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.
'President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”… Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. “What your country can do for you” implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward. “What you can do for your country” assumes that the government is the master, the citizen the servant.'
"...when we see that most jobs today go to folks with a college degree, it means the employer is, probably knowingly, hiring someone with the ability—and performance prospects—of yesterday’s high-school grad."
Apparently there are no wolf subspecies in the Americas. Those thought to be subspecies are just Wolf-Coyote hybrids, of which the Red Wolf is one. Nevertheless, your tax dollars are going towards not only protecting them, but actually breeding them as if they were a precious endangered species when they are just mutts.
Government tends to be an idiot.
Generally speaking, I am in favor of wolves getting back to their old haunts in the Northeast where there are no sheep herds anyway. They will kill the coyotes and coydogs and bring the deer and moose populations into balance. Wolves do not kill people unless you leave a baby alone in the woods. People kill people, mostly, so stay away from them at all times.
Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name, George Orwell, remains an iconic figure in literature to this day. He's most famous for writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both books which warn against oppressive totalitarian authority and the nature in which power corrupts.
A Haverhill, Mass., newspaperman teaches seniors how to tell their life story for the last time; ‘don’t think that your life is any more insignificant than anyone else’s’. As a local newspaper reporter for 50 years, Tom Vartabedian has written thousands of obituaries. In May, he wrote one about himself. After finishing a draft, he felt relief. “I had written probably the most important story of my life,” he said.
Mr. Vartabedian was following his own advice. The 75-year-old weekly columnist for the Haverhill Gazette recently taught a class on writing your own obituary at a senior center in town. “Don’t leave anything to chance,” he said, “the chance that somebody else makes a debacle of it.” Tom Vartabedian wrote hundreds of obituaries during his newspaper career. This year he was asked to teach a class to senior citizens on how to write their own....
Politics is transactional in nature; some people receive this, others that. It involves compromises, bending, accommodation. To try any one discrete act of legislation, especially in isolation from the whole, on the grounds of discrete reason-giving is to misapprehend the nature of the legislative process, which is more Hayekian than Platonic. It is not directed by philosopher-kings. It is the product of a vast array of individual accommodations that accrete into a whole that—like the “market”—becomes falsely personified as though its behavior were susceptible of rational explanation.
That is a hot, ugly mess and no partisan of liberty should want it otherwise.
Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine.
A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90% of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science...
Science is fetishized only by people who do not know science.
In the US, I mean. An astute reader commented here yesterday:
He (Trump) is a moderate Republican in the traditional Northeast mold with a strong populist streak.
The majority of self-identified Republicans are not conservatives; they are moderates. Until the Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party could be described as center/left. Its mainstream leadership still is. There is no New Deal of Great Society program they oppose.
Until the realignment of the 1970's, the Republican Party was arguably to the left of the Democrat Party. It had its own progressives, like T. Roosevelt, Hoover, Wallace, Rockefeller, Lindsay, and, arguably, even Nixon and both Bushes.
Until the realignment, both parties were broad tent parties, coalitions of convenience of state parties, and included both conservatives and progressives, who fought for control. They had no real ideologies, and couldn't because of the very nature of the coalitions, which were intent on getting power.
The Democrats were arguably a broader party since they included both communists and racist segregationists. The Democrats are now a socialist party with a dominant communist wing. The Republican Party nowadays is broader and shifted to the right of the Democrats.
PS. I think it is clear that the neocons are not conservatives either. The older generation are mainly Jewish socialists, who shifted to the Republican Party because of perceived anti-Semitism in the Democrat Party, mainly due to lack of support for Israel. What was once perceived or inferred is now blatant: the Democrat Party is openly anti-Semitic (and anti-American).
A pure Conservative, as I see it, would run on issues like this: Handcuffing the Administrate State, privatizing Social Security, eliminating the federal Department of Education and HUD, abolishing government unions, and lots of other things along those lines. Well that's just my opinion. (Related, Trump as a transitional figure).
Today's Survey question: Could a pure Conservative, somehow defined, with a cheerful and winning personality win a national election today?
I am standing on top of Bald Mountain in Sonoma Valley, staring profoundly off toward the far Pacific and the dying sun. I scrunch my eyebrows and squint a little, thinking this will add to my overall air of deep thoughtfulness. My facial muscles are responding not to the transporting magic of nature, however, but to another imperative: I need to look good for the camera. Cameras, actually. Off to my side, a young man named Jimmy, whose easygoing professionalism I’ve come to respect over the past 10 days of shooting, points a surprisingly heavy (I have tried to lift it) camera at my head to film me in profile. Up above, a drone swoops over to capture the full grandeur of the moment. Following instructions, I move closer to the edge of the mountain, striking a pose that is meant to say part world conqueror, part shaman. I am a New Age Cortés...
I keep seeing that phrase "marginalized people." It can be applied to hillbillies, felons, Moslems, black Americans, trannies, crippled or blind people, the mentally-ill, or whomever you want.
Turning the adjective "marginal" into a verb craftily turns a group of people into victims of an active, malevolent force to push people to the margins of life. Many people are marginal to society because they will not, do not wish to, or can not, adjust to or fit into ordinary bourgeois society. That may be deeply to be regretted that they can not or do not, but it is not being done to them by any malevolent forces. I am not a malevolent force, but I do not invite felons or trannies to our dinner parties. They would not fit in.
Felons and trannies rarely invite me either so perhaps they marginalize me.
If you want to see active efforts to "marginalize", just check out today's link about the MSM on the GOP. There you can see an example of institutional marginalization, powers engaged in active, conscious efforts to marginalize a vast group of Americans. This attempted marginalization and organized intolerance of differences will continue until November.
There have always been natural meritocracies of talent and skill. In the Western world, the idea of meritocracy has been a conscious push-back against aristocracy, inheritance, class, prejudice, and patronage.
These days, some complain that meritocracy is a cover for sexism and racism. The history: The New Ruling Class. A quote:
...Peter is not at St. Paul’s because his parents went to Harvard; as he makes clear to Khan, he is there because of his hard work and academic achievement. Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “My students today are…so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are.… [I]t’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the twentieth century—just sees a fog. A blank.”42 Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”
... the experts (the educated elite) are always wrong in their prescriptions for the country—always. If they got their remedies right, we would be a happy country with few problems, and we wouldn’t care that the ruling class feels superior to the rest of us. They would deserve to feel superior.
Unfortunately, that has not been the case since at least 1960. Everything the experts have done has failed. Not just been disappointing, not just not lived up to the expectations, but failed spectacularly, making conditions far worse than they were before and destroying lives in the process. The list of examples is endless, but here are a few...
I am always a skeptic because it has served me well thus far in life - and because experts often lack common sense and they often fall in love with ideas.
Machines are about to get very good at doing a range of tasks that human beings have historically been paid to perform. By some estimates, half of current jobs are in danger of being replaced. If anything close to this happens, a smaller and smaller share of the human population will possess skills that make them more productive than machines. As a larger supply of labor competes for fewer jobs, wages will fall for most, or dry up entirely. The owners of capital and property, physical and intellectual, will triumph. “With less need for human labor and judgment,” venture capitalist Vinod Khosla predicts, “labor will be devalued relative to capital and even more so relative to ideas and machine learning technology.”
That study about fecal bacteria and obesity? Retracted
That study about fracking and air pollution? Retracted.
Yes, they were peer-reviewed before publication. Peer reviewers rarely assess raw data. Studies are not facts. H/T to Powerline for informing us about Retraction Watch.
It's not the old thing about the Constitution and history and all that. My survey is about what individuals, citizens, do that are far less common in other lands. This survey was stimulated by Z-man's thoughts about citizenship in The Case of the Citizen Truly Stated.
He makes good points, but I think the main one is that a nation needs some tribal aspects to function as any sort of unity. To be a nation, there has to be a common Code.
I'll start it off:
- Americans have bake sales to raise money for their kids' schools
- Americans start businesses, fail, and try another one
- Americans start charities for people who died of rare diseases and have bike rides and runs to raise money
- Americans love to support their high school sports teams just for the fun of it
- Americans have millions of clubs and churches, and join them and work at them
- Enjoy many firearm sports
- Americans are ashamed to receive charity, and ashamed when they do not contribute to their community in positive ways.
Harry Stein: We had been threatened with expulsion so we were pretty nervous. We felt, in the grandiose way that a lot of antiwar kids thought of themselves at that time, we were really putting our lives on the line, we were putting our bodies on the line, we were as brave as you could be. So—on the other hand, the administration at that point and certainly most of the faculty was against the war, so we had some sense that maybe the punishment wouldn't be all that severe. Maybe we would only be suspended. So initially we were put on trial in a big, banked stadium, all of us, and we turned that into a show trial. The kid who was representing us, one of our number, was a future radical lawyer as a matter of fact, and he, of course, put the war on trial. So that collapsed pretty quickly, and they began bringing us in one by one before the judiciary committee. And of course we were all guilty so all we could do was acknowledge that we had been there and sign a statement to that effect, and then the verdicts came. And the verdict was suspended suspensions, which was of course a joke and we laughed about it and felt very relieved, but at the same time I think we also felt a kind of contempt for these ostensible grownups in the administration who didn't even have enough faith in their own values and traditions to stand up to us. Because we knew we were kids. We knew, even serious as we were against the war, we knew we were essentially kids pushing the boundaries and they didn't have the gumption to stop us. And that was a real kind of psychological break with the past and I think for Pomona a very important moment, because it's been all downhill from there.
Interesting topic. It usually only comes up when an establishment consistently deviates far from the majority. In the case of the UK, the politics are special: Cameron was elected in part by promising a referendum on EU membership. So their national election was, in effect, a referendum on a referendum. It seems to me that, if national sovereignty can not be held to a referendum of the citizens, then nothing can be presented to the direct will of the citizens.
