Maggie's Farm

"Segregation ...not only harms one physically, it also harms one spiritually...it scars the soul...It is a system which stares the segregated in the face, saying "You are less than..." and "You are not equal to...""

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

From a US Govt. "backgrounder" on the Civil Rights Act:

The assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963 left most civil rights leaders grief-stricken. Kennedy had been the first president since Harry Truman to champion equal rights for black Americans, and they knew little about his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Although Johnson had helped engineer the Civil Rights Act of 1957, that had been a mild measure, and no one knew if the Texan would continue Kennedy's call for civil rights or move to placate his fellow southerners.

But on November 27, 1963, addressing the Congress and the nation for the first time as president, Johnson called for passage of the civil rights bill as a monument to the fallen Kennedy. "Let us continue," he declared, promising that "the ideas and the ideals which [Kennedy] so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action." Moreover, where Kennedy had been sound on principle, Lyndon Johnson was the master of parliamentary procedure, and he used his considerable talents as well as the prestige of the presidency in support of the bill.

On February 10, 1964, the House of Representatives passed the measure by a lopsided 290-130 vote, but everyone knew that the real battle would be in the Senate, whose rules had allowed southern (Democrats) in the past to mount filibusters that had effectively killed nearly all civil rights legislation. But Johnson pulled every string he knew, and had the civil rights leaders mount a massive lobbying campaign, including inundating the Capitol with religious leaders of all faiths and colors. The strategy paid off, and in June the Senate voted to close debate; a few weeks later, it passed the most important piece of civil rights legislation in the nation's history, and on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed it into law.

Here's a link that briefly summarizes the civil rights era in the US.

"Don't Bite the Hand That's Feeding You," from 1915. Unfortunately, it is human nature to resent one's benefactors. Thank God dogs aren't like that.

It always seemed to me that new immigrants have a better chance of appreciating the uniqueness of America than do those of us who have been here for many generations and tend to be spoiled and to take it for granted. However, my family has been here since the 1600s, and I take this blessing not at all for granted. Freedom from the State (and my genes) are my most precious heritage.

The invention of "deep England." From a review of a new Shakespeare bio by Jonathan Bates:

Of the many influences on Shakespeare, his Warwickshire origins were most important. As the grandson of a yeoman farmer and the son of a failing Stratford-upon-Avon shopkeeper, he belonged to the country, not the city. He did not accumulate property in London, and may even have felt uncomfortable there. Unlike his theatrical contemporaries, he set scenes in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. He had a wide and detailed knowledge of country lore and the medicinal uses of plants, using names which baffled the London compositors who set his plays into print. Bate believes that Shakespeare invented “deep England”, a rustic idyll centred on the Midlands that delights in mingling morris men and royal spectacle.

Readers know how much I like outdoor gear, and how I need to remind myself that when I wear a few layers, I need to get trousers a full size larger in the waist or I will be miserable in the woods and fields.

It was a balmy 13 degrees F this morning here, with snow. Beautiful.

Well, I need to remind myself of the same thing with boots. I tried out some new snow/winter boots early this morning to plow and sand and shovel the driveway and walks before going to work in Hartford, and I had not figured for liner socks and heavy socks. It just hurt. 

Remind me, readers. I have trouble remembering this: Except for base layers, winter gear needs to be bigger than one's usual.

With the global cooling crisis, even those in the southern reaches will need to learn these details. Here's Dr. Merc's boat this morning in the Florida Keys (cannot find our friend's site right now, and I doubt he can find his snow shovel either):

Insty linked this quote via an interesting (Greenwich) CT blog we hadn't known about, For What It's Worth:

CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARES. “There’s already plenty of documentation about the collapse of California and how its citizens legislated it from a land of opportunity to a hell hole that punishes anyone with ambition and a dream. In the annals of its decline, this small item will surely pass unnoticed but it’s emblematic of what happened. In fact, I think it sums up the whole sorry saga quite neatly.”

There's a good summary via his link. The author of that blog says he is an ex-lawyer who is much happier in the real estate biz. Also through his site, this news article about some suckers in Fairfield, CT.

It's Climate Change! 

We're all gonna die! Global warming causes global cooling, dummy. All sophisticated, bien pensant folks understand that.

Meanwhile, the supposedly Kyoto-friendly Euros beg for more fossil fuel. We thought they gave it up for Lent forever. Yeah, I know: "That was then, this is now."

And more: I guess it's still too hot in Madison, WI. Isn't it nice that those sanctimonious moonbats are trying to save the world by bossing people around?

In the mailbox today, on one of those long sticky-notes:

"Irish woman looking for a housekeeping job or helping out on weekends. Please call: (phone #)."

How can one not give her a call? "Helping out" sounds darn good, and so does "Irish." But can she split logs, remove spiderwebs and dustballs the size of raccoons, and do the laundry without bleaching everything to smithereens? And can she make mashed potatoes?

Surely the latter. But I already know the Irish Secret: A whole stick of butter, a thing of sour cream, a cup of heavy cream, and a mountain of salt and pepper. Almost forgot one minor detail - a bunch of boiled potatoes in there too, mashed to a lumpless mush by strong Irish arms.

Fr. Neuhaus. (h/t, NRO):

It's a twofer from Humbug: Name That Fallacy! 

I have always been a fan of False Dilemma. It works like a dream on the naive. Perfect Solution is for children and utopians.

Democracy vs. Republic: The Video.

This is as simple and clear a discussion of forms of government as anything could be. It's around 5 minutes. (h/t, No Pasaran)

Moore in the WSJ, From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years. One quote:

Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated "Atlas" as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

Read the whole thing. Link above.

"Ever done the opposite of what the experts say?"

Our friend Stumbling hits a handful of fallacies in a piece on experts. One quote:

...herein lies the purpose of experts. It’s to reinforce these mechanisms, to help people avoid the uncomfortable facts that the world is uncertain, that mistakes are inevitable, and that we are not as in control of things as we think.

Blaming experts for being wrong is like complaining that the economy is not yellow. It’s a category error so howling as to be nonsensical.

Capitalism does not exist, says Bruce Walker at American Thinker. One quote:

What we call "Capitalism" actually encompasses something much grander and much broader.  Wealth is not simply financial wealth and man is much greater than homo economus, a creature governed solely by economic factors.  Except for neurotic personalities, like the fictional Midas or Scrooge, people work, invest and strive for success in the marketplace of all human interactions. 

America is the world master of marketing and advertising. (We owe something to the great advertiser David Ogilvie for that.) From For the Greater Goods, in The American:

The latest Interbrand listing of the most valuable global brands reveals 8 American brands in the top 10 and 52 in the top 100, more than twice the expected numbers based on America’s cut of roughly a quarter of the world economy. Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks command more loyalty among many consumers than any political party or trade union.

Read the whole thing to learn how it happened.

Readers know that I am a collector of formal fallacies. I keep them on the mantle, well-dusted and polished. "Saving the Hypothesis" doesn't strike me as a formal, Aristotelian fallacy, but it surely is a common thing for folks to struggle to salvage a notion in which they are emotionally invested, regardless of new data. We all do that sometimes unless we catch ourselves BSing ourselves. 

Larry Anderson at American Thinker proposed this fallacy in relation to the Global Warming Climate Change whatever topic. One quote:

I distinctly remember the first time I had an argument with someone about "climate change."  It was a warm spring day in April of 1975. I was walking across the campus at Harvard headed for lunch. A fellow classmate (we were both juniors) ran up to me. He was really excited. He hollered out:

"Have you heard? The ice age is coming. They've proven it with computer studies at MIT."

"How did they prove that there is an ice age coming with computers?" I asked my friend.

"The planet is getting colder. They have the data.  And it is going to keep getting colder. They have these computer models --"

I stopped him right there. I knew enough about computers to understand that they were not up to accurately predicting short-term weather patterns -- let alone an ice age.

"No way. Computers aren't that powerful. "

"But they have the data and they have computers!"

"I know they do. But computers spit out whatever they are programmed to spit out. Load a computer with the data that the world has been getting colder; ask it what the weather will be tomorrow, and what do you think the computer is going to tell you? The world is getting hotter? If it does you'd better get a better computer. You hungry?" I replied and I continued on my way to lunch.

The original "climate change" hypothesis was that the planet was getting colder and that it would continue getting colder. That was a very simple hypothesis and was easily proven or refuted. Planet keeps getting colder = hypothesis correct. Planet gets warmer = hypothesis incorrect.

The world got warmer instead of colder. The "climate change" hypothesis was rewritten. This time the planet was facing a catastrophic meltdown. The world was not only getting warmer -- it was going to keep getting warmer at an ever increasing and life-threatening rate.

A quote from Krauthammer, on The Necessity of Israel:

For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.

I read books at night and go online during the day during little breaks from work. Is exploring the internet reading? I dunno. Some say it's different from reading books. One quote from Christine Rosen on reading in The New Atlantis:

As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.

