Maggie's Farm

Roger wonders what the Aussies are apologizing for. I think all of this phony apologizing for history is just a passing sanctimonious fad, but it does feed into an unwholesome and unconstructive victim mentality and does nothing to inspire people to get on board. 

Nonetheless, it raises once again the interesting anthropological subject of what happens when native cultures, whether rural farmers in Asia, Indians in Saskatchewan, Bedouins in the Middle East, or Aborigines in Australia, are confronted with a powerful modernity they didn't ask for and do not really comprehend. Same thing happens among subcultures right here in the US.

The new culture is rarely embraced, even if new technologies are. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't. I wonder what I would do if confronted with a new powerful culture from outer space. My guess is that I would resist it, because my culture is pretty good, and I am an old-fashioned, sentimental sort of guy.

Photo: My favorite Maori: Kiri Te Kanawa

Is life more competitive these days? I have no idea how to measure that, but there is no doubt that we live in a nation - and a world - full of strivers.

My guess is that it's because opportunity is more widely spread around than in the past. The world has more hopers and dreamers than it ever did, and that is the true gift - or curse - of American civilization to the world. 

Akst's Strive We Must in the Wilson Quarterly discusses the current state of competition in education, sports, business, and everything else. A quote:

Competition has also been rescued to some extent from the ­class-­based doghouse in which it dwelt for so long. In the bad old days, after all, trying too hard was considered poor form; success was supposed to come easily, like one’s wealth and position, and not require any of the sweaty striving associated with the lower orders. Those days are blessedly ­past—­we are all sweaty strivers ­now—­yet we remain ambivalent about this state of affairs. We feel nostalgia for the ethos of good form, and for the freedom from class anxiety we might have felt in a more static society. Who among us has not referred, at some point, to competitive modern life as a rat race? Which of us has not vowed, sooner or later, to foreswear it, presumably in favor of a return to our natural state of romping in the meadows with the butterflies? We want our kids to do well, yet competition is something we want to shelter them from. That’s why, in northern California, some high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students are experiencing white flight among families who find the academic environment a mite too...hectic.

Read the whole interesting essay (link above).

Dr. Leonard Sax, a family physician and psychologist, writes about the hard-wired differences between boys and girls, and about the refusal of educators to take them into account. From an interview with Dr. Sax:

Boys today are increasingly alienated from school. Recent investigations have shown a dramatic drop over the past twenty years in boys' academic performance in American schools. According to the United States Department of Education, the average eleventh-grade American boy now writes at the same level as the average eighth-grade girl. Similar gender gaps have been documented in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. And the percentage of boys going on to college, and graduating from college, is falling. The U.S. Department of Education now projects that in the year 2011, there will be 140 women graduating from college for every 100 men — very nearly a 60/40 female-to-male ratio.

The future may already have arrived. Several major U.S. colleges and universities, such as New York University and the University of North Carolina, already report that their student body is more than 60 percent female.

Read the whole thing (link above).

Megan McArle explains simply why cutting the profits of drug companies will damage R&D. A quote:

I don't think of R&D as a budgeting problem; I think of it as an investment problem. After all, even if the pharmaceutical industry has no profits right now, they can borrow the money in the financial markets at fairly attractive rates.

The main obstacle to R&D, then, is not the current state of pharmaceutical industry profits; it is the potential return on the investment in R&D. After all, Merck doesn't have to make drugs; it could generate a nice, safe return of 5% a year in government bonds. Or it could get into some other business, such as making soap. If you drive down the profits on new drugs too far, it stops making sense to invest in new drugs, even if there is a small profit to be made on current production.

Exactly right. In fact, I feel that it was wrong to institute time limits on drug patents. (h/t, Big Pharma vs. Big Gov at NE Repub.)

"Sarkozy is more pro-American than any of the American Democratic candidates."

Stanford's Russell Berman, on John Bachelor's (excellent) radio program tonight.

I also learned that Russia has a 13% flat tax. America needs more rich folks - the more, the better. It costs Americans 50 billion to do their taxes - not to pay their taxes, to do them. What a waste of our labor. Even our tax attorneys typically, say, in exasperation, "Just put in a reasonable number and don't worry about it." Nobody understands it.

