Maggie's Farm

No, not really, even with all-wheel drive.

In the back woods of the Northeast, most local people drive crappy little old RWD rusty GM sedans and zoom around nicely with snow tires while the skiers from the cities slip and slide their Subarus and 4-WD Suburbans, Range Rovers, and Escalades all over the roads and into the ditches.

Media Notices America's Grievous Shortage of Laws

Insty:  We don't need more laws

America has more laws, rules, and regulations than anybody could learn in a lifetime - or could obey without a large team of lawyers on hand at all times. I'm in favor of a ten-year moratorium on new laws, giving time to roll back old laws.

See Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

The stone age meets the 21st Century. The sad truth about uncontacted tribes

The article begins:

The year was 1943, and another Advent had dawned for Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer loved Advent and had often preached sermons on this holy season of waiting and hope as a metaphor for the entire Christian life. Just one year earlier, during the Advent of 1942, Bonhoeffer had written a circular letter to some of his friends and former students:

"The joy of God goes through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there; it does not deny grave sin but finds forgiveness precisely in this way; it looks death straight in the eye, but it finds life precisely within it."

Those words took on a deeper meaning in December 1943 as Bonhoeffer found himself one of eight hundred prisoners awaiting trial in Berlin’s Tegel military prison.

Central planning by our moral and intellectual superiors. Would anybody in a free country want that, even if we had any moral and intellectual superiors?

Then a Miracle Occurs….

The Fatal Conceit of Jonathan Gruber:

Gruber’s widely publicized revelations about the political strategy of pushing through landmark legislation that voters would reject if they “understood” what was in it is typical of the scientific planner mindset. Scientific planners like Gruber believe that they know better what ordinary people need than the people themselves, that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves, and that more intelligent technocrats must intervene in their lives on their behalf.

ObamaCare will puncture Gruber’s balloon, later if not sooner. The lesson that Gruber will learn is that ordinary people are actually smarter than the scientific planners...

From How the Common Core Went Wrong:

Critics have tagged the Common Core with the pejorative "ObamaCore." The gibe is more instructive than many realize. The Affordable Care Act and the Common Core both involve ambitious efforts to change whole swaths of American life, though the practical impact of each was intentionally shrouded in uncertainty. Both would have benefited from more scrutiny early on but are now increasingly entrenched. In health care, critics have found it a losing strategy to talk about simply repealing the ACA without talking about what should replace it. They need to offer plausible alternatives to have a shot at policy or political success. Meanwhile, the ACA has started to change American medicine. The same is true of the Common Core. Five years on, it has started to change instruction, textbooks, and curriculum.

It's rare for us to highlight works on sociology, but I'll make an exception for Peter Berger. Berger with Thomas Luckmann were the authors of the still-classic and fascinating The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, 1967

Despite the formality of the title, it's a very readable and persuasive book about our experiences of reality and the role of our local cultures in shaping our experience of reality.

Berger was on my mind because Pastor Keller had mentioned the idea of "relativizing the relativizers." I like that idea, because nobody can really think outside their own culture, and relativists and multiculturalists of all sorts tend not to be aware of how deeply Western and, indeed, parochial their views really are.

Anyway, that's a chapter from another book by Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. I have not read it, but I think I will.

Americans should be pleased to know that the incidence of sexual assault (except in prisons) has been steadily in decline for many years. There is no epidemic and there is no rape culture in the US - indeed there is a strong Judeo-Christian anti-rape culture - but there are some individual sexual predators and rapists around, and there always will be. Here's a real rape culture:

Consider a genuine phenomenon of “rape culture:” the widespread practice of Pakistani pimps “grooming” underage English girls to be raped en masse by themselves and their clients.

and this one: Raping and Beheading the Faithful

Also interesting is that the incidence of violent sexual assault on campuses appears to be about half of that which occurs out in the real world. That is remarkable in some ways, considering that the campus today jams frequently-alcohol- or drug-intoxicated adolescent boys and girls too-close together in a generally sexually-disinhibited and hypersexualized atmosphere.

My view has always been this: if assaulted, sexually or otherwise, call the cops. It's a civic duty really, because odds are that the perp will strike again with someone else.

Best, most reasonable and comprehensive piece I've seen on the topic: The College Rape Overcorrection - Sexual assault on campus is a serious problem. But efforts to protect women from a putative epidemic of violence have led to misguided policies that infringe on the civil rights of men.

I am not sure why campus sexual assault is so often the focus of the media when sexual assault and violence of all sorts is far more frequent off campuses.

Related, Lena Dunham's Assault on Humanity

Also,

New DOJ Data On Sexual Assaults: College Students Are Less Likely To Be Victimized

UVA Refuses to Reinstate Fraternity Activities

Rolling Stone's UVA Rape Story Just Took Another Massive Hit

Colleges Now Buying Special Insurance to Cover Campus Rape Scandals

Federal Judge on NSA: 'Privacy Is Actually Overvalued'

Because of national security, of course. I thought he was a smart guy.

MacDonald: The latest campus fad, which sees racism everywhere, will create a new generation of permanent victims. Her article makes me feel unsafe as it seems to trivialize the feelings of the most vulnerable, marginalized, and irritable among us, such as me.

There is a book called Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back but it's about dealing with mental illness.

We have posted recently about firewood, green or dried.

Of course, it all depends on whether your fires are for pleasure, comfort, and ambience or for the BTUs. We have an old wood stove in the kitchen which provides tons of heat, but my fireplace in the den warms that little room up very effectively, to the point that I have to open the window.

Fireplaces do radiate heat, just much more ineffectively than stoves.

What wood to burn? Any wood is good. Some people are too afraid of burning fir and pine, but they are excellent, produce wonderful smells, and probably produce less chimney creosote than slower-burning hardwoods. However, if you keep a home fire burning as we do, you must have the chimney cleaned at least twice per winter, and ideally once per cord or two whatever the wood. Chimney fires are the reason so many churches and old houses have burned down in New England.

Generally speaking, the hotter the fire, the less creosote condensation in the chimney. Here you can read all about chimney creosote.

I have read that it takes a year to air-dry unsplit green wood, which can contain over 50% water when freshly cut (dry wood is around 25% water, depending on where you live). I burn green wood sometimes once I have a good bed of coals and don't want a blazing fire, but it certainly does not burn as hot as air-dried wood. I don't care because I am not reliant on wood for heat except when our power is down.

Here is some good firewood info from the Master Sweep.

Here are some good data about firewood

Info re the Franklin stove

 Around this time (1744), the deputy governor of Pennsylvania, George Thomas, made an offer to Franklin to patent his design, but Franklin never patented any of his designs and inventions. He believed “that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously”

Info re the Rumford Fireplace

Brick-lined chimneys? They are obsolete. Best thing is to line them with stovepipe.

Always bear in mind that every time you light a fire you are producing CO2, killing Gaia, and destroying the planet. Coal and oil, after all, are just very well-seasoned old wood. If you truly love Gaia, you would do without mechanized transport, or horses, or A/C, heat, and the internet.

The backlash against no-excuses discipline in high school

I see no reason why black kids could not benefit from the same sorts of disciplines and expectations that were imposed on me. It did me good and yes, I did rebel in some minor ways.

Reynolds: Asians get the Ivy League's Jewish treatment

From How the Common Core Went Wrong:

...  it looks like the Common Core is a back-door way for the federal government to exert tremendous influence over education. NCLB prohibits federal departments or agencies from mandating, directing, or controlling "a State, local educational agency, or school's specific instructional content, academic achievement standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of instruction." But that law proved to be a frail safeguard. Secretary Duncan funded new testing consortia in the hope, he said, that their tests would drive instruction and that they would work on "developing curriculum frameworks" and "instructional modules." Coupled with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, its disregard for the constraints negotiated into NCLB, its expansive and troubling use of NCLB waivers, its aggressive efforts to dictate school discipline and to attack state-based voucher programs, and much else, there is cause to question how much restraint federal officials will show going forward. For instance, advocates have not created a strategy to update the standards or vet materials, prompting quiet conversations among Common Core proponents (including those at the Department of Education) about whether it wouldn't just make sense for the Department to fill the vacuum. At this point, the Common Core looks to be a standing invitation to further federal involvement in schooling.

Robert Iosue:  It is possible to control college costs—and I did it

Seems fairly easy to do but unlikely to be done unless market forces force it.

Well-written of course, objective, and interesting. Deidre McCloskey: Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured and Unjustified Pessimism: A Review Essay of Thomas Piketty

From The Truth about Evil by John Gray:

 Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the West's default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing - however falteringly - to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved.

Paradoxically, this belief in the evanescence of evil is what underlies the hysterical invocation of evil that has lately become so prominent. There are many bad and lamentable forces in the world today, but it is those that undermine the belief in human improvement that are demonised as "evil."

An impressive essay.

International students now make up 17% of all U.S. graduate students

The schools want their money.

Elite colleges will have a hard time justifying the ways they limit Asian-American acceptances: Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans, ‘similar challenges’ planned

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Common Core–The Elites Did It:

 The broad view is that the Common Core didn’t grow out of grassroots demand for curricular reform.  It isn’t the work of school boards or an initiative put in motion by dissatisfied parents.  It didn’t come about because good teachers convened and came up with a proposal to improve K-12 education.  It was instead the product of a handful of very-well connected intellectuals who dreamed up their own vision of what American schools should do.

and

One of the local realities is that many parents who are actively involved in their children’s education view the Common Core as state-imposed disaster.  They are immune to the Coleman-Gates appeal for uniformity of teaching for the sake of uniformity itself.  They are suspicious of an approach to math that vaults over tried-and-true approaches for the sake of the unproven benefits of a new “theory.”  They are equally perturbed by an approach that derogates the importance of literature and, when it does introduce literary works, chops them into fragments and short extracts.

Combine arrogance, money, fancy degrees, and a top-down attitude, and this is what you get: a one-size-fits-all central plan designed for the masses by our moral and intellectual superiors whether you want it or not.

Same general philosophy as Obamacare. Or this: Liberal Masterminds Demand National Food Policy.  No, that's not from The Onion.

This topic might be triggering to our readers: This is how bad censorship is getting: Discussions of what can’t be said come with a ‘trigger warning.’

Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement—a disorder whose lethal spread in academia grows by the day. What should be the object of derision, a focus for satire, is instead the subject of serious faux academic discussion and precautionary warnings. For this disorder there is no effective quarantine.

It doesn't need satire because it satirizes itself. But in the UK, the government is considering speech permits. That is not a joke. I think it must be mostly about not pissing off their Muslims.

Not Asian-Americans, but Asians from Asia:

They’re far outpacing Americans, particularly on the quantitative section of the test. Many B-school admissions officers say that a score on the quantitative section is the best predictor of success in an MBA program.

One result of these disparities is that Americans’ percentile rankings have dropped, even though their raw scores have remained constant in recent years. With Asia-Pacific students applying to and attending American business schools in large numbers, some schools complained to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT. As the WSJ put it, schools “don’t want to become factories for high-scoring test-takers from abroad.”

Except in the small ways (eg the color of a moth's wings, or different kinds of finches), I am a skeptic about evolution, possibly because I do not really understand the theories behind the theories. I do get the part about development of related species, but I do not get the adaptive advantage of an elephant over a bacterium or an algae colony. I am told we live in the Age of Bacteria, a world in which bacteria are the largest (by volume) and most populous organisms, and thus the most successful and best-adapted to current times (and for multi-cellular critters, the bugs win). Thus it is difficult for me to view humanity as the new, improved crown of creation any more than elephants.

No, I am not talking about intelligent design and all that.  Also, I understand that evolutionary theories (of which there are several) say nothing about "progress," just adaptation to current conditions. It's just that I find the science and the logic of it all puzzling.

So did the fine essayist Stephen Jay Gould. I enjoyed this, but had to read it twice: Challenges to Neo- Darwinism and Their Meaning for a Revised View of Human Consciousness