Maggie's Farm

Recall that it just took one fierce, unknown feminist Harvard faculty member to eject the distinguished Larry Summers from the presidency of Harvard by supposedly having a Victorian-era fainting spell.

It seems to be a tactic which works. I agree that people must push back.

Speak Up And Stop The Lynch Mob.

WHEN WITCH-HUNTS ARE WAGED BY WITCHES

Today’s College Campuses, Where the Will to Power Derives from Victimhood. That Nobel Brit prof folded like a cheap camera, but Trump is pushing back. He's a Honey Badger, he don't care.

The Donald's Scarlet X. Trump was correct, of course. This was a mokita.

Donald Trump Was Right

Steyn on cleansing the culture:  Try to imagine it's early 1933.

Private colleges have always practiced "holistic" admissions. It basically means that they take whoever they want for whatever reason. Nothing wrong with that, it seems to me. It's their school. High test scores definitely indicate academic potential, but other qualities and talents are interesting and valuable too. The elite schools look for a "flag" amongst all of their most highly qualified applicants. They can't take them all. Money is one of the flags but there are many others.

When it comes to taxpayer-supported higher ed, it gets much more complicated: The truth about 'holistic' college admissions

I have never been quite clear about what "studying" littacher means. (I do know the difference between aggressive reading and passive diversionary reading.) However, there are a few "critics" - I think of them as "illuminators", who are wonderful to read on the topics of books and authors. Books about books, which are literary works in themselves. Harold Bloom is one, another is John Updike, and I can list a few more who I enjoy like Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Walter Benjamin.

I also enjoy learning from experts about how stories (or songs or pictures or poems) are structured, the hidden architecture.

In the end, people do love well-told stories and well-depicted ideas and things, regardless of the medium. When stories, for example, are very well-written and constructed, the delight in the words adds a lot to the tale (eg rosy-fingered dawn). Craft, talent, inspiration, penetrating intelligence, wide knowledge, insight into human nature, magic - the things most of us lack but admire and even envy.

I would take a class with Bloom, but what about "studying littacher" in an ordinary high school or college? This via Schneiderman's Are Literature Departments Doomed? (but not his view):

Literary texts, like other artworks, are neither more nor less important than any other cultural artifact or practice. Keeping the emphasis on how cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and consumed, the investigator will focus on art or literature insofar as such works connect with broader social factors, not because they possess some intrinsic interest or special aesthetic values.

Bullshit.

No doubt about it. Government regulations generally end up working in favor of large, established industries and companies, and, in effect, suppress competition. It takes a large legal department to try to make sure of compliance. Upstarts become discouraged, or just blow off the rules and hope nobody notices.

Just see what they are doing to Uber. Customers love Uber. 

Ronaldus Magnus: 

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

In my experience, small businesses are almost never in full compliance with all relevant (local, state, county, federal) rules and regulations and only are aware of the obvious ones.  The only beneficiaries are lawyers. Government rules and regulations are our bread and butter and I am not proud of that.

Student Ratings Bait Profs Into Lowering Standards, Of course. The customer is always right.

From a piece in the NY Review of Books:

In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton speak of “an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other.”

It's a conspiracy. For example, how many As did your kid get? Yeah, they all do.

Of course they do. They are, in effect, subsidies for Big Education.

The world is defenceless against the next financial crisis

Would the world be better off with ordinary free markets and no central banks?

 An 1866 lithograph by Robert Dudley shows the HMS Agamemnon, one of the first ships to attempt to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable, dwarfed by the SS Great Eastern, the ship that eventually accomplished the task, and the first one large enough to carry the entire cable length by itself.

The story here: A Wire Across the Ocean - The first telegraph cable to span the Atlantic revolutionized communication, but it also transformed business, politics, and even language.

Williamson:

You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective.

Do Cycling Helmets Prevent Head Injuries?

Constitutions on Campus Week at College Insurrection

Watts: The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad  because experiments get replicated and hypotheses
tested — or so I used to think.

Related: The Pope goes off the rails

Wacko.

...are being turned into weenies: The Last Rebels: 25 Things We Did As Kids That Would Get Someone Arrested Today

Who is to blame for this? Weenie Dads? Tort lawyers? Government? Mom-headed households? Truth is, when I was ten I would disappear all day on bikes with friends, exploring woods, swimming illegally in reservoirs, building forts (snowball fights in winter, rock and stick wars in summer), shooting BB guns, fishing, sailing a Sailfish, playing vacant-lot baseball, shooting hoops on the asphalt-covered schoolyard, enjoying occasional fistfights, stealing candy from the candy shop, smoking cigarettes stolen from parents, teasing girls (mainly the ones we liked). Home by dark of course. That was the rule.

Normal stuff. The wife says I turned out fine.

If your kid doesn't come home dirty and bruised, with a mouth full of lies and the occasional broken bone, it's a shame. But I guess the boys play video games all day now and rot their brains.

 It was diverse: Quakers, Yankees, Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish

Tim Hunt: ‘I’ve been hung out to dry. They haven’t even bothered to ask for my side of affairs’

He thought he was being cute and ironic. There is no cute and ironic anymore, dude. Thank God, one more witch (on the right) brought to justice. The other person in the photo might be a collaborator requiring similar justice.

Re the Monty Python "Call me Loretta" posted below, I want to change my body too. I want to be 3" taller, I want 25 lbs. of truly disgusting daddy-fat gone, I want perfect teeth, I want 3" in length and 1" in girth added to my pepperoni, I want to be able to bench 200 lbs. And I want to be 20 years younger and handsomer too with a powerful chin and a bigger nose. (Secret fantasy: I really want to be black and to be an NBA star, but I do not want to over-ask.)

So is that too much to ask for? Am I mentally-disordered? Is it Body Integrity Disorder? Do I need government to fix me? Or is the only thing that is ok now for guys to desire is to be castrated into eunuchs?

What do you readers want to make yourself feel just right?

This is absolute madness...

Connecticut has already been driving business and employers away for years, but government greed never ends until they kill the golden goose which CT has historically had. Until after WW2, Bridgeport, Hartford, Waterbury were wealthy industrial powerhouses. Today, remarkably, even New York is a better tax deal for business.

One by one, my prosperous friends who are among the 5-10,000 people in CT who pay the bulk of the state income taxes are establishing residence in Florida. It's not that they want to. It's because they feel it's stupid not to. They come back home for the summer.

Now even the huge employer, GE, is considering leaving CT and another big one, Sikorsky Aircraft, is cutting back local jobs.

Here's the way to do it: This State Created Jobs and Surpluses Through Tax Cuts

From George Will:

Work Culture: Up or Down?

Ask a farmer about work hours. During my career-building years, I worked 12-14 hour days. I have never regretted that, and I learned a lot in doing so. Oftentimes in my NYC days, I needed to work 24-hour days and all weekend too, and you would never hear any bitchin from me about that. Glad to have the work. Many times caught with my unconscious face planted on desk.

In my current self-employed era, I work just as hard and long as I choose to. Rarely less than 11 hours/day, and in spare time on weekends. Work is good. Mrs. Barrister values my effort enormously, which encourages me and cheers me on. She rewards me by being sweet to me and by making me a nice life. I am productive, useful, and I make money.

What else would I do, anyway? I like to read books at night, not during daytime. I surf the web when I need a short break from concentration and writing. I hate the boob tube.

It has been a great pleasure for me to provide Mrs. B with the ladylike, genteel life she aspired to. Raising kids, playing sports, seeing friends, volunteering, gardening, cooking, reading littacher and studying art history, messing with the horses. Just like her Mom. Fine with me because it all enriches my gracious Connecticut life.

Weekends I mainly structure around manual labor around the Barrister Estate, church, and socializing in evenings. We are constantly making new friends, sometimes more than we can handle. It all does me good. Life is short.

I intend to work until I drop, or until nobody needs or wants me. I guess that's my Calvinist culture and upbringing which requires being useful and productive. It works for me. Vacations and trips, however interesting, make me restless. Except for Thailand, India, and the Midi. Camera? Never, ever. After the kids got bigger, I threw it away. For me, it interferes.

Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

Harvey Silverglate is a Maggie's hero despite his lefty tendencies. A founder of FIRE, civil liberties fellow. The book title over-promises, but it's an important topic.