Wednesday, August 31. 2011
That tropical storm up here dumped the river into my pool, filled it with mud, plants, and frogs, and knocked down a fence. I think VT got the worst of it all.
What books are you reading right now?
No cheating. Don't tell us that you are reading Kant.
I am reading the new Mark Twain autobiography, but you cannot really read it. You just dip into it. He was a charming fellow.
 Reno at First Things looked at the life of Moses from an interesting angle: the multicultural man turned uni-cultural by the hand of God. A quote:
Each of us must struggle to understand how to live our lives in a pluralistic, democratic society. But to my mind, however fuzzy and uncertain we might be about any particular public policy or social project, we must at least be clear about Moses. We should want to follow his trajectory, and there can be no compromise with those who prize his multicultural youth. For he who is not a servant of a cultural authority deeply installed is merely human�which is to say, a slave to his passions and servant of his self-interest, who, when he comes to realize his base existence, is all too easily victim of thin, ideological deities who promise the immediate psychological satisfactions of a veneer of moral idealism.
Read the whole thing. (h/t, Dr. Bob)
Monday, August 29. 2011
 I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From The Case Against the College Degree:
College degrees are poor proof of learning, and perhaps a barrier to it
Students want jobs and respect. Degrees bring both. Employers, meanwhile, want smart, capable workers. A degree is a decent enough proxy for intelligence, but we want it to be more than that. We want degrees to mean that students have learned the foundations of human knowledge literature, chemistry, physics, composition, metaphysics, psychology, economics and so on. If we didn t, we d replace degrees with inexpensive vocational exams.
Charles Murray, a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, calls for just that in a recent book, Real Education. He argues that too many kids who lack the ability to complete a liberal arts education are being pushed into four-year liberal arts schools, because there s a steep societal penalty for not getting a degree. Schools, in turn, have made their degree programs easier. Murray provides a sample of courses that students used to fulfill core degree requirements at major universities in 2004, including History of Comic Book Art (Indiana University), History and Philosophy of Dress (Texas Tech University) and Campus Culture and Drinking (Duke). He documents not only falling standards but rampant grade inflation.
Read the whole thing. He has an interesting suggestion too, but colleges won't go for it. For their own survival, they are committed to their marketing of their expensive credential, whether it means anything or not. In my experience over recent years, it means little-to-nothing.
You used to know what assumptions you could make about somebody with a BA. Not any more. Now, they don't even need to know basic calculus. That's crazy.
Sunday, August 28. 2011
 A farmer stopped by the local mechanic's shop to have his truck fixed. They couldn't do it while he waited, so he said he didn't live far and would walk home.
On the way home he stopped at the hardware store and bought a bucket and a gallon of paint. He then stopped by the feed store and picked up a couple of chickens and a goose. However, struggling outside the store he now had a problem - how to carry his entire purchases home.
While he was scratching his head he was approached by a little old lady who told him she was lost. She asked 'can you tell me how to get to 1603 Mockingbird Lane?'
The farmer said, 'Well, as a matter of fact, my farm is very close to that house. I would walk you there but I can't carry this lot.'
The old lady suggested, 'Why don't you put the can of paint in the bucket. Carry the bucket in one hand, put a chicken under each arm and carry the goose in the other hand?'
'Why thank you very much,' he said and proceeded to walk the old girl home. On the way he says 'Lets take my short cut and go down this alley. We'll be there in no time.'
The little old lady looked over cautiously then said, 'I am a lonely widow without a husband to defend me ... 'How do I know that when we get in the alley you won't hold me up against the wall, pull my skirt, and have your way with me?'
The farmer said, 'Holy smokes lady! I'm carrying a bucket, a gallon of paint, two chickens and a goose. How in the hell could I possibly hold you up against the wall and do that?'
The old lady replied, 'Set the goose down, cover him with the bucket, put the paint on top of the bucket, and I'll hold the chickens.'
Friday, August 26. 2011
Why is a college degree diminishing in its economic and social value?
Because so many people are going, nowadays. It's not special anymore, and unselected people are getting degrees today who could not have gotten near higher ed one generation ago. It's a consumer-oriented biz now, desperate for gullible consumers. From our IBD link this morning:
A recent example of this exaggerated view of the value of higher education is "The Undereducated American," a paper by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
The authors argue that the United States needs to produce far more college graduates than it currently does.
Their evidence is that there is a significant wage "premium" for those who graduate from college — across all fields of work. They argue, in effect, that the high return on investment applies regardless of whether the graduate becomes a financier or a dishwasher.
But they fail to look at generational differences.
Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that gains for recent college graduates have been declining for more than 10 years.
 It's about a Model B Ford engine head, from Literature Brings the Physical Past to Life, at Chronicle:
Let the dead French theorists lie. Instead, literary scholars can become guides to the physical reality of the past. If you think about it, that's what we've been doing in class for the last hundred years: explaining how to pronounce "Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?" in Early Modern English, for instance, or describing a Boeing B-17 to help students understand Randall Jarrell's poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Once ordinary people note that we're doing something useful again, they might stop looking at us like we're nuts. And maybe we'll even get some jobs back.
Are the kids so uninformed that they don't know who a ball turret gunner is? Wish I had time now to discuss this essay, but I don't.
Thursday, August 25. 2011
Do personality flaws and weakness result in poverty, or does poverty "cause" personality flaws?
David French discusses.
I say that it can be either, both, or neither. If one grows up in a drug- and crime-tolerant environment, it's more likely that the wicked side of one's nature will be given free rein and things won't work out well, just as it's easier to live like a Boy Scout when all around you are doing the same.
My problem with addressing the subject this way, however, is that it ignores the large numbers of voluntarily poor, unluckily poor, and temporarily poor. Poverty is not a unitary phenomenon. Is a struggling artist or actor "poor"? And what is poverty in America anyway?
I think that French may be speaking more about "the poor in spirit" than the materially-deprived.
One quote from a piece of the above title:
Lewis’s aversion to government was clearly revealed in 1951 when Winston Churchill, within weeks after he regained office as prime minister of Great Britain, wrote to Lewis offering to have him knighted as “Commander of the Order of the British Empire.” Lewis flatly declined the honor because he, unlike the “progressives,” was never interested in politics and was deeply skeptical of government power and politicians, as expressed in the first two lines of his poem “Lines during a General Election”: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear / All that; it is their promises that bring despair.”
Tuesday, August 23. 2011
I think one of the things that defines our website, Maggie's Farm, is curiosity. Curiosity about almost everything. We are only adequate writers; we lack creative flair and a zippy way with language; we rarely present entirely new ideas about things (but sometimes we do); we are dilettantes in most areas we discuss.
Curiosity is us. We like to wonder what is inside things.
As I sit by the pool this lovely Connecticut afternoon sipping a Scotch and enjoying a decent ceegar after having done a mile in the pool nude nekked with only God and the wife's horses watching me, I have been reading this in American Scientist: That’s Interesting - Curiosity drives discovery. But what, exactly, makes us curious? One quote:
Faced with a puzzle, and excited by it, I do try to understand the anomaly before me. My failure to find a ready explanation, and my feeling that the phenomenon is nonetheless understandable—these are both motivating psychological actions. In time, if I am fortunate, my thinking brings me to an explanation that makes sense not only to me, but to the community of chemists. I wouldn’t have gotten there without thinking, “That molecule is really interesting.”
Three things drive learning: curiosity, ambition for mastery, and necessity. Curiosity is an underrated and relatively rare gift. We try to nurture it in ourselves.
Sunday, August 21. 2011
A commenter here mentioned C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man recently. It got me thinking about what the most influential books have been for my adult thinking about socio-religio-political topics.
 My list would have to include:
Hayek's Road to Serfdom
Fromm's Escape From Freedom
C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man
C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity
Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain
Orwell's long essay Politics and the English Language
Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning
Huxley's Brave New World
I'm sure I omitted quite a few, but these came to mind. (I guess, as an ole Yankee, I am rather freedom-oriented and leave-me-alone-oriented rather than gimme-oriented. I was raised to fend for myself and to shoot my own moose, but that might be old-fashioned nowadays. The "modern" women, apparently, want government to be their help and support in life instead of husbands. That's pathetic - on both sides.)
When I think about writings that influence me, I wonder whether they indeed influence, or whether they articulate half-thought and semi-formed thoughts that were already brewing in the back of my brain from my life experience.
This is a quote from Charles Warman's review of The Abolition of Man at Amazon:
In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man's ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature's ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.
Feel welcome to add your personal list to the comments.
