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.
Scott Adams did a piece on the role of luck for making a good life. It seemed as if he were implying that being born with darker skin than his was one item on his "bad luck" list.
I am not convinced of the latter, but most of "good luck" involves genetics in every sense, from appearance to IQ to illnesses to character traits and talents. A non-dysfunctional family and a decent middle-class upbringing are pretty good lucks too.
Do you view life as a series of opportunities knocking, or as a series of back lucks? I do the former.
Like many Americans, I probably could have taken my career further but, at a point, I was content. I enjoy viewing the Matterhorn, but feel no urge to climb it other than the normal macho impulse. I am glad that others do.
I don't think the Irish in Ireland drink it. I think of it as a rare dessert treat, but one time I had it for breakfast at a shooting meet and I have never scored as well since then.
Last year, students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s most prestigious public schools, marked a map hanging in a hallway with their families’ far-flung places of origin: from Seoul to Beijing to Hyderabad. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of TJ students were white; today, 79 percent are minority, most from Asian immigrant families.
TJ is a testament to American meritocracy’s melting pot—but last week, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand announced a plan to reduce the number of Asian students at this selective high school. In a four-hour online “work session” alongside the district’s all-Democratic school board, Brabrand laid out an initiative to eliminate TJ’s race-blind, merit-based admissions test and replace it with a “merit lottery” open to all eighth-graders with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in order to increase “equity of opportunity.”
Word is out on the street: the study of literature is dying; English is breathing its last; no more Beowulf, no more Virginia Woolf either. Or not much of it. There are reasons to listen to the auguries. Most of the teaching in English departments now is done by adjuncts. The number of majors is tumbling. The profession’s on fire, and the deans, provosts, and presidents don’t hear the cries or smell the smoke...
When the ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples entered the New World some 16,000 years ago via Siberia, they hunted many of the mammals, reptiles, and birds, from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego. Mammoths, mastodons, and enormous ground-dwelling sloths, as well as giant bears, giant tortoises, and enormous teratorn birds with 16-foot wingspans—animals that had never had a chance to evolve in the presence of humans—were among the many species that disappeared from the Americas. Some medium-sized animals—such as horse, peccary, and antelope species—were also wiped out. But others survived: Bison and deer species, tree sloths, tapirs, jaguars, bear species, alligators, and big birds such as rheas and condors are, at least for the time being, still with us.
" The Vision of the Anointed is a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology."
In his intro, he asks "In what section of the bookstore or library should this book be placed? Science? Mathematics? Logic? Linguistics? Computer Science? Artificial Intelligence? Psychology? Sociology? Cognitive Science?"
(I hate that term, "educated at...". No, that doesn't happen. Wherever in life, one educates oneself - or doesn't. Nothing against Helprin - remarkable guy, and a humble one.)
I feel Soldier of the Great War is his magnum opus, but readers may differ. If you start with him, you will want to read all of them.
"The purpose of a college education is to teach you how to think". Regardless of your current opinions, this book is going to make you think. If you are not afraid to check your values and judgements, read the book.
P.xi "Historians who think it the highest calling of their profession to resurrect the 'daily life of ordinary people' can find little evidence in the daily life of ordinary Germans of the overwhelming fact of life-and of death-for millions of Jews; those who look for the 'long-term' processes and impersonal 'structures' in history tend to explain this 'short-term event' in such a way as to explain it away; and those seeking to 'deconstruct' the history of the Holocaust as they deconstruct all of history come perilously close to the 'revisionists' who deny the reality of the Holocaust. And so with philosophers and literary critics for whom there is no reality but only language, no philosophy but only a play of mind, no morality but only rhetoric and aesthetics."
P.6 "The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism-relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, 'How interesting how exciting.' Today, students in some of the most distinguished departments of literature are all too often reading books about how to read books. Literary theory has replaced literature itself as the fashionable subject of study. Structuralism and deconstruction, gender theory and the new historicism, reader-response and speech-act theory-these are more hotly debated than the content and style of particular novels or poems."
P.17 "This is the intention behind some of the most fashionable schools of history: that which explains everything in terms of race, class, and gender; that which focuses entirely upon the daily lives of ordinary people; that which structuralizes history, displacing individuals, events, and ideas by impersonal structures, forces, and institutions. The effect in each case is to mute the drama of history, to void it of moral content, to mitigate evil and belittle greatness. Looking into the most fearsome abysses of modern times, these historians see not beasts but faceless bureaucrats, not corpses but statistics."
There is a whole chapter on Marx and his writings. Also a chapter on the significance in the long story of history of nationalism and post modernism.
Bleak House is my most memorable Dickens novel, maybe partly because an underlying theme is an endless legal case. Yes, I am a Dickens fan.
From Amazon:
As the interminable case of 'Jarndyce and Jarndyce' grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.
Full of pungency and wit, this luminous work is Bulgakov's crowning achievement, skilfully blending magical and realistic elements, grotesque situations and major ethical concerns. Written during the darkest period of Stalin's repressive reign and a devastating satire of Soviet life, it combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem, each brimming with incident and with historical, imaginary, frightful and wonderful characters. Although completed in 1940, The Master and Margarita was not published until 1966 when the first section appeared in the monthly magazine Moskva. Russians everywhere responded enthusiastically to the novel's artistic and spiritual freedom and it was an immediate and enduring success. This new translation has been made from the complete and unabridged Russian text.
I consider the book to be equivalent to a college introduction to music. It is serious, but written in a friendly style.
I make a rough distinction between Folk music (including things like traditonal folk music from wherever, Country, Rock, Blues, Rap, Jazz, Hymns, Gospel, Broadway, etc), and music which demands more attention. Right or wrong, that's how I think but I love a lot of it.
There is a large grey zone between those rough categories. Copland's Appalchian Spring, for just one example. For another, Verdi's operas were what gondoliers and street-sweepers sung at work.
The only music that truly annoys me is Rap and Praise Music.
Hayek's socio-political classic The Road to Serfdom was one of the books that swayed me from youthful idealism to more mature realism. Human nature, really.
Who he is: