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.
There is no end to learning. When we feel that we have learned everything, it means that we have learned nothing.
Kensho Daniel Furaya
Kensho Daniel Furuya
There
is no end to learning. When we feel that we have learned everything, it
means that we have learned nothing. - See more at:
http://www.medrants.com/archives/5674#sthash.0B4zSIcF.dpuf
It addresses the mystery in science, medicine, economics, predictions, and history. One quote:
One of the things I have found interesting about Taleb is the way he extends what I had in my own thinking thought of as ‘mystery’ to areas of human life I had not previously considered. My list of the ‘mysterious’ had included life: what is it, where did it come from and why; consciousness, morality and free will. Emotion too is mysterious because it is implicated in a proper existential attitude to the world and yet it is not fully intelligible. Emotion complements reason but by definition is not simply reason itself. Thus its workings and logic has to be intuited and felt rather than fully explicated.
Taleb extends mystery to include historical events, the workings of medicine and the future. We simply cannot predict the future and certainly not from extrapolating from current trends. If we can’t explain the past nor predict the future, then it may seem as though life is just a little too mysterious. But, like Socrates, Taleb’s starting point is that much of wisdom consists in acknowledging what we don’t know. Plato's Socrates thinks that, having discovered our ignorance, we should seek to remedy the situation. Taleb probably has a more modest idea about how far we really do this.
St. Patrick's Day is the traditional time to plant snow peas around here. It's coming on March 17, and my bags of seeds are ready along with the inoculant.
As has been happening in recent years, due to the crisis of global cooling, this year it may require a snow shovel and maybe a blow torch to melt the soil to get those seeds in the ground.
It looks like one more year when the peas will be late.
This year’s conference theme is “Vulnerable Times.” MLA president Marianne Hirsch explained the concept a few months ago: “The Presidential Forum [one among many panels on the topic] will theorize vulnerability’s complex temporalities. Discussing embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed, forum participants will expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”
Ahh, the wonders of the Liberal Arts and those darn complex temporalities.
The authoritarian impulses of do-gooders and the Left are often highlighted here. My "problem" - if it is a problem - is that I instinctively rebel whenever a government tries to tell me that they are doing something for my own good. As red-blooded Americans, we know that government is mostly made up of self-important jackasses who couldn't run a candy store and who surely should not be running my life in any way. I can do that myself, just fine.
This is the way America is supposed to be: It Takes a Certain Kind of Village -Rallying to save a beloved local institution, D.C. neighbors show what real community looks like.
A sense of local community, "community spirit" if you will, can only arise organically and spontaneously. An outsider cannot make it happen with a few rounds of Kumbaya. In my limited experience, these things are less likely to occur in wealthy communities and in God-forsaken inner cities.
I do not think De Tocqueville experienced either of those during his remarkable study of America. I suspect that most Maggie's readers are ready to serve their communities when needed. It's the Yankee spirit - do what needs to be done outside of government.
Over the last 25 years the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled, according to a joint study by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research. The ratio of nonacademic positions to faculty positions doubled at both public and private institutions. Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors.
Why? Who are these people and what do they do all day?
Sultan's piece that we linked this morning, Our State of Police, is a stimulating one. I had never thought about these things from this angle before. One quote:
"Oppressing everyone to avoid oppressing anyone is the egalitarian ethos gone mad."
Of course, we are talking about the sorts of insoluble problems that arise in a non-totalitarian society, problems rooted in the many "flaws" in human nature. Another quote:
The left can't fix the social problems that, in some cases its welfare state helped cause. It certainly can't fix those that predate its intervention. Its efforts are all the more hopeless because it attributes the cause to its usual suspects of capitalism and intolerance so that it never addresses the problems, instead it uses people from failed societies as ammo in a cultural war. The right's tactics temporarily contain the worst of the violence, but not its expansion or its causes.
No society or culture can be conflict-free, nor can even any family or tribe or anything. We must be humble when thinking about "solutions" of all sorts. It has been said that Conservatives like me temperamentally embrace the Tragic View of life as contrasted with utopian views, and there is something to that. It is, indeed, the story of man's fall - broken from the very start.
