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.
Christina Hoff Summers on the dearth of women in math and science, as quoted in a piece at Attack Machine:
Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is legendary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester freshman course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.
and
“I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”
Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences?
...tomorrow the eyes of America will be on these two states moving in different directions. Ohio has an economy burdened by high taxes and work rules that impose heavy costs on employers. Texas embraces free trade, keeps taxes low, doesn't impose unions on business and has tooled itself for 21st century global competition. Ohioans may not like to hear this, but for any company considering where to locate a new plant or move an existing one, the choice between Ohio and Texas isn't even a close call.
The challenge for our national economy in a world of competition is to become more like Texas and less like Ohio.
A healthy rebellion against the teacher's union and for the students (h/t, Insty). Does anyone today doubt that the reactionary unions are the largest obstacle to experimentation for problem schools? These kids need a chance.
Free advice for the NYT and the Boston Globe, if they wish to survive, from Jeff Jarvis. Darn interesting ideas. One quote:
As for the New York Times itself, I’d cut bait and turn it into a national newspaper — international in their dreams. The Times is not now and has not been for sometime a New York paper. So I’d either spin off or kill metro coverage. It could become a new local online collaborative journalistic network in the mold of the new Globe. Or it could die and I firmly believe a new and more nimble local network can emerge and take up the slack left. With that spinoff goes the Times production and distribution arms, in the Morgan model.
If these large newspapers can think outside the proverbial box, as Jeff suggests, they might have a fine future despite their Leftist views. Gee whiz, they're just newspapers - not God's gift to mankind. There is no shortage of interesting stuff to read - like Maggie's Farm, for one modest example.
At the NYT, some integrity and some balance wouldn't hurt, but is not their solution. Just don't dumb it down: the world does not need another USA Today targeted towards curious 3rd grade drop-outs. They need prosperous middlebrow readers like me, who look forward to the Book Review.
(NYC, by the way, has tons of newspapers, from countless neighborhood papers like Chelsea Now, The Staten Island Advance, and The Village Voice, to city-wide papers like The Daily News, The NY Post, The NY Sun, The New York Observer, and Newsday - and more. It's the ultimate newspaper town, and every suburb has at least one local rag. The complication is that the whole country is interested in what goes on in NYC and, nowadays, in our imperial state, Washington too. Alas, because I wish that what those bozos did in DC had no importance to me.)
I love newspapers, and worked on one during summers as a lad (The Hartford Courant, in the typewriter and linotype era), but now I only read online stuff (not including magazines and the local rag, which covers purely local matters and which is required for fire-starting, and for gun- and game-cleaning - and to find out which of your bonehead neighbors has been arrested for burglarizing a hardware store in Torrington).
Confession: I enjoy most of the Sunday NYT, and, between the wife and I, we pretty much give at least a glance at every page of the darn thing. It's their political spin and bias that give us migraines: "Can you believe they said this, honey?" (We cancelled the daily years ago, in a fit of disgust.)
VDH asks "Who is the forgotten American?" Read the piece. Here is his conclusion about the hard-working, responsible, tax-paying backbone of America:
The forgotten American listens to Hillary and Barack and thinks all these promises are nice and well and good, but figures that they expect someone like herself to pay for all those programs for all those who chose to live life differently than she did—for whom in most cases there was as much or more chances than she had. She wants to pay taxes and help, but shrugs that those who receive think it’s never enough—resentment, not gratitude is their more appropriate response for government help. And she assumes that Hillary and Barak, given what they make, don’t much care whether they pay a few thousand dollars more in their own taxes, and that they, like a John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore or Ted Kennedy, are rich enough to feel everyone else’s pain but her own.
I don’t know how many forgotten Americans there are out there, but I have a feeling the answer may well determine the next election.
Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago discusses, in the NYT, the collapse of liberal theology and his fear of the consequences in our culture, if not in our politics:
Over the past 30 years we have seen the steady decline of mainline faiths and the upsurge of evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic and ''neo-orthodox'' movements -- not only among Protestants but among Catholics and Jews as well.
I agree that there has been a decline of the mainline practices, but true believers never disappeared. The RC Church, Conservative Jews, Protestants both black and white in the south and west and in uban areas have all kept the flames of faith burning. As far as I can tell, the meaningful change has been that intelligent folks have begun speaking out about their faith without regard to fashion; there are unembarassed true believers in the halls of power; and true belief has come to add vitality to the white-bread middle-class suburbia that the elite have always scorned.
Lilla terms this the "dumbing down of American religion":
The leading thinkers of the British and American Enlightenments hoped that life in a modern democratic order would shift the focus of Christianity from a faith-based reality to a reality-based faith. American religion is moving in the opposite direction today, back toward the ecstatic, literalist and credulous spirit of the Great Awakenings.
I do not know what Lilla means by "reality-based faith," but I suspect he refers not to faith but to the vague, tradition-based, civics and morality-focused Main Line Protestant church-going habits of the 1950s and 60s. That kind of thing could never survive long, if it ever really existed, because while it provides community and a nice coffee hour, it provides little spiritual food. As he points out occurred in Germany with the disenchantment with their diluted Protestantism:
They sought an authentic experience with the divine, genuine spiritual solace and a clear understanding of the one path to salvation. And what did liberal Protestantism teach? In the words of H. Richard Niebuhr, that ''a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.'' And if that was the case, why be a Christian at all?
Excellent point. He seems to see the natural human desire for transcendent experience, for an experience of reality containing higher truths than those of pleasure-seeking, comfort, self-worship, humanitarian ethics, and civic-mindedness - in other words, the desire for a "faith-based reality."
That doesn't frighten me at all, but it seems to frighten Lilla, who views liberal (in the Locke sense) government and liberal theology as partners, and he makes the historical case for that view. As I see it, "ya gotta serve somebody," and I find nothing in the Gospels or in Paul's letters to fear. I see everything in them to welcome as a still-revolutionary message of hope of redemption for a sinful world.
But I suspect there is something else going on between the lines. If the recent "Great Awakening" were about liberation theology, or other leftist political causes, I doubt there would be all of this "concern" from Lilla and others - not that Lilla is a leftist. Martin Luther King Jr., a humanly flawed and Godly man, was never criticized for his deep faith which drove his political activism from civil rights to attempting to unionize the South to anti-war activity. Is there a racist condescension in the idea that passionate Christianity is OK for blacks, but not for middle-class white folks? Or is it all mere politics?
However, spiritual awakening is not about politics and it's not about economics - it's about an individual's relationship with the divine.
Michael Horton discusses the messianic complex "of shifting the focus of Christians from his promised return to your best life now." Is it the job of the church, and of Christians, to save the world or to save souls? Or both? A quote:
...the New Testament does not offer a single exhortation to Christianize politics, the arts and sciences, education, or any other common grace field of endeavor.
Of course, Christians will bring their worldview and values to their secular callings. Instead of simply working for the weekend out of pure self-interest, believers should choose and fulfill their vocation as a way of best loving and serving their neighbor. What the church does for those who are of the household of faith is different from what individual Christians do as neighbors in the world.
Where we might hope for triumphant calls to "redeem culture," the New Testament epistles offer comparatively boring yet crucial exhortations to respect and pray for those in authority, to treat employers and employees well, and to be faithful parents and children. We are called "to increase more and more" in godliness through the ordinary means of grace in the church. And in our secular vocations we are called to "aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk properly toward those who are outside and that you may lack nothing" (1 Thes 4:10-12).
He also provides a fine summary of the history of social activism in evangelical Christianity. Read the whole thing. (h/t, MouseNaround)
Over many years, the man has been an inspiration through his fiction-writing, his non-fiction, his sailing, his piano-playing, his passion for Bach, his passion for God, his love of life and of freedom and and of his fellow man. And his love for his remarkable wife Pat, who died last year.
Yes, also for his cheerful political energy and pioneering efforts on behalf of Conservative views (he, seemingly single-handedly, made these views respectable), but these efforts were always lower on his list than devotion to God and living - and enjoying - life to the max. A superb human and a superb life.
I am most grateful for the things this brainy, witty, refined and joyful Scotch-loving Connecticut Yankee added to my life, but what I will remember most vividly is his description, in one of his sailing books, of his successful effort to install a piano in the parlor of his sailboat.
The roller coasters and ferris wheels are remarkable, but the main thing with k'nex is putting them together. It's a challenge, a 3-D puzzle, and that's the fun of it. Like Legos.
Quoted in a thoughtful discussion at David Thompson about the Left's internal conflict between internationalism and nationalism:
The justification for giving priority to the interests of fellow citizens boils down to a pragmatic claim about the value of the nation-state. Without fellow-citizen favouritism, the nation-state ceases to have much meaning. And most of the things that liberals desire - democracy, redistribution, welfare states, human rights - only work when one can assume the shared norms and solidarities of national communities.
It turns out that Aristotle, not Jean Buridan, first came up with the logical paradox of the hungry, thirsty ass who dies, paralyzed by indecision between a bucket of water and a pile of hay.
It's the political equivalent of Buridan's ass: with no defining issue to differentiate the candidates, Americans gravitated towards the one you'd like to have a beer with and watch a little football.
Our editor mentions another one: A MA Yankee torn between his attachment to the Berkshire Hills and Cape Cod. (God forbid that leaves you stuck inside of Worcester, MA with the Memphis blues.)
If he really cares about me, he should shut up about no taxes for the greedy geezers (Why just them? Why not me, too?), and free health care, and all that nonsense. He should just do something truly useful: pay our dang Costco food bills.
Food prices are shockingly unprogressive for this enlightened, progressive era. America can do better, and there is no justice in the filthy rich paying the same price that I pay for a nice butterflied New Zealand leg o' lamb.