How strategic and targeted are we when we read on the screen? In a commissioned report published by the British Library in January 2008 (the cover of which features a rather alarming picture of a young boy with a maniacal expression staring at a screen image of Darth Vader), researchers found that everyone, teachers and students alike, “exhibits a bouncing/flicking behavior, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically....Users are promiscuous, diverse, and volatile.” As for the kind of reading the study participants were doing online, it was qualitatively different from traditional literacy. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of ?reading’ are emerging as users ?power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages, and abstracts going for quick wins.” As the report’s authors concluded, with a baffling ingenuousness, “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

That is precisely what Jakob Nielsen, a former software engineer and a widely respected expert on Web page usability, found in his research on screen reading. Rather than reading deliberately, when we scan the screen in search of content our eyes follow an F-shaped pattern, quickly darting across text in search of the central nugget of information we seek. “?Reading’ is not even the right word” to describe this activity, Nielsen pointedly says.

Could be true. We must all have ADD or are thinking about sex all the time, and are only able to learn if we're "really interested in it." Reading and studying are entirely different activities: one is more passive, one more active, as I see it.

Thermocouples are cool little items, conductors which generate a voltage when subjected to a thermal gradient (Wiki). That's the old thermoelectric effect that you remember from high school physics.

The effect was accidentally discovered by the Estonian Thomas Seebek in 1822. Most of our general-use thermocouples are the inexpensive K-type, Nickel-Chromium and Nickel-Aluminium.

I had the unfortunate opportunity to learn more about our dependence on these mechanisms over the weekend. Among hundreds of other things they are used for, I learned that they control the pilot light on gas water heaters. If the pilot light goes out and your thermocouple sensor is on the blink - no hot water.

Steyn on the Palis:

In Gaza, they don't vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it's to get Junior into the Saudi-funded, Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers.

At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right, and the Rice view is wishful thinking. After all, when French President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel's "disproportionate" response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a Western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of "desperation."

Hence, this slightly surreal headline from The New York Times: "Israel Rejects Cease-Fire, But Offers Gaza Aid." For whatever that's worth. Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health. Well, what do you expect? It's "desperation" born of "poverty" and "occupation."

If it was, it would be easy to fix. But what if it's not? What if it's about something more primal than land borders and economic aid?

Read the whole thing. We over-flatter the human species when we assume that humans are motivated by innocent and/or rational goals.

Smart thing to do. Obama eyes tax cuts. It's one of the only effective things a government can do to try to shorten a recession.

In the end, though, recessions just have to play themselves out. It's the natural history of economies, and, now that economics is fully global, local efforts can have minimal impact on the big picture.

Maybe (let's hope) Obama will be more practical and less ideological than has been feared.

A re-post, for Gramsci Week:

Re-Taking the University: A Battle Plan

Kimball's 2005 piece in the New Criterion has been previously posted here, but it deserves a second go-round, if not a third. The author of "Tenured Radicals" goes beyond the subject of academia in this essay which succinctly exposes the tactics and strategies of the now-greying but still revolutionary 60s radicals. Some sample paragraphs:

The old Marxist strategy of “increasing the contradictions”—a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are—is a license for thuggery. It excuses all manner of bad behavior for the sake of a revolution that will (so it is said) finally transform society when all the old allegiances have finally collapsed. If one or two tottering institutions require a little push to finish them off, so be it. Shove hard: You cannot, as comrade Stalin remarked, make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Tenured Radicals is a frankly polemical book. In some ways, however, it underestimates if not the severity then at least the depth of the problem. What happened to the universities was part—a large part—of that “long march through the institutions” that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recommended and whose American lineaments I chronicled in The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (2000). “The Age of Aquarius,” I wrote in the Introduction to that book, “did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.”

Since the 1960s ...colleges and universities have more and more been home to what Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture of the intellectuals.” The goal was less reflection than rejection. The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much of what was wrong with the twentieth century could be summed up in the word “workshop.” Nowadays, “workshop” has been largely replaced by the word “studies.” Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies: these are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances. They exist not to further liberal education but to nurture the feckless antinomianism that Jacques Barzun dubbed “directionless quibble.” 

Read the whole essay.

How does he know? And what exactly is he really saying about them, then? Furthermore, what about him? Does he have a dirty mind, and find God's splendid artistry prurient?

Aussie MP/Reverend wants topless beaches banned out of sensitivity to Moslem men. Sheesh. Australia has lots of other beaches to go to, if they want to swim or surf. Or they can do as I do, which is to keep my eyes discreetly down when visiting topless beaches...admiring my pedicure.

How about banning burkhas for the happiness of the non-Moslem men? Funny thing is, I know a couple of Moslem men. They might be the exceptions, but they seem to appreciate females quite a bit.

Photo: From a naked surfing contest in Australia.