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.
My friend Mark Safranski's blogZenPundit is one of my favorites. Its focus is on foreign policy, and more specifically on military affairs. The breadth and eclecticism of its links and discussions, agree or not, are of the highest order and center on rational discussion of complex issues. Most of us value the rational discussions we have, unfortunately though not often enough, because all parties come away with new appreciations and better understandings.
I found this graphic there, a flowchart of whether you are having a rational discussion.
Krugman and the Times editorial board are both examples of something important in American life today: left-liberal intellectuals are increasingly able to understand that individual supports of the blue social model are crumbling. But they are still so captivated by the blue model, so profoundly convinced that the Progressive movement’s solutions to America’s social ills in 1910 are still valid today, that they cannot yet look beyond the blue model to imagine a different and brighter future for the United States.
Haidt is the Liberal academic who has shaken up the academic world with his self-analysis and self-criticism. He applies the tools of his discipline to his own stifling academic world. From Neili's Two Bombshells for Social Psychologists:
It is almost impossible to overstate the courage, intellectual clarity, and simple wisdom involved in Jonathan Haidt's challenges to his social psychology colleagues. His message is as uncompromising as it is uncomplicated: open up the discipline to viewpoints outside the narrow, left-liberal mainstream, learn from people who have political and moral views different than you own, treat religion more fairly, and stop acting like an insular tribal cult and act more like the open-minded science profession you claim to be.
Apparently it takes "great courage" not to think in lockstep nowadays, in academia. It's a fascinating essay.
Governments are packed with foolish and self-important jackasses who mostly could not run a corner candy store. I tried to link this article at Pajamas again, and the link still doesn't go through. It's What We’re Talking About When We Talk About Big Government - Behold: the structure of redundancy, stupidity, and unconstitutional power the 100-year fog of leftism has created.
Scroll down a bit at Pajamas, and read it there in the left-side column. One quote:
Conservatives — Originalists — speak of Big Government always: an aversion to it is deservedly the driving intellectual thesis behind conservatism. We despise Big Government, more than anything, and I can’t emphasize strongly enough that I don’t believe the left has any clue why. They have theories about guns and fear, psychological weakness, bigotry, and the like, and these are all weak arguments against Big Government, which makes them easy to dismiss and continue to be a leftist. They are not, of course, our arguments. There is a disconnect between what we say, what we mean when we protest Big Government and what we are thought to mean by our political opposition.
Editor Dog addendum: Government needs to support the cause of cowboy poets. Sheesh. If cowboy poets want a handout, we are done for as a country. Kaput. I do not recall Robert Frost asking for taxpayer money - but he was a New Hampshire fellow: Live Free Or Die.
Data from more than 1,300 four-year colleges and universities in the United States show that the use of race and ethnicity in admissions declined sharply after the mid-1990s, especially at public institutions. The proportion of public four-year colleges considering minority status in admissions has fallen from more than 60 percent to about 35 percent. Among private institutions, the drop during the same years has been notable but less dramatic, from 57 percent to 45 percent. The major decline came after 1995, when the campaign against affirmative action intensified, and schools, particularly public ones, thrown on the defensive, retreated. They were reacting not only to actual litigation but also to its threat. While colleges and universities that are considered elite are more likely to have practiced affirmative action and to have been more protective of it, even they have retreated. Few innovative or vigorous forms of affirmative action are now in play in the face of courts and federal agencies exercising strict scrutiny when examining admissions procedures and in the face of an increasingly suspicious citizenry.
Another reality is redefining, and probably weakening, the meaning of affirmative action. Although few schools publicize the fact, one of the central historic principles giving rise to affirmative action is being undermined. President Johnson’s speech assumed that affirmative action would help the descendants of former slaves (he made no mention of Hispanics). That assumption from yesteryear is out of sync with today’s realities. Affirmative action more and more functions to open the campus not only to the descendants of former slaves but to black students with different cultural and political heritages. Once championed, as in Johnson’s speech, as a means of reparation or restitution, affirmative action now turns out to be helping hundreds and hundreds of young people who have suffered the wounds of old-fashioned American racism little or not at all. More than a quarter of the black students enrolled at selective American colleges and universities are immigrants or the children of immigrants. African-American students born in the United States thus turn out to be more underrepresented (given their presence in the U.S. population) at selective colleges than one might imagine. At some of the most exclusive institutions (Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania), no less than two-fifths of those admitted as “black” are of immigrant origin. Such facts, as they come into view, blunt the force of arguments favoring affirmative action. Diversity and restitution are better reasons than diversity alone, but restitution seems less and less in play.
Diversity itself, moreover, seems weaker and weaker as an argument for affirmative action when many campuses now appear, at least to the public at large, more diverse than ever before. The increasing presence on campus of students from myriad ethnic groups (Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Iranian, and many others) and the consequent reduction of “white” students (witness student populations at the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, USC, Columbia, and other schools) undercut the notion that American higher education is still unfairly monochromatic.
Prof. Chace favors affirmative action only for blacks with American heritage.
A chat with a Physical Therapist today at noon. She told me that they enter the codes of diagnosis etc, and Medicare or Medicaid generates a response telling them how many sessions the patient can have, of what duration, and at what payment.
"What do you do here?", I asked.
She said that their department's policy is this: Patient gets whatever is reimbursable. If 8 sessions are allowed and they only need 4, they get 8. It can't hurt. If 8 are allowed and they need 30, they get 8.
"We don't even bother anymore asking them to pay for more therapy if they need it. If it's not free, they never take it."
I have always been interested in the history of the idea of retirement. Not interested because it is something I want to do (I could financially do it today if I wanted to), but interested in why an intact, healthy person would not want to fully participate in society by being a productive member.
My Grandpa worked until he was felled by a stroke at 86, and my Dad worked until macular degeneration made him incapable of driving around age 76.
Private pensions (especially from the railroads) began in the late 1800s but it wasn't until the New Deal and Social Security that the option to be put to pasture became widely available. Roosevelt was, of course, highly motivated to remove workers from the labor force in an effort to reduce unemployment, and that was the main impetus for Social Security.
In 1900, 65% of men over 65 worked. By 2000, it was 17%. Of course, nowadays many jobs build in forced retirement. I saw some stats somewhere that about 40% of retired men return to some form of paid work within three years of retirement, but I don't recall the source.
Although some employees sitting in cubicles may long for the end to their work lives, sun-drenched days with tee-times, knitting and visiting the grandchildren, Howard Stone said retirees shouldn't retire, at least in the traditional sense of the word.
"Those who say 'I'll never work again' are making a major, major mistake. Because they're going to find themselves adrift, away from a community purpose and a sense," he said.
I found a good piece, with lots of numbers, on the economic history of retirement in the US. It begins:
One of the most striking changes in the American labor market over the twentieth century has been the virtual disappearance of older men from the labor force. Moen (1987) and Costa (1998) estimate that the labor force participation rate of men age 65 and older declined from 78 percent in 1880 to less than 20 percent in 1990 (see Table 1). In recent decades, the labor force participation rate of somewhat younger men (age 55-64) has been declining as well. When coupled with the increase in life expectancy over this period, it is clear that men today can expect to spend a much larger proportion of their lives in retirement, relative to men living a century ago.
Comment from Dr. Bliss: Excellent subject. A few random thoughts:
- I think many folks want to be able to retire. Many enjoy their jobs much more once they have the financial freedom to quit.
- People I have talked to who have retired young, such as cops with full pensions at age 45, and Wall Streeters who walk away with bags of money around the same age, almost always take on a second career of some sort.
- Psychologically, being retired can feel like being unemployed or sent out to pasture. When people retire in their 50s or early-mid 60s, a workplace loses their experienced wise ones who have "seen it all before", and the experienced wise ones feel useless.
- A comment about people who "hate their jobs." People love to bitch about their jobs. But without the job, they lose a lot of human contact, a structured place to use their brains or abilities, and a role in the world.
- Hedonistic retirement: The idea of the fun and sun and travel retirement has been sold hard to the middle class over the past 30 years. From what I have seen, it isn't all it's cracked up to be. A vacation can be a refreshing change of pace and change of senery, but an endless vacation can be like a meal made of all dessert courses: cloying and unnutritious.
- People who do not return to work after retirement, but who jump into unpaid labors of love, like community service projects, local politics, working for charities, churches, and non-profits, often seem to feel a good sense of satisfaction in "giving back."
- "Meaningful work." I hate that expression. All work is useful and contributes to society, whether it is raising one's kids, milking the cows, flipping burgers, or selling bonds. People who use that expression should think hard about what they mean by it. Furthermore, folks who want their work to provide them with meaning may be barking up the wrong tree.
I know two Oncologists who are being pushed out of private practice by Medicare price controls. Why are they losing money on their practices? Medicare price controls on their services, despite the huge costs of chemotherapies.
As I understand it, chemotherapy administered in a hospital can be charged at a higher rate than in an office. Thus it is viable for a hospital to take over a private practice and make money, or at least break even, on it.
Medicare ignores the market, setting prices for physician services based on an academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union and implemented by the American Medical Association. Those prices do not reflect the value patients receive from their care, and they do not reflect shifts in the demand for particular kinds of services (such as primary care) as the population ages or as more people have health insurance.
Here's what I do: I teach, for free. I work at an urban charity clinic where I donate my time. (I have no idea whether, if, or how the clinic is compensated.) I have a private practice in which I adjust fees in order to consult anybody who is referred to me. I accept no insurance plans, no Medicare, no Medicaid. All I have to worry about is covering my monthly bills.
