Maggie's Farm

Douthat reviews the current debate between Coates and Chait: On Coates v. Chait

On a related topic, Star Parker has this:  The Problem Is Liberalism, Not Racism

As we have pointed out here, there is far more white poverty than black poverty in the US. It's not about skin tone.

Truth is, poverty is not a unitary phenomenon, and it's not all a problem. There are hundreds of sorts of poverty: poverty by life-style choice, poverty by location choice, poverty by bad luck, poverty by illness, mental illness, and addiction, poverty by personality traits or weak character, poverty from long-term unemployment, temporary poverty, poverty from being in grad school, poverty from being improvident, new immigrant poverty, poverty from having been in jail, poverty from being embedded in a poverty culture, poverty from trying to live on Social Security, poverty from being a single parent (a life-style choice, I suppose), fraudulent poverty from cash businesses and illegal activities, and so forth. It's not all a collective "societal problem."

Why don't the pundits talk about that? They never do. Even Charles Murray doesn't. I'd like to see a statistical break-down, but it doesn't exist. Worse yet, poverty stats fail to include government or charitable benefits so I am skeptical about all of it.

America offers great freebies even for those for whom poverty is a life-style choice because we do not let people starve in the streets, without shelter. Need a cell phone? We even have Obamaphones. America is a great country in which to be poor.

Lawns are not natural, and they are a pain in the ass. However, they are needed for kid play, croquet, and summer cocktail parties. They can also look gracious and neat, when healthy and when surrounded by good plantings. They are really just one sort of garden, or part of a garden. Grassy garden paths are fine things.

Around here, most years you can overseed a thin lawn area in April (although the best time is early Fall). When I overseed an area in Spring, I follow it by raking in a thin top-dressing of my own concoction - a mix of sand, compost, rotted manure, a little peat moss.

What about crabgrass prevention? Crabgrass preventers need to be put down around the time the Forsythias bloom, or slightly before that. The problem is that it cannot be used when seeding a lawn - it will prevent germination of your grass seed. That's why overseeding is best done in the Fall.

What exactly is Crabgrass? It's an annual grass, Digitaria. It's not native to the US. It likes dry and compacted soil where it feels free to smother your lawn grass. Irrigated lawns tend not to grow much crabgrass, but lawn irrigation is for the 1%. Grasses are meant to go dormant in mid-summer.

What about lawn aeration? Heavily-used lawns (by people, dogs, wheelbarrows, lawn-mowers, etc) benefit from it annually. In Spring, you can do it after the third mowing. Not good to do it in mid-summer when the soil is too dry and the plugging tines cannot penetrate. I always go over an area a few times, not just once. It's a good work-out. Those plugs disintegrate quickly.

Heavy towable aerators are made for pastures, sports fields, and golf courses. Some do plugging, some do slicing, but I think deep plugging is best. 3" is the bare minimum because healthy grass roots are deeper than that.

A side-benefit of lawn aeration (and top-dressing) is earthworms. Earthworms cannot live in compacted soil, but they can happily aerate a soft and healthy turf themselves during all of the warm months.  Besides aeration, they need food: your top dressing, grass clippings and mower-chopped leaves.

Grass is not Astroturf. Here's how to aerate:

From Scruton's The great swindle - From pickled sharks to compositions in silence, fake ideas and fake emotions have elbowed out truth and beauty:

Faking depends on a measure of complicity between the perpetrator and the victim, who together conspire to believe what they don’t believe and to feel what they are incapable of feeling. There are fake beliefs, fake opinions, fake kinds of expertise. There is also fake emotion, which comes about when people debase the forms and the language in which true feeling can take root, so that they are no longer fully aware of the difference between the true and the false. Kitsch is one very important example of this. The kitsch work of art is not a response to the real world, but a fabrication designed to replace it. Yet both producer and consumer conspire to persuade each other that what they feel in and through the kitsch work of art is something deep, important and real.

Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention — in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement.

It's all mind-boggling to me. What is outside the universe, or is my sense of space-time too parochial?

Video on the big discovery.

Cosmology is enough to make anybody feel mentally ill, disoriented. The very notions of space-time, and of infinity, scramble my brain and make me think about God.

Here's a good piece on the latest: Proof of the Big Bang - A stunning discovery made at a research station in Antarctica indicates that Albert Einstein was right about the nature of the universe:

 The colossal forces of inflation caused the fabric of space-time – a concept introduced by Einstein as a way of reconciling gravity, motion and time – to start wobbling, like the surface of a sea subjected to an earthquake. One objection to relativity was that no one had evidence that violent events can make gravity form waves like this. Now they have.

Daniel Goldman reviews Joseph Bottum's new book. One quote:

 Joseph Bottum ... examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues. Precisely because the new secular religion permeates into the pores of everyday life, it sustains the certitude of salvation and a self-perpetuating spiritual aura. Secularism has succeeded on religious terms. That is an uncommon way of understanding the issue, and a powerful one.

From Milton Friedman is on the relation between citizens and government that is worthy of the ideals of a free society.

One snippet from the linked quote:

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant.

What he preached:

As Wesley draws to a conclusion, he asked, “Dost thou thus believe?”  If so, “then the peace of God is in thy heart, and sorrow and sighing flee away. Thou art no longer in doubt of the love of God; it is clear as the noonday sun.  This repentance, this faith, this peace, joy, love; this change from glory to glory is what the wisdom of the world has voted to be madness, mere enthusiasm, utter distraction.”

Academic leftists used to be interested in ideas and arguments; much less so today.

Now, the lefties just use name-calling and "Shut up" as debating tools.

As a youth, I used to debate my Conservative friends over beers and/or a little weed. My political evolution from adolescent Lefty to conservatarian began happening when I entered the adult world and learned more about human nature and how it is expressed, in part, through the miracle of markets. My evolution continues, because each year I realize more how precious and rare freedom is, and how dangerous and oppressive the State is.

FYI, Buffett's Latest Letter

Says he's putting his future widow in S&P index (not into Berkshire?). BRKA has been good to me, over the years.

I'll always listen to what Scruton has to say.

Asians compose 14 percent of California’s population but 37 percent of the undergraduates at its state universities.

The Asians view the US as a land of opportunity. Most immigrants do. What about Americans with longer histories here?

Economists sort-of confess that their predictions are not very good.

 In an autobiographical essay published 20 years ago, the left-leaning economist Kenneth Arrow recalled entering the Army as a statistician and weather specialist during World War II. “Some of my colleagues had the responsibility of preparing long-range weather forecasts, i.e., for the following month,” Arrow wrote. “The statisticians among us subjected these forecasts to verification and found they differed in no way from chance.”

Alarmed, Arrow and his colleagues tried to bring this important discovery to the attention of the commanding officer. At last the word came down from a high-ranking aide.

“The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good,” the aide said haughtily. “However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

A history of Monty Python, produced after the premature death of Graham Chapman:

Pre-K Can Work - Needy kids could benefit, but only if we use proven pedagogy and hold programs accountable.

Pre-K Dreaming - The push for “transitional kindergarten” is costly and evidence-free.

I tend to feel it's just one more cradle-to-grave scam, a government+union attempted take-over of the child care (aka baby-sitting) biz.

What a mystery it all is, with the info and theories changing hourly, and everybody jumping on the latest to keep the website hits coming.

We'll do the same. Whoever turns out to have guessed it right (ie what happened, and where the airplane is, with coordinates) wins a Maggie's Farm t-shirt (if we have any left).

Responses in comments, please.

Kimmel: "You once shot a coyote while jogging."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry: "True."

Kimmel: "You jog with a gun?"

Perry: "I do interviews with a gun."

(h/t, SDA)

I knew her, a good while ago. She was a girlfriend of my teacher. This is Hangman.

A Letter to the Class of 2013:

It is true that students can get a great education from almost any school in the country. The bad news is that the quality of their education is, in many cases, up to them, and many schools will provide little guidance. Students who want a solid foundational education don’t have to go to one of the 22 colleges that earn an “A” rating. They can build their own education—and I hope our study serves as a guide for the type of education that employers want, our country needs, and will serve students long after graduation.  But at many colleges and universities, the burden will be on them to make these informed choices.

Governing for Poetry  - Can nothing be done without the public fisc?

It's a hobby, for heaven's sake, just like posting at Maggie's. For whom did Shakespeare write his sonnets?

Dave Barry Learns Everything You Need to Know About Being a Husband From Reading 50 Shades of Grey:

Chapter One

Bart Pronghammer walked into the hotel room and knitted his brow at the sight of a naked woman with breasts like regulation volleyballs.

“Let’s have sex,” she mused matter-of-factly.

A few paragraphs later they’re all done, and the male reader, having invested maybe ninety seconds of his time, can put the book down and go back to watching SportsCenter.

Mankiw.

Genius and creativity may decline, but we hope wisdom increases.

Even The New York Times has recognized that the US has oversold college as a financial investment.

From Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy:

“What all the [ideological crusades of the twentieth-century] have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government....[S]everal key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole of society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.

2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.

3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.

4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes....(p.5)

What is remarkable is how few arguments are really engaged in, and how many substitutes for arguments there are. This vision so permeates the media and academia, and has made such major inroads into the religious community, that many grow into adulthood unaware that there is any other way of looking at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions of so-called "thinking people". Many of these "thinking people" could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes. (p. 6)”