Maggie's Farm

I'm re-reading Let Go .  It is a short compilation of letters written by Fr. Francois Fenelon in the 1600s.

Most of them were written to parishioners or to his spiritual advisees.  One of his main themes is to do what you can to let go of self to make room for God in your heart.

Via Gateway:

 Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements will benefit “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of colour.

The Society of Cultural Anthropology’s Campaign to Present American Populism as Fascism

I do not know what "classical music" means, but I understand that it tends to be used to refer to old music and art music.

Mrs. B. says "Bach isn't classical music - he's Baroque."  OK. 

I keep it simple: There is folk/pop/Broadway music, and there is more demanding music. No idea about where to put jazz. I won't obsess about the categories because jazz makes me focus completely. Keith Jarrett. I enjoy all sorts of music but music which demands more of me, as a listener, keeps me interested longer. 

But to obsess a little longer, are Verdi's operas pop, or other? What about Charles Ives, and Benjamin Britten? All music is for fun and entertainment, or for spiritual enhancement.

For the non-musically trained, I believe a bit of (legal) cannabis can enhance listening. 

There was a time in north America, and lots of other places, when every kid had some musical instruction, whether voice or instrumental and regardless of talent.

This is apropos to MacDonald's  Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 1). Succumbing to specious charges of racism, America’s orchestras, opera companies, and conductors are abandoning the Western canon.

She quotes this:

  Garrett McQueen, then an announcer for American Public Media, told a Composers Forum roundtable in June 2020: “You are complicit in racism every time you listen to Handel’s Messiah.” 

This lengthy piece at Quillette by Michael Robillard uses gender ideology as a case study about objective reality: The Incoherence of Gender Ideology.

He incudes this Dalrymple quote:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

This is how you subvert a nation and a people.

"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes

- Tom Paine

I doubt that anybody thinks so, so here's this: Do we still need math? We spend much of our early years learning arithmetic and algebra. What's the use?

If your kids or grandkids do not know these American classics, it's about time. Robert McClosky was the author/illustrator. 

Blueberries for Sal

Make Way for Duckings

One Morning in Maine 

The latter was my favorite. What a cool Dad. 

Almost forgot that McCloskey wrote the two amusing stories about Homer Price. I loved those. 

And elite universities deserve a huge share of the blame.

Scott Adams speaks and writes about talent stacks. He is addressing things that help with material success. Business success matters for sure whether the business is art and design, carpentry, real estate, electrical design, cooking, or options trading, and the more talent and/or skill the better.

I am good enough, but not the best, at my day job. I tend to be interested in general life competencies which have less relation to profitable pursuits. 

Long-time readers know my list of life competencies. Nobody needs to excel at them, but the more of these you can sort-of handle, the richer life can be:

Friendships - most important of all 

Swimming, snorkeling, and, best, diving

Doing some religion

Handling firearms

Handling horses

Fishing of any or all sorts

Sports - the more, the better

Physical training and weight training 

Handiman skills - the more, the better

Gardening

Handling canoe, kayaks, sailboats, powerboats 

Developing an art skill whether musical or other 

Financial management - not rocket science. Just an estate guy and Vanguard funds.

Hiking, camping, basic climbing, and orienting abilities 

Dog-handling and training 

Natural history - knowing the trees, plants, bugs, birds, geography, geology, etc. makes being outdoors much more interesting 

What would you add or delete, in comments?

This simple information is accurate, but who would take an ocean seamanship course from people who write like this. 

Planning is always good, but a boat can't do that. The fact that they are Brits is no excuse. 

What's your favorite cold summer sandwich? (I say cold to eliminate things like burgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese, and meatball grinders.)

I'll include roll-ups as sandwiches, just to be kind to roll-up-eaters. 

My go-to summer sandwich is a Turkey Club on white toast with extra mayo, and chips on the side. At this point in life, I'll take a "Junior Club," which is just one layer of the stuff.

What are your favorites? 

About one of the great books: Episode 184: Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

Excerpts from Eliot Feld's A Stair Dance, danced by Kids Dance (students of Ballet Tech, the NYC Public School for Dance). 

Story at Quillette: How All My Politically Correct Bones Were Broken:

... after a decade of teaching students from minimally educated, working poor families, I was thoroughly familiar with the difficulty of bringing unprepared or unmotivated students of any color or background up to anything like a college level. Many students lacked even middle-school reading competence. Many could not write a complete sentence. Some skipped classes and failed to turn in assignments—or just dropped out. But the college mission was to educate everyone. We were an “open door” institution, with a high school diploma or GED sufficient for admission. We were here to give students the chance none in their families had ever had before, and we believed in our mission. Toward the end of the meeting I raised my hand and asked how, given reading and preparation levels, we could possibly increase grades and graduation rates without lowering standards. “What do you teach?” he asked. “English,” I offered. “You don’t teach English,” he corrected me. “You teach White Studies.”

I had no idea how to respond, so I fell silent.

Tyler Cowen: Abolishing tenure is the least of my proposals

I felt that the wonderful entymologist E.O. Wilson (the "Ant Man") got in over his head with scientism. Always liked him. I had a plastic ant farm as a kid and it was more interesting than an aquarium of bored little fish.

In Scientific American, a comment on Wilson, Pinker, and others, by John Horgan:  Science Should Not Try to Absorb Religion and Other Ways of Knowing

It begins:

An edgy biography of Stephen Hawking has me reminiscing about science’s good old days. Or were they bad? I can’t decide. I’m talking about the 1990s, when scientific hubris ran rampant. As journalist Charles Seife recalls in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, Hawking and other physicists convinced us that they were on the verge of a “theory of everything” that would solve the riddle of existence. It would reveal why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is the way it is.

In this column, I’ll look at an equally ambitious and closely related claim, that science will absorb other ways of seeing the world, including the arts, humanities and religion. Nonscientific modes of knowledge won’t necessarily vanish, but they will become consistent with science, our supreme source of truth. The most eloquent advocate of this perspective is biologist Edward Wilson, one of our greatest scientist-writers.

In his 1998 bestseller Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson prophesies that science will soon yield such a compelling, complete theory of nature, including human nature, that “the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.” Wilson calls this unification of knowledge “consilience,” an old-fashioned term for coming together or converging. Consilience will resolve our age-old identity crisis, helping us understand once and for all “who we are and why we are here,” as Wilson puts it...