Docs with high overheads - large staff, machinery, materials, high rents, high malpractice insurances, etc. do not have the luxury of operating as I do.
I count myself as very fortunate to be able to have an old-fashioned practice. I can do whatever I chose to do, and I like it that way.
...why has our left become so reactionary, so unwilling or unable to adapt to a changed world that they “act out” with all the juvenility of adolescents deprived of the family car keys? Some say it is because they have replaced religious faith with politics and I, an agnostic, see some truth in that. But there is more. Liberalism has become a mask for greed in our culture — a way of hiding excessive selfishness from others and, importantly, from the self. It’s a deflection, really.
We humans are greedy by nature. I have learned that mastering greed and just trying to do the best job I can is one of the secrets to life. God has helped me do this. We always want more, in the vain hope that we can achieve happiness that way. I have some money to spare now, and nothing I want to spend it on that I do not already have - my skiing and my summer boat lease - and beer money.
Perhaps it is time for a wife and kids to spend money on. Take them around Europe to revisit all the places I went to during college with my backpack. Go broke on private education. I guess that's a life plan...
“The argument between assimilationists and multiculturalists is whether it is the immigrant or the culture that should change.”
I've always assumed that the reason at least half the world would like to live in the US is because of our culture. Who wants to change it? You don't see people climbing barbed wire fences and breaking laws to get into Russia or Egypt or Iran or India or China or Venezuela, etc. The most recent stats I saw (2000) showed 2.9 million people in NYC itself were foreign-born. That's mind-boggling, equivalent to the entire population of Kansas.
The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Amendments led to a surge in immigration to New York City and a decline in the share of European immigrants. Between 1970 and 2000, the total foreign-born population nearly doubled, from 1.44 million to 2.87 million, while the share of Europeans dropped, from 64 percent to 19 percent. Latin America was the largest area of origin in 2000, accounting for nearly 32 percent of the city's foreign-born, followed by Asia (24 percent), the nonhispanic Caribbean (21 percent), Europe (19 percent), and Africa (3 percent). Thus, New York City's foreign-born in 2000 have extremely diverse origins, in contrast to the overwhelming European origin of the foreign-born in earlier decades.
Sometimes, listening to the MSM and the Left, you'd think that this country was a terrible place to live in. Ingrates, if you ask me. My foreign-born colleagues and acquaintances thank God every day that they are here in America - while people like me, it's shameful to admit, often just take it all for granted.
I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.
The basic problem, across the whole range of the human helping relationships (like aid) between what might be called the “helper” and the “doer,” is that success lies in achieving more autonomy on the part of the doers, and autonomy is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be externally supplied or provided by the would-be helpers. This is the fundamental conundrum of all human helping relations, and it is the basic reason, not complexity, why engineering approaches and the like don’t work.
Read the whole post. One can not and would not refuse to give some food to a starving person, but most economic "help" is not helpful to anybody. There is something racist about the idea that Africa, being black, needs welfare and charity instead of free markets and the rule of law.
Symptoms of the higher education bubble include students and their families in debt for unemployable degrees, taxpayers and the economy weighed down to support colleges that put country-club campuses, lack of academic rigor, even outright bias, above excellence, and fervid resistance to change from college faculties and administrators.
Any organization that fails to identify and satisfy the legitimate needs of those who provide its inputs and consume its outputs -- stakeholders -- will ultimately fail. Higher education is not immune to this rule of markets.
Professors are not the only stakeholders in academic freedom, though they’d like others to think so and allow them exclusive sway over what occurs within higher education. Students, qualified outside observers, taxpayers, indeed society in general, are key stakeholders.
Loyola professor of business law Arthur Gross-Schaefer’s brilliant piece in the February 2011 Journal of Legal Studies in Business, “Academic Freedom: Moving Away From The Faculty-Only Paradigm” is must reading for anyone who is concerned for the future and success of US higher education. As Gross-Schaefer says, “A serious re-evaluation of the faculty-centered paradigm of academic freedom needs to be undertaken.” Gross-Schaefer gets to the point: “this article will challenge the Robinson paradigm of academic freedom, predicated on faculty as the single stakeholder, as limiting and self-serving.” He reviews what happens “when a professor’s personal analysis begins to interfere with objective inquiry and the honest review of diverse opinions.”
Usually, this abnormal situation occurs when a professor is dealing with a contentious topic and has only presented a single view that compromises the academic environment. Accordingly, university students need basic academic rights: the right to not have professors impose political or personal beliefs, the right to receive valid scholarly materials, and the right to have controversial topics fairly discussed by having diverse views represented and carefully examined.[84]
Like most people in life who just don't get it, arrogance is at least half of the problem. If you think you're real smart it's hard to learn anything from anybody, much less from experience.
