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.
Why do we extend to universities the priviledge and advantage of being tax-free and partly if not largely tax-supported institutions?
What is it that they do which is so special? Is it their duty to be conservators of knowledge and wisdom, or to be "adversarial" critics of society?
I would make the case that few of the great thinkers of world history worked for universities, almost none of the great writers, and, until the past 30-40 years, few to none of the great scientists. I would make thae case that, in a world of high liteeracy and high levels of education, professsors no longer represent a unique intellectual priesthood as they might have in the Middle Ages. And I would make the case that there is nothing about being a professor which renders their views of anything outside of their teaching expertise of any more value than my own views.
Mark Bauerlein takes on The Adversarial Campus. One quote:
...the Adversarial Campus Argument isn't really an argument. It's an attitude. And attitudes aren't overcome by evidence, especially when they do so much for people who bear them. For, think of what the Adversarial Campus does for professors. It flatters the ego, ennobling teachers into dissidents and gadflies. They feel underpaid and overworked, mentally superior but underappreciated, and any notion that compensates is attractive. It gives their isolation from zones of power, money, and fame a functional value. Yes, they're marginal, but that's because they impart threatening ideas. The powerlessness they feel rises into a meaningful political condition.
The idea of academic administrators and professors picturing themselves as Luke Skywalker figures - pitted against an evil empire of oppressive bourgeois vales - is rather quaint and not without comic potential. And, as we’ve seen, ‘rebellion’ of this kind is often difficult to distinguish from absurdity, psychodrama and reactionaryrole-play.
Well, the United Nations has its Intergovernmental ... its Interglobal... its Climatological...
Oh, why even bother getting the title right. We all know what it is. It's a global taxation system tarted up with a graph and a chart or two. The United Nations has never accomplished anything. Let me retract that. The United Nations has never accomplished anything beneficial to mankind. Every once in a while, you can shove it aside if you bribe enough of its members and get something done. You can put a UN patch on a US uniform and kick North Korean ass, for instance. But let's not pretend the UN did anything. It's a talking shop for the worst kind of people, representing mostly venal or totalitarian governments. The only successful program run by the UN was Saddam's Oil for Food scam. And by "successful," I mean Kofi Annan's and Saddam Hussein's kids got theirs. It took the US military to give Saddam's kids what they deserved.
Santa Claus is bipartisan. The Bush administration is unveiling its plan to rescue people who gambled and lost in the housing markets when the bubble burst.
We now have a bipartisan tradition of the government stepping in to rescue people who engaged in risky behavior -- whether by locating in the known paths of hurricanes in Florida or in areas repeatedly hit by wildfires over the years in California or by doing things that increase the probability of catching AIDS.
Why not also rescue people who gambled away their life's savings in Las Vegas? That would at least be consistent.
Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers -- and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's irresponsibility.
Since weather events have always existed, all the warming alarmists need to do is to blame every weather event on global warming, or, to stay on the safe side, "climate change." From John Tierney in the NYT:
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
Tierney is quite correct: it's boob bait for the gullible and ignorant, regardless of what the climate is doing. Climate isn't local weather. Read the whole thing.
Look, I know it's amusing talking about Ron Paul! Ron Paul! is a blast. Everybody loves a verbal grenade rolled into excrutiatingly dull settings. But politics is supposed to be dull. Politics was interesting in Russia in 1917, in Iran in 1979, in Venezuela last year... well, what I'm trying to tell you is you don't want to "live in interesting times."
Now, young persons and people in rent-controlled apartments that work at fair trade coffee shops can afford the luxury of talking about whether the American Civil War was a good idea. If you just got out of college, Ron Paul! is right up your alley. Why talk about today's silly problems when Ron Paul! is arguing about whether we should abolish the Second Bank of The US? It's so much more lively to talk about history, because it's on the shelf and you can find any damn version of it you want to argue over. Real time isn't indexed yet.
Ron Paul! is captivating to youngins because he's like the reset button on Halo. You don't have to live with your decisions in the context of your surroundings. If you charge into a nest of fiat currency economies or Brutes, Elites, and Grunts and get slaughtered, just start over! Instead of having to offer cogent and useful advice on how to move forward in contemporary life, you just mention that contemporary life shouldn't be that way. But governance is not an editing exercise. It's a writing exercise. The editors are many; some have access to editorial pages, and some have access to nuclear weapons. And if you're feeling devil-may-care with every aspect of government andyou figure: Why not blow it up and start over? it's useful to remember that the fellow behind door number two when you press the reset button on government sometimes isn't all that interested in the gold standard; he might be more interested in invading Poland or collectivizing the farms or something.
So Ron Paul! excites youth because they really don't think they have anything at stake yet in the affairs of the world. And he attracts the survivalist nuts who have already gone to the bunker, and desire someone to give the imprimatur of sanity to their decision to drink their own urine, hoard Kruggerands, and eat Spam underground already. The Pat Buchananites love anyone who says: Things used to be swell but now they suck. And conventional Conservatives, ashamed to call themselves that because the hip kids will photoshop them in Brownshirts or in a bathroom stall with Larry Craig, call themselves Libertarians for cover and adore Ron Paul! because he says over and over again that he's not interested in doing the one thing Libertarians hate: governing. So he's got the idealistic college kids, the country club anarchists, and the nuts. Who's that help?
I stumbled into an online petition yesterday entitled "End Climate Change Now!" Such foolishness makes me laugh and cry. If every human on the planet were to sacrifice their lives on the altar of Gaia today, the climate would continue to change. Who do we think we are, anyway? Climate is always going either up, or down. It never stands still, but zigs and zags, like every natural phenomenon. But it led my thoughts to lovely, remote Greenland.
The population of Greenland is 56,000, about 85% Eskimo. As you recall, Denmark "owns" Greenland, but they are mostly self-governing. The imperialist Eskimos invaded pristine Greenland around the same time that the imperialist Erik "the Red" Thorwaldsson began to bring settlers to Greenland, in the late 900s.
At that time, Greenland had far less ice, was green, and was warm enough for farming. By the 1300s, Greenland had become too cold for the Norwegian Vikings, and they all returned home.
Earth has been in an Ice Age (mostly Pleistocene - previously the entire planet had been tropical for a long time) for 3 million years ("Ice Age" defined by ice on both poles), with repeated advances and retreats of the ice sheets, and repeated micro and macro fluctuations which are just trivial blips on a giant chart.
We only know a lot about a few of these blips, such as the "Little Ice Age" of 1000-1350s, and the "Medieval Warm Period" (1400-1900), when it was possible to grow all sorts of crops in England.
Major "cool periods," or Ice Ages, occur about every 200 million years, and last several to tens of millions of years. The most recent advance of our current ice sheet peaked about 10,000 years ago (this one tends to advance and reteat every 15-18,000 years). We, in our micro view, often term the most recent advance "The Ice Age" - the one with Wooly Mammoths etc. But we are, historically, in the middle of the big one now. Will another little ice advance occur and bury NYC? Definitely. We are in the longest cold period in the earth's history.
Stop climate change? Heck no. It's freezing out, sleeting and snowing, and we are, in fact, in the middle of a darn ice age. A bit of a warm spell should be welcomed as a blessing. No, I will sign no Stop Warming petition, but I'd sign one to stop tectonic plate movement. I do not want MA to reconnect itself to Africa just now, and only Halliburton could move those things.
Check out this site for historical climate changes. As you can see by the graph on the right from Scotese, we have been in a heavy duty cold spell for quite a while. When our climatologists look at climate, they tend to look at the micro picture, but that is like trying to predict the stock market by looking at one day's fluctuations. It's meaningless. And apparently most folks, other than the loonies, have figured that out.
Problem is, we have another blip of a serious Ice Age coming on our path to our return to the normal Pleistocene tropical climate. Can we handle it?
We will survive; we can cope, but just as surely we will all die off, in time, in whatever apocalypse the future has in store for mankind - even if we last long enough to see the sun fade out. That is history's lesson, and the lesson of science.
Image of Mammoth: Moravec does excellent prehistoric paintings. Check out his cool website.
We rarely link podcasts, but this Glenn and Helen interview with Jonah, about his new book Liberal Fascism, is fun to listen to, and all you have to do is click it.
It's a calm, thoughtful discussion of Fascism and its history. A quote: "It all boils down to Locke vs. Rousseau."
This post about the Application of Yamashita grew out of a recent dinner conversation/debate/discussion. From a summary here, a quote:
Since the Supreme Court's decision in 1946, the United States Congress and federal courts throughout the country have relied on the Yamashita standard. Many important human rights cases cite directly from the Supreme Court decision, as does the legislative history of the Torture Victims Protection Act ("TVPA"). In citing to the Yamashita Standard for support in the interpretation of the TVPA, the United States Senate Committee stated, "under international law, responsibility for torture, summary execution, or disappearances extends beyond the person or persons who actually committed those acts -- anyone with higher authority who authorized, tolerated, or knowingly ignored those acts is liable for them." The Second and Ninth Circuits of the United States Court of Appeals affirmed this standard in their decisions Kadic v. Karadzic, 70 F.3d 232 (1995) and Hilao v. Estate of Marcos, 103 F.3d 767 (1996), and it has been repeatedly recognized as the standard in numerous human rights cases litigated under the TVPA and the Alien Tort Claims Act ("ACTA") in federal courts across the country.
The case is here: long-winded, but if you just read the summary of the opinion and the very courageous dissent, you will get the general drift:
Hillary Clinton's new policy, since she got caught so many times answering planted questions. Eric is right: she wants a coronation. Does she really believe that she is better than other people?
via Drudge. Why can't they just have smoking and non-smoking cafes and bars? Let people decide where they want to work, and where they want to go. Is that just too simple and free?
As regular readers know, we all seem to have been thinking recently about the cost of liberty and the human ambivalence about freedom. See, for a few examples:
A few Sundays ago our preacher spoke provocatively about the cost of Grace. We want to think of Grace as being, by definition, a freebie. My pastor says not. Roger Kimball recently discusses the cost of freedom. Perfect.
Freedom and liberty are costly in money, lives, bruises, setbacks, and effort. And freedom is messy, too. All valuable things are costly, like relationships with man or God. Over time, the Left has actually managed to find a way to permit people's consciences to allow them to accept things and money from their neighbors which are not willingly given. Old-fashioned American dignity would not permit that.
In the end, the issue is whether we, as citizens, want to pay the price, or whether we want somebody else to pay for it like the old bowl of lentils. There is no free lentil lunch.
The infant in all of us wants everything good to be free to us, like mother's milk. If adults want to live in freedom, they need to get beyond that, because liberty is not for babies. Good things are costly.
This is a recent re-post.Why it popped up today I cannot tell, but perhaps there is a reason.
Dr. Sanity did a good job with the pomo logical contradictions a little while ago. She quoted Stephen Hicks:
In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims. - On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is. - On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. - Values are subjective--but sexism and racism are really evil - Technology is bad and destructive--and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. - Tolerance is good and dominance is bad--but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.
Read her whole piece. Many of us have made these points before, but it doesn't matter. It's about Stalinist politics, not reason. Stalin remains popular in Russia - a folk hero.
In an effort to one-up The Barrister today, how is this for foolishness?
He might be the Archbishop of Canterbury, and thus guardian of the Anglican faith. But every time I see Dr Rowan Williams’ smug face or hear his social-worker voice, I feel like breaking at least one of the Ten Commandments (I’ll leave it to readers’ febrile imaginations to guess which one).
While Maggie's Farm officially supports Pogo for President, I am supporting Fred Thompson. If you want to give him a hand, send him a few bucks here to help prime the pump. If he does well, the money will flow. Is he too laid-back? Or just sane? We will see.
Our Iowa Editorial Committee has pondered long and deep, and decided that we will endorse, for the Repub nomination, Pogo.We Go Pogo!
Pogo has been running for Pres. since 1952, and it's time to give him a chance. He has the experience, and he won't play possum in the White House.
This decision is not to disparage George Papoon ("Not Insane!"), who is also an excellent mammalian candidate but one who promises to permit voting by all kinds of animals, including unicellular animals. We are told on good authority that each one of us has more bacteria in our GI tracts than there are American voters, and we believe this could dilute the opinion of us superior and more thoughtful multicellular animals.
Is "diversity training" a tyranny of virtue? Of course it is (see my two previous posts about benevolence yesterday). It's OK, I believe, to maintain a tyranny of virtue within the home as a parent, but public life and home life are not the same - and your ideas of virtue may not be the same as mine.
Interestingly, diversity training often leads to lawsuits (h/t, Insty). I much prefer greedy, nasty, flawed or corrupt SOBs to virtue tyrants.
I took note of two quotes in a comment by Jim C. about the Kimball piece quoted below:
'Rousseau warned that “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable … of changing human nature, … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”'
Hillary Clinton, 1993: "Let us be willing to re-mold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century; moving into a new millennium."
Indeed. Does that mean that I get to redefine Rousseau and Hillary for their own good?
From a heavy-duty but brief essay by Roger Kimball, a quote:
Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with rigid moralism. It is a toxic, misery-producing brew.
The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness. “Either element on its own,” Stove observed,
is almost always comparatively harmless. A person who is convinced that he has a moral obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or again, a person who puts morality first, but is also convinced that the supreme moral obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of these people might turn out to be a scourge of his fellow humans, though in most cases he will not. But even at the worst, the misery which such a person causes will fall incomparably short of the misery caused by Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho-Chi-Minh, or Kim-Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness.
Read the whole thing. As our readers know well, we view individual liberty as a moral issue in itself and as the American ideal.
Let me save you all some time. 
The population of Greenland is 56,000, about 85% Eskimo. As you recall, Denmark "owns" Greenland, but they are mostly self-governing. The imperialist Eskimos invaded pristine Greenland around the same time that the imperialist Erik "the Red" Thorwaldsson began to bring settlers to Greenland, in the late 900s. 
Our Iowa Editorial Committee has pondered long and deep, and decided that we will endorse, for the Repub nomination, 
From a heavy-duty but brief essay by Roger Kimball, a quote: