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.
Was the "War On Drugs" mostly political? I will not defend drug use morally, spiritually, or otherwise, but the fact remains that you can buy anything you want on almost any selected street corner in the US. All that war seems to have done is to create gangs, enrich drug cartels, add lots of government employees, and put a lot of people in jail.
The signal feature of the 1787 Constitution was its prudent restraint. The Framers learned from hard Revolutionary War experience that their new nation needed a more powerful central government than the Articles of Confederation authorized. But they bestowed the requisite powers with a trembling hand, knowing that the men who would exercise them were not angels but humans, as fallible as all other men—and usually more so, since overweening ambition and self-interest, not patriotism, are the standard spurs to seeking office. Recognizing that electing your officials doesn’t ensure that they won’t become as tyrannical as the hereditary monarchs the colonists had fled, the Framers’ hemmed in and divided government authority, giving Congress only 19 specific powers that mostly concerned raising taxes, coining money, spending it on “the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” (meaning keeping the country safe), building post offices and post roads (but not turnpikes and canals), regulating the armed forces, and making laws necessary and proper to carry out these limited functions. Constitution architect James Madison, always at the vortex of the fierce disputes over what measures these enumerated powers implied as necessary and proper, concluded—after serving for a quarter-century as a congressman, secretary of state, and president—that the bedrock constitutional principle was simply to ensure that America does not “convert a limited into an unlimited Govt.”
Recommendation from a friend who just returned from a vacation trip: Crillon Le Brave.
Looks pleasant enough to me. I'd prefer to rent a villa with a cook and housemaid, though, get a few rental cars and bikes, and invite everybody to visit.
Why do we find more moral gratification in having good intentions than in producing good outcomes? Why do we accept mere symbols of being good—the Facebook photo with the orphan, the public diplomatic démarche, the battleship steaming toward the Oppressor—as evidence of good outcomes, or even as good outcomes in themselves?
It's called "moral narcissism" but some would term it "moral imperialism" or "cultural imperialism." Kipling had the last word on that topic.
If you have some savings (which most responsible people sacrifice comforts and luxuries to have), what do you do with it? Investing how? Or not investing?
- Short-term savings (might possibly need within a year or three)
- Long-term (might need someday, or might wish to leave to kids if you croak soon enough)
Inquiring people want to know what you do with your money. If I get some comments, I'll show you mine.
A while ago, a reader made the point that schoolteachers rarely teach kids to read and to do basic arithmetic these days because most people learn these things from their moms and/or dads, at home.
In a society with essentially-universal literacy, is it a school's job to do those basic things anymore?
I've been a Roger Angell reader for most of my life. Whether interested in baseball or not, I recommend his prose to you. He just turned 93, has retired to Maine, is planning a second marriage, and is being honored in Cooperstown for his contributions to baseball.
Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.
Also,
Recent and not so recent surveys (including the six-decades-long Grant Study of the lives of some nineteen-forties Harvard graduates) confirm that a majority of us people over seventy-five keep surprising ourselves with happiness. Put me on that list. Our children are adults now and mostly gone off, and let’s hope full of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our ambitions. If our wives or husbands are still with us, we sense a trickle of contentment flowing from the reliable springs of routine, affection in long silences, calm within the light boredom of well-worn friends, retold stories, and mossy opinions. Also the distant whoosh of a surfaced porpoise outside our night windows.
We elders—what kind of a handle is this, anyway, halfway between a tree and an eel?—we elders have learned a thing or two...
If you want to reinvent the wheel and design a whole new way to live an adult life, go bananas. Nobody gives a shit. If, however, you don’t have a smarter plan, here’s what’s been working for many generations...
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
Confucius
Low-information voters often willingly confess that they know nothing despite their college paperwork, but in general ignorance begets confidence and wisdom destroys it. It's Dunning-Kruger.
The American founders knew that government needed a short leash. So much for that plan.
This essay by Williamson is almost too good to post on a summer Friday afternoon: Property and Peace - The irreplaceable basis for a prosperous and decent society is property. One quote:
The founding ideal of this republic is that we are the who and government is the whom, a necessary evil that is to some degree necessarily evil. On the right scale and in its proper place, that necessary evil is bearable. But when it oversteps, we are under no obligation to bear it — in fact, we are morally obliged by our particular American patrimony to resist. That is why the usual progressive taunt, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you move to Somalia?” is foolish and shallow: The American government exists at our sufferance — we do not exist at its sufferance. George W. Bush was mocked for talking about an “ownership society,” but if you want peace, that’s precisely what you should be trying to build. The alternative is to have 50 percent + 1 arbitrating the uncomfortable question of who in effect owns whom.
You want a less polarized politics? Consider that the God of the Old Testament asked only for 10 percent, and had Ten Commandments, not ten thousand.
What’s driving the libertarian convergence of our two parties, as described by Edsall and Wehner? In a nutshell, the morality of capitalism has won. All of American life is being transformed by the imperatives of the 21st century global marketplace. The Koch brothers, we read, are “moderating” the Republican party by purging it of its concern with social issues, which are really just reactionary prejudices. Silicon Valley is “moderating” the progressivism of the Democratic party, purging it of policies that stifle growth and innovation by stripping members of the meritocracy of their honestly earned property and money. Impediments to globalization have fallen away, and the results are astonishing. More people than ever have access to the world past and present through what they can call up on their various screens, the average lifespan continues to get longer, and the realm of personal freedom or autonomy, as our Supreme Court explains, continues to grow. More than ever, America is defined by a meritocracy based on productivity. Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, even the imperatives of biology (such as birth and death), and so forth mean less than ever in constraining the opportunities for free and industrious individuals.
