? You might almost imagine that teaching was just a government job.
How are they fragile? They are mobs. Campus as nursery school with annoying brats. Professors are spineless and fearful of the students. Victimhood is good, of course. Can we have enlightened discourse? Intelligent debate?
We recently heard a performance of Bach's St. John Passion, with the same small-size choir that Bach had (but with far better voices now, for sure), and with the original instruments. Bach pretty much always bitched about the lousy choirs he had to work with. Bitched about the musicians too.
If you want to fertilize gardens, shrubs, lawns, trees, etc, we recommend doing it in March or early April before there is any significant budding or growth. In any event, as soon as the soil thaws. Why is that? It is because roots wake up and get hungry before anything appears visibly on plants. Some years I have fertilized right on top of a late snow.
As Steyn says,