Some points that Larry Kudlow made on the radio yesterday (paraphrased):

Corporate taxes should be zero in the US, as should the capital gains tax, dividend taxes and estate taxes (they are all forms of double-taxation). The rest of the fast-growing world (except for dying Euroland) is coming to understand that, but our Dems are still stuck in the 1930s with their anti-business, anti-free market populism.

After all, who ends up paying those taxes on corporate income? Consumers in the US and around the world (30% of American business does exports), and investors (which now includes most Americans). Without the investors, there would be no business growth and no job growth. Kudlow reminds us that 138 million Americans work for corporations, and it is very much in their interest that those businesses do well in the world economy.

The Dem government-greed-based attacks on, and plans to control, our wonderful, high-wage industries (oil, pharmaceuticals, finance, insurance, etc.) are from another era, and promise nothing but damage to employees and shareholders.

"Voting with their feet." Willisms, whence the image, is always on this story.

Best quote: "Multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon."

A quote from Wesentier in TNR's Washington Diarist on Obama's apparent conciliationist foreign policy ideas:

There are autonomous countries and cultures out there. The turbulence that I have described is not caused by misunderstandings. It is caused by the interests of powers and the beliefs of peoples. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Islamabad, Gaza City, Khartoum, Caracas - does Obama really believe that he has something to propose to these ruthless regimes that they have not already considered? Does he plan to move them, to organize them, to show them change they can believe in? With what trick of empathy, what euphoria, does he hope to join the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds in Iraq? Yes, he made a "muscular" speech in Chicago last spring; but I have been pondering his remarks about foreign policy in the ensuing campaign and I do not detect the hardness I seek, the disabused tone that the present world warrants. My problem is not with "day one": nobody is perfectly prepared for the White House, though the memory of Bill Clinton's "learning curve" is still vivid, which in Bosnia and Rwanda cost more than a million lives. My problem is that Obama's declarations in matters of foreign policy and national security have a certain homeopathic quality. He seems averse to the hurtful, expensive, traditional, unedifying stuff.

But hey, it's about "hope," right?

A piece in The Nation instructs teachers in how to slip "Social Justice Education" into everything they teach.

It's sick out there, and getting sicker.

We do not want to see a Socialist Dem in the White House. But, if were were to end up with one, what "change" should be expected? From Kling on Mandates for Change:

How can the Democrats implement policy changes without large spending increases? The answer is regulation. The business sector is going to be increasingly told what to sell and how to sell it. Particularly in health care and energy, firms are going to be accountable to bureaucrats, not to customers. Products and services will be designed in Washington, not by competition.

Regulations and mandates are an alternative to budgetary spending. For example, if politicians do not want to spend money on recruiting a volunteer army, they can institute a draft. Similarly if politicians do not have the resources on budget to pay for universal health insurance, they can pass a law making the purchase of health insurance mandatory. If such a law is effective, then the uninsured will be "drafted" into the army of the insured.

Aren't we fortunate that the people in gummint are so much smarter than us illietrate red neck goobers?

Related: The usefulness of competition in medical insurance, at Marginal Rev.

"You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six."

Yogi Berra (h/t, My Wealth Builder)

So requests VDH at Pajamas. I agree.

America remains the Land of Opportunity, and the politicians should be extolling that, and bringing inspiration to those who want or need the encouragement instead of pandering to peoples' sense of ineffectiveness and their desire for some "help" from the government which will never arrive without a loss of dignity and freedom.

The politicians should be saying "We'll provide justice, civic peace, protection from external enemies, minimal interference and taxation, and personal freedom so you can go out there and pursue your dreams - whatever they may be."  

Sometimes I think the Dem ideal is for everybody to become a "ward of the State." I find that attitude to be insulting, negative, and destructive to the human spirit. Furthermore, I have minimal respect for anyone who wishes to "govern" me: I desire to be self-governing.

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' " Ronald Reagan

If you have any doubts about opportunity, read about this guy who built a life with nothing but $25 and a bed in a homeless shelter.

Re Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley, from Criminalizing Capitalism in City Journal:

... in the end, Sarbanes-Oxley has just made it easier for ambitious government attorneys to criminalize bad business judgment and complex accounting in hindsight. Further, in their focus on strengthening legal enforcement, the feds have passed up opportunities to create commonsense protections for investors. Worse still, the government has instilled investors with false confidence by implying that they can rely on prosecutors, not prudence, to protect their market holdings. Now the housing and mortgage meltdown—which could hurt the economy far more than Enron did—is reminding investors that no law or regulation can protect them from economic disruption.

Politicians and business pundits saw Enron’s collapse as an unprecedented market failure that cried out for a new remedy. Hadn’t the country’s best stock analysts believed the Enron “story”—permanently high growth through dazzling innovation? Hadn’t the nation’s bond-rating agencies awarded Enron a rating implying that prudent investors could lend to the doomed company? Hadn’t Enron’s “independent” auditors and outside counsel signed off on its crazy financial statements? And hadn’t Enron employees who had invested heavily in company stock seen their life savings evaporate?

Yet Enron was actually an example of how markets work—messily, sometimes tardily, but in the end with ruthless efficiency. Even as most Wall Street analysts bought Enron’s sales pitch and accepted its financial statements, investors slashed the value of the company’s shares in half—far surpassing declines in the broader market—during the year before the accounting scandal broke. Investors had begun to withhold money before the government launched investigations. When Enron declared bankruptcy in December 2001, the regulators were left only to certify the market’s verdict. Those investors and lenders who hadn’t scrutinized the company lost money, as they should have.

Though Enron didn’t signal a market failure, it was a business failure, of course.

Words: The hidden inferences in words, at Overcoming Bias:

It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like.

This would be true if the brain treated words as purely logical constructs, Aristotelian classes, and you never took out any more information than you put in.

Yet the brain goes on about its work of categorization, whether or not we consciously approve... 

The whole thing here.

I am a Mitt fan, but I knew he'd have trouble as yet another East Coast patrician country club Republican. As somebody said on the radio, re Mitt:

We had the best dog food in the world. Best ingredients, the healthiest balanced diet, a great name, the best packaging, the best marketing, and a huge advertising budget.

So why wasn't it successful?

Dogs didn't like it.

Mr. Jacobs opened England's first coffee house in Oxford in 1650. It was two years later that another coffee house was opened in London by a Greek, Pasqua Rosee, in partnership with Daniel Edwards, an Englishman. By 1700 some two thousand such coffee shops were established.

The word "tip" dates back to the old London coffeehouses. Conspicuously placed brass boxes etched with the inscription, "To Insure Promptness," encouraged customers to pay for efficient service. The resulting acronym, TIP, has become a byword.

I also learned on that site that the darker roasts contain less caffeine, and that the coffee tree was introduced to Hawaii as an ornamental plant - not for production.

Photo on left: Ripe Kona coffee beans.

Quote from a WSJ piece, The Happiness Myth (h/t, Dr. Bob):

...a lot of us seemed a lot happier, or at least less restless, before the Happiness Movement began bullying us. Myrna Blyth, a longtime editor in chief of Ladies' Home Journal, made this point explicitly in her 2004 book, "Spin Sisters." Ms. Blyth undertook an informal study of the themes in women's magazines as they evolved over recent decades, and concluded that what women have mostly gotten from their magazines is the message that they're never quite happy enough -- never good enough, never fulfilled enough, never far enough along on the path to "having it all."

Read the whole thing. My simple-minded theories are that, if you wonder whether you're happy, go out and try to please somebody else. Or get on your knees and ask the Lord what He wants you to do. Or go shoot some targets or birds: that always works because happiness is a warm gun.

Those were the first three questions asked of She Who Must Be Obeyed by the young Barristerette's college advisor. No, no, and, sadly, no. ("Big bucks" seems to mean a third to a half million at minimum, with more to follow if your kid doesn't flunk out)

Apparently legacies do not carry too much water anymore except at Princeton, and extracurricular passions matter little unless almost world-class ability has been demonstrated. We were also advised that GPA matters more than the classes taken, so avoid classes in which one cannot excel: schools worry about their magazine rankings, and GPA of kids admitted is a factor in that.