This libertarian convergence of opinion is clear in both parties...
Few kids would turn down an Ivy scholarship, but, after your first job out, you are on your own and nobody cares about it anymore except for you and your narcissistic needs. Done right, wonderfully life-enriching, speaking as an older Dartmouth fellow from the era when your Ivy BA meant something; many things, really. Lots of social signalling and networking, because everybody likes a Dartmouth lad (or lassie). Those were the good old days when elitism gave you a leg up in the sport of life. Clubs, jobs, friends, grad school, social acceptance, deals, etc. Of course, being a Col. or above in the US military offered similar perks. Respect.
It reminds me of the oldie, "Don't send my boy to Harvard, the dying mother said, Don't send my boy to Harvard, I'd rather see him dead, but send him to Columbia, or better yet Cornell, but as for Pennsylvan-i-ay I'll see him first in hell."
He begins, In the spring of 2008, I did a daylong stint on the Yale admissions committee...
Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of “service,” and not in the spirit of “making an effort,” either—swooping down on a member of the college support staff and offering to “buy them a coffee,” as a former Yalie once suggested, in order to “ask them about themselves.”
Who can know or understand all of this crap? All people know is that you can get in trouble if you do not. Insane, but it keeps lawyers and lobbyists employed.
I have always found it fascinating that while elitists and NWO champions constantly proclaim that morality is relative and that conscience is not inherent, somehow they are the ones who possess the proper definition of the “greater good.” If “good” is in all cases relative, then wouldn’t the “greater good” also be entirely relative? This inconsistency in their reasoning does not seem to stop them from forcing the masses through propaganda or violence to accept their version of better judgment.
and
We would be far better served as a species if we were to turn our back on the NWO altogether and move swiftly in the opposite direction. Imagine what tomorrow would be like if there were no controllers, no statists, no despots and no philosopher kings. Imagine a tomorrow where people respect the natural-born rights of others. Imagine a tomorrow where people’s irrational fears are not allowed to inhibit other people’s freedoms. Imagine a tomorrow where interactions between citizens and government are rare or nonexistent. Imagine if we could live our days in peace, independently building our own destinies, in which our successes and failures are our own, rather than the property of the collective. It may not be a perfect world, or a utopia, but I suspect it would be a much better place than we live in today.
Some good history and some good thinking about the modern (and ancient) administrative state with its extra-legal powers. I have no doubt that the founders hoped to prevent a Versailles-like giant central bureaucracy, but they failed at that. Why? They wrote all they could to prevent it.
The USA Progressives borrowed our public school structures, and developed our central governmental administration, from the Prussian models. As Hamburger says, "as American as Bismarck."
"There is always a 'necessity' for increasing government administrative power."
Makes some sense, as long as that doesn't get dumped on the taxpayer. Of course, having a bankruptcy on your credit report will not do much for your future prospects.
... intellectuals are a paradoxical product of the market economy, because “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” Like Hayek, Schumpeter described intellectuals broadly as “people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” More narrowly, “one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.” That is, intellectuals do not participate in the market (at least not in the areas they write about), and do not generally rely on satisfying consumers to earn a living. Add to this their naturally critical attitude—which Schumpeter argues is the product of the essential rationality of the market economy—and it is easy to see why intellectuals would be hostile to the market.
Was he teaching "community organizing"? I was a drunk, angry teacher - I just wanted to open my students' eyes to social justice and reality. I didn't want them to end up bitter like me.
It's not so much the drinking that bothers me - it's that he was not doing his job and it sounds like he still is not. For him, it's all about him. I would not want this jerk "teaching" my kids anything. Since I am sure he is in a government teaching union, he can't be fired.
The grades I just issued in my post-calculus, differential equations course – a sophomore math offering taken mostly by engineering students—followed the usual bell-shaped curve, roughly 10% A’s, 20% B’s, 40% C’s, 20% D’s and 10% F’s. The complaints came more from the D students than from the Fs.
The modern age is an age of anarchy, an era of habitual rebellion against old ways and existing order in the name of liberty, equality, enlightenment, and progress. It began as a rebellion against religious hierarchy, burgeoned into a rebellion against political monarchy, and finally boiled over in a rebellion against social patriarchy, leaving in its wake a new civilization endlessly at war with civilization itself...
August is not the right season, but for fall or spring, 
Expert Gerry Tosh Offers A Wonderfully 
If you have some savings (which most responsible people sacrifice comforts and luxuries to have), what do you do with it? Investing how? Or not investing?
Pic on loan from the NYT article - 
10 Great Things About the Burqa,
Some good history and some good thinking about the modern (and ancient) administrative state with its extra-legal powers. I have no doubt that the founders hoped to prevent a Versailles-like giant central bureaucracy, but they failed at that. Why? They wrote all they could to prevent it.