Saturday, August 20. 2011
 Why aren't guys growing up these days? Or did guys ever really want go grow up? I don't know. A sociologist named Michael Kimmel has a book out reporting on his new study. For example, meet Jason:
Jason graduated from Dartmouth almost five years ago. Now 26, he works in finance in Boston and shares a Back Bay apartment with five other guys with whom he went to school. He runs and works out, stays fit, and dates lots of different women all in their early twenties. At night, he hangs out at the Dartmouth bars of Boston. Hey, college was supposed to be the best years of your life, right? he explains, with only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. So where is it written that it has to end when you graduate? College is forever, man. That's what the admissions guys say that these will be your friends forever. Well, forever is now.
That's from the review of the book at MSNBC.
Here's an interview with Kimmel at Inside Higher Ed
Here's an interview with Kimmel on hooking-up.
What's your view on all this?
We posted earlier on our side trip by train into Lombardy and Lake Como, via Milan, and our visit to Villa Carlotta. This area was historically famous for its silk (which Smithsonian Magazine featured this month), its picturesque villages, and for its villas and gardens. Today, we will finish that day's journey up with a bit of Como and Bellagio. Some consider Bellagio the most lovely town in Europe, but I think it has tons of competition for that title.
Here's my shot of a view of Lake Como from Villa Melzi (built around 1808) in Bellagio:
Lots more photos below, on continuation page -
Continue reading "Gone to Lake Como, reposted from 2008"
Thursday, August 18. 2011
from a friend:
Actual writings from hospital patient charts (medical transcription people are not perfect, nor is docs' handwriting):
1. The patient refused autopsy.
2. The patient has no previous history of suicides.
3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.
4. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.
5. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.
6. On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared.
7. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.
8. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993.
9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
10. Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.
11. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.
12. She is numb from her toes down.
13. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.
14. The skin was moist and dry.
15. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches.
16. Patient was alert and unresponsive.
17. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid.
18. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.
19. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.
20. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.
21. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.
22. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.
23. Skin: somewhat pale but present.
24. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor.
25. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.
Wednesday, August 17. 2011
Got a car or truck with a sticky ignition, where the key won't turn even if you wiggle the steering wheel and move the key in and out a little bit, or turn the key in the opposite direction to loosen things up? Or, worse, the key doesn't want to come out?
It can be exasperating and, at times, embarassing. Apparently it can be due to slightly jammed lock cylinders, or the wheel lock.
Some suggest a squirt of WD-40 into the lock but I am wary about doing that. I wonder whether any of our car mechanic genius readers have any ideas, short of an expensive trip to the auto shop.
Monday, August 15. 2011
It's not just for those of the gay persuasion anymore. For her birthday on Saturday, I took Mrs. BD down for dinner at Gradisca and then the last night of the ODC show at the Joyce (her picks, being her birthday).
The gentrification of the meat-packing district (high fashion, now), and the diversification (less gay-dominant) of the West Village and Chelsea (families, hetero couples and jolly groups of young blond gals with cute summer dresses everywhere) was fun to see. And people in the park, forgetting their troubles and woes...
We walked quite a bit - Hudson St., Jane St., Greenwich St., 13th St., etc., where the streets are confusing.
One thing is clear to me: The "fashionable upper East Side" is a dead zone. No fun at all. Stodgy, without vitality. These neighborhoods are not like that:
That's W. 13th. More NYC pics below the fold -
Continue reading "More NYC pics: A good time in Chelsea and the West Village"
Sunday, August 14. 2011
Some people become concerned with who and what they are, and some people just forge onward and never think twice about it.
To keep it simple, I'll tell you how to "find yourself." Engage the world in all the ways you can: socially, spiritually, economically, morally, avocationally in sports, volunteer activities, clubs, going places and doing things, and in hobbies.
By doing those things, the world will tell you what and who you are. Engaging reality is the best teacher. My experience teaches me that people avoid some engagments with the world because they do not want to learn what reality has to teach them about who and what they are.
Generally speaking, Prof. Reality teaches humility as its first lesson, and goes on from there.
Saturday, August 13. 2011
Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address, June 2005
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
(It's a short speech - continue reading on continuation page below)
Continue reading "Steve Jobs, worth re-posting: "Stay hungry, stay foolish.""
Thursday, August 11. 2011
 Since the 1978 Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seals of New England have been proliferating. Fishermen had been shooting them on sight.
We have two species, the Harbor Seal and the Grey Seal.
The Grey Seals are not uncommon along the Cape Cod ocean beaches. Last summer, they were swimming around 15-20 feet from us, perhaps thinking we were some new sort of seal. They are big, curious, and harmless.
On a drizzly day last week, Mrs. BD and I hiked the beach from Newcomb's Hollow to Cahoon's Hollow (and back). We saw quite a few Greys in the water, looking almost like swimming black Labs.
Signs advise people that it is a crime to harass the seals, but there are no signs telling the seals not to harass the people.
One effect of the growing seal populations is that they attract the big sharks, Great Whites, Hammerheads, and others. Big sharks, of course, cannot distinguish a seal from a swimmer, but shark attacks are not really a problem, despite Jaws. When you see fins ("she's getting four stars from the road"), just get out of the water and read Moby Dick on the beach until they go away.
Photo above is a Grey Seal, resting on a beach.
Photo below is the crowded Cahoon's Hollow beach last week, in Wellfleet. Yes, we did have lunch at The Beachcomber. Duh. Sipp told me he used to pretend to play bass guitar in his band there. They specialize in blues and reggae, nightly during the summer. It feels like a Key West bar - quite cheerful and relaxed - and the seafood is pretty good. If you are under 50, be there or be square... but the music is too late at night for me.
A few pics of the Wellfleet Beachcomber below the fold, for Sipp's amusement -
Continue reading "The seals of New England, with a free ad for The Wellfleet Beachcomber"
Image below via Englishman:
... long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime.
From EU Ref: A nation scared of its own children?
In Britain, crime is easy
Q&O: It’s the collectivist that are the problem, not the individualists
Horrid Leftist Erica Payne Defends Rioters, Looters and Thieves in London
Sunday, August 7. 2011
Kay Hymowitz on Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever. Women prefer the mommy track. A quote from her myth-destroying essay:
...why do women work fewer hours, choose less demanding jobs, and then earn less than men do? The answer is obvious: kids. A number of researchers have found that if you consider only childless women, the wage gap disappears. June O’Neill, an economist who has probably studied wage gaps as much as anyone alive, has found that single, childless women make about 8 percent more than single, childless men do (though the advantage vanishes when you factor in education). Using Census Bureau data of pay levels in 147 of the nation’s 150 largest cities, the research firm Reach Advisors recently showed that single, childless working women under 30 earned 8 percent more than their male counterparts did.
This did apply to me:
It makes no sense to think of either the mommy track or the resulting wage differential as an injustice to women. Less time at work, whether in the form of part-time jobs or fewer full-time hours, is what many women want and what those who can afford it tend to choose. Feminists can object till the Singularity arrives that women are “socialized” to think that they have to be the primary parent. But after decades of feminism and Nordic engineering, the continuing female tropism toward shorter work hours suggests that that view is either false or irrelevant. Even the determined Swedes haven’t been able to get women to stick around the office.
Barn-garage, Deerfield, MA:
My Dad's pic of our ancestral church (Greenford Magna), where our namesake was pastor:
Nice garden. No lawn, just paths. Some nice Echinacea on the right:
Our favorite restaurant in P-town, :
42nd St. NYC, this winter:
More of my fun random pics below the fold -
Continue reading "Summer weekend random slide show from my personal pic file"
Saturday, August 6. 2011
Still cleaning out my old image files. Warning: A little cheesecake mixed in here, for the sake of art.
More useful or useless images below the fold - steal at will -
Continue reading "Another image dump (not my photos)"
Friday, August 5. 2011
From Sipp's My Children Will Not Be Appearing On White Dwarf Star Search, Thank You Very Much:
We are trying, with no help and a lot of opposition, to produce decent, productive, ethical, moral, well-read, arithmetically capable, ambitious, vigorous, funny, kind, intellectually curious, self-regulating adults. And the only question anyone has for us is: how can we live with ourselves, knowing we're keeping our children from the wonders of attending the White Dwarf Star Academy.
Somehow we manage to bear up under the shame of it.
Wednesday, August 3. 2011
Beliefs come first; reasons second.
We humans flatter ourselves when we claim to "think" things through, because often our starting point is our conclusion. We rationalize our conclusions and biases, and are attracted to information which confirms them. However, that does not mean that our thoughts are always misguided or wrong.
Our New Hampshire friend has recently discussed the topic:
Anyone who does not know why they hold a particular viewpoint cannot judge fairly whether it should be kept or abandoned. There’s no point in arguing with them.
That's the point. It is in fact a Psychoanalytic point. Two good rules of thumb for introspectives are these: "Don't believe everything you think," and the old AA aphorism, "Feelings aren't facts."
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