P values have always had critics. In their almost nine decades of existence, they have been likened to mosquitoes (annoying and impossible to swat away), the emperor's new clothes (fraught with obvious problems that everyone ignores) and the tool of a “sterile intellectual rake” who ravishes science but leaves it with no progeny. One researcher suggested rechristening the methodology “statistical hypothesis inference testing”, presumably for the acronym it would yield.
The irony is that when UK statistician Ronald Fisher introduced the P value in the 1920s, he did not mean it to be a definitive test. He intended it simply as an informal way to judge whether evidence was significant in the old-fashioned sense: worthy of a second look.
At Maggie's we are all perennial skeptics, and we think that the average business "murder board" is far more rigorous and critical than any academic peer review. There is more at stake.
Tomorrow, I will have one 3 lb. steamed lobster, with home-made cucumber cole slaw, home-made potato salad with vinaigrette. Bottle or two of Oregon Chardonnay. And I will make a Trifle, all home-made (except I bought the pound cake at the supermarket). Bottom layer of pound cake soaked with rum, then drizzled with raspberry jam. Then a layer of homemade custard. Then a layer of cut-up strawberries, plus raspberries and blueberries. Then whipped cream, and then decorated with semi-sweet chocolate shavings and raspberries. Hope she likes it.
We have an English Trifle bowl like the one in the photo somewhere. I can't find it. It's somewhere buried in the basement pantry, A mere trifle to please She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.
My Mom fell through ice once, rescuing her doggie who fell through a thin spot of ice on a pond. Luckily, her feet reached the bottom so she was able to carry the pup and break through ice to the shore. She was alone in the woods at the time. She jogged home to try to stay warm, took a hot shower, and had a couple of hot toddies. She and the pup were just fine after a while.
This is a rather remarkable admission from the leadership of the Democratic Party. Have they merged with the Socialist-Worker's Party? Or with the Leisure/Artist Party?
I am, of course, opposed to "job-lock", but there is no job-lock, aka indentured servitude, in America today. America is seen as the land of opportunity for people all around the world who dream of getting here. What the heck are these Dems talking about? To whom are they pandering now?
A pal who read my piece about humidors in winter was thoughtful enough to deliver me an Opus X along with two 72% Boveda gel-packs. Those packs are news to me.
He promised that putting two Boveda packs in there will get your humidor through three months in the winter up here, where our humidity can be quite low in winter. The packs don't activate until opened.
If kids don't absorb the fundamentals, they will have difficulty going further. "New Math" set me back by years. The piece begins:
We need “new ways to measure how well our kids think, not how well they can fill in a bubble on a test,” President Obama told the nation during his State of the Union last week. To which a clever tweeter responded, “There’s a high correlation between filling in bubbles on a test and knowing the right answer.”
Thankfully, much is being made of Heather Mac Donald’s recent piece, “The Humanities and Us,” in the City Journal. She illustrates the decline of college English departments, where “gender, sexuality, race, and class” have taken over Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. The radicals of the 60s and 70s are firmly in charge; their diktats have attacked the hallmarks of literary study; and Mac Donald rightly calls for a return to standards at colleges. But standards won’t do any good if incoming freshmen are incapable of reading, thinking independently, and using logic. That has already begun to be the case, and it is going to get worse thanks to new “standards” known as Common Core.
If you can make a case for government-controlled education and medical care, then it is easier to make a case for socialized law - or socialized plumbing, for that matter.
Liberal Democrats all but concede that Obamacare marked the end of their activist ambitions. Hereafter, we will all take vigorous walks and watch prestige dramas on HBO.
But there’s still at least one major social-welfare project the left must see through before anyone considers its mission accomplished. The issue is the vast injustice that arises from the way the law is applied to different classes of citizens.
If and when that's done, there will something else, ad infinitum, until the people rebel and take back their birthright.
If she really is committed to changing the tale of two cities, as she and the new mayor claim to be, one way to start would be to cast aside ideology and judge whether those Core Knowledge classrooms, drenched in “mere facts,” are actually the key to narrowing the devastating knowledge gap between middle-class kids and poor children, who begin school with little knowledge of the world and with a stunted vocabulary. She might also find that there is at least as much “joy” in classrooms in which children get taught explicitly about the world around them as there is in classrooms in which children “construct” their own knowledge.
St. Patrick's Day is the traditional time to plant snow peas around here. It's coming on March 17, and my bags of seeds are ready along with the
A pal who read my piece about humidors in winter was thoughtful enough to deliver me an 