I paid $477.89 this afternoon to fill one lousy cart (admittedly the giant-sized Costco cart, full of lots of meat like lamb, salmon, pork loin, burger, and filets - and cheeses and fruit to supply us for a couple of weeks, plus ten years' worth of those skinny French string beans, plus the usual cleaning supplies and the random impulse buys that Costco thrives on), not to mention the gas to get there (20 miles). Food is more important and essential than anything else. Come on, Barry! "Universal Food Care" : promise me Costco food will be free in the beautiful future we all dream of.
Consider the same for Home Depot stuff, too, Barry. We cannot live without tools and lumber and cement and windows and screws and toilet parts and stuff like that. Simple justice requires that these things should be free, same as food.
How free trade and open markets can save the world, materially speaking, with wealth, health, and easier lives. We linked this fascinating 20 minute Hans Rosling piece once before, but it deserves a repeat.
You probably won't post this on your centrist PC blog, but let me make a case for affirmative action in so-called "selective" institutions of so-called "higher education."
As an undergraduate at an Ivy university, I have given up on any hopes of diversity of political opinion. The politics here are fashionably Maoist and this place is packed with tenured radicals left over from the 60s who still think their thinking is "advanced." It's a joke, really, and most of us see it for what it is.
However, I would like to see some "affimative action" in the admission policy for female undergrads.
Specifically, they need to make a serious effort to recruit and admit more cute females who are comfortable with their femininity. There are not enough of them to go around for us wholesome, regular heterosexual fellows, so we are forced to go elsewhere to find them; forced to forage widely and inconveniently to the environs of BC and, if desperate and half in the bag, BU.
Never to MIT, believe me.
What makes it worse is that some of the gal students here, who could look great, do not. As a socio-political fashion statement, they do not try to look good. They try to look dowdy, or 60s, or scholarly, or to create the illusion of indifference to their appearance, or to look like dikes. It's just not appealing to a guy for a female to look unfeminine.
I know that you will tell me that they will fix this appearance thing when they go for their job interviews at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, but what about now? Would gals be drawn to me if I wore a skirt instead of khakis and a Brooks Brothers shirt? If it would work, I'd give it a try...
I think my idea is reasonable, since affirmative action is all about appearances anyway. So, as a consequence of my experience, I have decided to support the idea of affirmative action solutions to the statistically disproportionate lack of cute, charming, appealingly-dressed females on Ivy campuses - regardless of skin color, religion or lack thereof, ethnicity, dietary preference, or political orientation.
Your devoted nephew,
T.
PS: I dare you to post this on Maggie's. PPS: I have attached a photo of the sort of person I mean: cheerful, chipper, outdoorsy cuties who like sports is all I ask for. Smart, but they do not need to be rocket scientists. I almost went to Theo's place for a bethonged example, but thought it might detract - or distract - from the sincerity of my earnest plea for fairness.
Do you want Google to store your medical records? I don't. Now I fully recognize that nobody in their right mind would want to find out anything about me and my utterly normal life which is remarkable only for its relative contentment, but there are privacy principles here: it's nobody's business.
A security and intel analyst decided to find out what he could about himself. The piece begins:
In 2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. So he did background checks. He pulled his credit file. He looked at Amazon.com transactions and his credit-card and telephone bills. He got his DNA analyzed and kept a log of all the people he called and e-mailed, along with the Web sites he visited. When he put the information together, he was able to discover so much about himself—from detailed financial information to the fact that he was circumcised—that his publisher, concerned about his privacy, didn’t let him include it all in the book.
Yes, it scares me. When it comes to medical treatment (and legal help) I want free choice - and screw "the good of all." And I wish they would quit calling it "healthcare." It's treatment from doctors when you get sick.
Meanwhile, I think I'll stay home today and watch the snow fall and maybe do an hour on ye olde eliptical machine, feed the birds, and do some writing for ye olde blogge. Looks like we may have a foot today, so I will crank up ye olde snowplow too.
I am told that the Surf Hotel on Block Island is for sale. Stayed there once or twice, many moons ago. A funky old Block Islandy sort of place. Fawlty Towers, anyone? Sadly, somebody will probably buy the old place and turn it into condos or time shares, with credible water pressure and walls you cannot hear through.
Also, I see this modest Manhattan townhouse on E. 68th St. is for sale.
Our friend 
Christina Hoff Summers on the dearth of women in math and science, as quoted in a piece at Attack Machine:
Free advice for the NYT and the Boston Globe, if they wish to survive, 
These folks make 
It turns out that 
If he really cares about me, he should shut up about no taxes for the greedy geezers (Why just them? Why not me, too?), and free health care, and all that nonsense. He should just do something truly useful: pay our dang Costco food bills. 
A recent email from a nephew:
Yes, it scares me. When it comes to medical treatment (and legal help) I want free choice - and screw "the good of all." And I wish they would quit calling it "healthcare." It's treatment from doctors when you get sick.
I am told that the 
Also, I see this modest Manhattan townhouse on E. 68th St. is for sale.