New England government was charged with the creation of a moral society. There was nothing that was not its business: how much did a master pay his apprentices? Who celebrated Christmas? Who was cheating on his or her spouse? The duty of government was to make society live right; the university, the pulpit, the newspaper — these were to be the allies of government in the struggle for good.
Even after the old alliance between church and state in New England was broken up for good (the establishment of religion at the state level lasted almost 50 years after the ratification of the Constitution in Massachusetts and Connecticut) the acolytes of New England righteousness worked to make the American government a force for the moral uplift of the American people. Many of their causes today look prescient: the abolition of slavery and voting rights for women. Others, prohibition, eugenics and various forms of food-nuttery matching the changing scientific fashions of the day, look weird.
Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations.
I think this guy seems reasonable, fine as infotainment. Wants to be a TV professor. Not sure he can tell me much that I don't know. Anyway, I have a day job.
Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?
How many people in Britain make a living from multiculturalism and “community cohesion”? The number of taxpayer and partly-taxpayer funded government bodies, community groups, political organisations and “charities” devoted towards diversity and equality or race relations is certainly in the four figures, and the total cost to the taxpayer must be several hundred millions of pounds – all totally wasted.
And
The regime of euphemism has not just led to mistakes. It has also empowered a class of so-called Gutmenschen in government and the academy. If Sarrazin is right, then much of what they have lately done is not just misguided but, however good their intentions, corrupt. They are fighting with considerable skill for their political lives. Sarrazin’s few political defenders, meanwhile, tend to have one thing in common — they are retired.
Lots of people out there wanting to destroy Western Civ. I am not sure what they'd like to see replace it, however. Perhaps the Great Transgender-Moslem-Communist-Green-Palestinian-Love and Peace Community Alliance. I bet they throw some real fun parties, but I have never been invited.
I am quite pleased with our Western roots, and with what it does and has done, and for what it makes possible - including the insane thinking which is a necessary side-effect of freedom - and which provides so much entertaining fodder for me at Maggie's.
Steinberg debates the late great Moynihan in Poor Reason - Culture still doesn’t explain poverty. Steinberg claims that the behavior of the black poor is a consequence of poverty, not a cause. But what about the white poor?
This is from Wiki (US poverty rates, as I understand it, are calculated prior to government or charitable monies, goods, or benefits):
21% of all children in the United States live in poverty, about 46% of African American children and 40% of Latino children live in poverty.[37] What is unclear is why so many minorities live in poverty. The poverty rate is 9.9% for black married couples and only 30% of black children are born to married couples (see Marriage below). In 2007,11% of black women aged 30–44 without a high school diploma had a working spouse.[38] The poverty rate for native born and naturalized whites is identical (9.6%). On the other hand, the poverty rate for naturalized blacks is 11.8% compared to 25.1% for native born blacks suggesting race alone does not explain income disparity. Not all minorities have low incomes. Asian families have higher incomes than all other ethnic groups. For example, the 2005 median income of Asian families was $68,957 compared to the median income of white families of $59,124.[39] Asians, however, report discrimination occurrences more frequently than blacks. Specifically, 31% of Asians reported employment discrimination compared to 26% of blacks in 2005.
After reading Steinberg's essay, I am more convinced that Moynihan was right. There is substantial white poverty in the US too. Regardless of racial differences - Asian, black, Hispanic, white - (and excluding penniless new immigrants who rightly expect a challenging beginning) - I'd be willing to bet that poverty in the US can be understood mostly in terms of bad luck, character (including tendencies, interests, abilities, and personal inclinations), parental role models, or, most often, life choices. (Behavior is a choice, as a human being.) These things are not all "culture", but they are part of it.
I believe that many people choose poverty, in the broad sense of "choose". And, as a reader notes, if X% of the population is below the poverty line by definition, it's impossible to get rid of it no matter how much money people take in.
Furthermore, in my opinion, if you have heat and a roof over your head, a TV if you want one, a functioning vehicle if you need one - or a bus pass or a subway token, beer money, and funds for clothes and Big Macs, you aren't really poor.
We have all lived hand-to-mouth at some points in our lives. I decided that it wasn't for me, so I made a plan for my life. And then another one when the first plan didn't work. Eventually, I made a plan that worked and I could afford a family and a wife who likes horses. Still, I need to work every day and plenty of weekends too, to support Casa Barrister.
Final word: I suspect that all of these opinion pieces about black poverty have the agenda to support the notion of "institutional racism." With a black guy in the White House, it's getting difficult to maintain that invention, just like it's getting difficult to maintain the notion of "institutional sexism" with Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton as presidential contenders (on some days, it seems that women are the real stars of the Conservative movement).