Well, the latter advice made me despair about higher education, because if kids avoid things that are difficult for them in high school for college admission purposes, and then avoid them in college for grad school admission purposes, how will they ever learn what they need to understand the world?

Kids have to take courses in which they cannot excel.

One cannot understand much about this world without calculus, Shakespeare, statistics, economics, chemistry, physics, bio, history, geology, Chaucer, philosophy, religion, music history and theory... etc. Of course, you can learn all these things after you get "educated" in schools (not so easily, though, with statistics and calc) - but then what is formal education good for other than certificate-chasing, professor-employment, and kid-indoctrination?

Sometimes I think I am too old-fashioned for this modern world.

Before I decided to post this little meditation, I ran into this book review/essay re Higher Education's Loss of Purpose. A quote:

...the research ideal devalues the connection with thinkers of the past. The belief that students benefit from participating in a timeless conversation with the great voices of our civilization falls by the wayside.

That was all bad enough, but the tide of political correctness (an edgy term for someone from the heart of mainstream academia) washed over the humanities with the destructive force of a tsunami. Why? Because the insistence of the diversity/multiculturalist crowd that human beings are imprisoned by their immutable characteristics (race, gender, class) means that there is no point in trying to learn from the past. Dead, white males and their “hegemony” are what we must break free of, not learn from. In one of his most penetrating sentences, Kronman asks, “For if my most fundamental attitudes are conditioned by my race and gender, so I cannot help but see and judge the world from the vantage point they fix, how can I ever hope to escape their orbit, subject these attitudes to critical review, and set myself the goal of living in some way other than the one they prescribe?”

Whereas the physical sciences and some of the social sciences have rejected the idea that there is any pedagogical value in “diversity,” the humanities swallowed it whole and thus further degraded their intellectual standing.

Photo on top: An 1837 one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT
Lower image: Harvard College, 1767

Happened to hear Rush while doing a quick errand today. Rush re McCain: "They are trying to run us out of the Republican Party."

Rush is usually right about things, but this proves to me that he has MDS bad. It's nice, in a way, to see that he is imperfect in his insights. My comments for Rush:

1. Who is "they"? "They" are Republican voters, like me. There is no vast anti-conservative conspiracy.
2. "run us out"? That's crazy. I voted for McCain, but I am much more conservative than McCain, and I have no wish to run anybody out. I just voted for the guy who I think can win, and who will put sane folks on the courts and benches.
3. The "Republican Party." The GOP, as we have said before, is not owned by Conservatives. There are times when I wish it were, but a diversity of opinion is a healthy thing, overall.

People need to get a grip. One more point: I do not think people vote simply on proposed policies and positions. If they did, you could run position papers for office. Sometimes they vote simply for who they "like" or trust as a person. How people vote is often complex, but they own their vote, and can do with it whatever the heck they want. It's silly to blame them and it is silly to blame McCain, because no-one is forced to vote for him.

Addendum: Wizbang on why to get behind the peoples' choice

Reposted from May, 2005:

Haven't read the book, and never saw South Park either. I don't watch TV - total waste of life. But Anderson's book is rapidly becoming a Big Book, so I had better take a look at it real soon. It concerns the culture wars.  There is a very nice interview in Frontpage by Jamie Glazov with Brian Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.

Among his statements in the interview:

"Technology has radically undermined this liberal media dominance. South Park Conservatives is in part a brief history of new media, and I show how talk radio, cable television (above all Fox News), and now the Internet and blogosphere have brought right-of-center views and perspectives long excluded by the media mainstream right to the heart of national debate. The change has taken place virtually overnight: the oldest of these media, political talk radio, is really only 15 years old or so, and the newest, the blogosphere, didn’t really exist five years ago." 

 And (this is becoming a familiar theme):

"In the academy, change is harder to achieve, because the tenure system has guaranteed a certain kind of intellectual—reflexively left-wing culturally and often quasi-socialist or out-and-out Marxist in their views on political economy—remains the norm. Left-wing professors are going to hire other left-wing professors and give tenure to other left-wingers. The difficulties experienced by cultural and political conservatives or even defenders of the Western cultural tradition in getting tenure means fewer and fewer of them go into academe. "

Read the interview.