A Narrow Lens Through a Narrow Window

The following are two paragraphs of an article written by Heather Mac Donald, a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her article was adapted from her 2013 Wriston Lecture.

"Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent as to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”"
"How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory."

What is curious about all this is not that new social concerns arise and compete for attention with established entities, it is that you can not have both.

Educate Rats

For years the West has assumed the Easter Island abandonment, in the face of the obvious sculptural and engineering success, to be evidence of a colossal societal failure. The thesis goes that the island was deforested by slash and burn farming and the society simply outgrew its resources. This is especially appealing in the academic world where mismanagement of resources is seen as a metaphor for current times.

There is a different, if grossly unpalatable, view from two anthropologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, from the University of Hawaii. In a new book they argue there is no evidence for land-clearing fire at all. Instead, an unlikely energy circle developed: Rats from ships fed off the tree trunks and were locally successful. The natives ate the rats. After time, the rats grew so successful they killed off the trees.

So the rats mismanaged their resources. This led to their decline and the decline of the natives who farmed them.

Wendell Berry says that the evidence for disorder is overwhelming; one should always flee those who offer patterns as explanations. I will find my solace there.

Cab Thoughts 3/5/14

"I am just going outside and may be some time" Lawrence Oates, leaving his tent to die on Scott's return from his doomed South Pole expedition.


There have been only four Rube-publican amendments to laws voted on in the Senate since June of 2013.

In 1959 in the Ural Mountains nine Russian hikers were camped in tents. The tents were found abandoned with long slashes, some from the inside. All the campers were found dead up to half a mile away. Six died of hypothermia--half dressed and without shoes. Three had crush injuries to the chest and head. Several articles of clothing had radiation exposure. Authorities have blamed "an unknown compelling force."

In the last five years nearly 27% of domestic equity funds, 24% of international equity funds and 19% of fixed income funds have merged or liquidated.

Ink was originally made mixing ferrous oxide mixed with ground oak nut (gall), carbon for blackness, sucrose for shininess, sometimes wine as preservative.

Christine Eibner, the senior economist at Rand in Arlington, speaking on The Affordable Care Act: "We don't have experience with this kind of major change in health policy. There are so many moving parts.' On modelling, she says, "Policy decisions have to be made without data--there are no data yet. That's why models are useful." Decisions without data. That's why models are useful.

If regulations are so important, why are there no consequences they are broken, e.g. the Madoff scandal?

Who are ......Selous scouts?

After World War II the Americans turned their focus to the Soviet threat but the British were focused upon Zionist terrorists who began an extensive bombing campaign that included the Colonial Office in London. In this effort, Zionist terrorist Yaacov Elias invented the "letter bomb."

Lee Harvey Oswald was a posthumous child.

I recently went to Spaghetti Warehouse for a meal and waited for about fifteen minutes to be seated. The huge lobby had an old phone booth that had been decommissioned but the booth had been left intact for nostalgia. A number of kids, lower teens and younger, gathered around, ducked in and out and eventually returned to their parents for an explanation. They did not know what a phone booth was.

The statistical estimates are that after earning 75 thousand dollars in the U.S., incentive to earn more is lost because of taxes and loss of benefits.

Golden Oldies:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/05/obama-wishes-americans-well.html

Norway's Magnus Carlson, age 22, won the world chess tournament in India. He is the world's highest ranked player and, on a historical basis, is ranked above Fischer. Since Big Blue's victory over Kasparov in 1997, chess scores have risen and the number of high scores have risen. It was expected the computer's success would discourage players but the opposite has happened.

The legendary investor Benjamin Graham lost 70% of his investments in the 1929 recession.

In 1948, the Peoples Liberation Army lay siege to Changchun in Manchuria and, according to Communist commander Lin Biao, turned "Changchun into a city of death." 160,000 civilians died. Those are Hiroshima numbers. To solidify the provinces .2% of the population was arbitrarily killed. Colors were applied to people, reactionary black, revolutionary red, based on the estimate of "class."

There is 2.3 trillion dollars in the banks, not lent because of low rates.

Studies on people who believe in conspiracies show those who believe in one will likely believe in others. Paul Thagard believes it is the result of an extreme need for coherence in life. Arguments usually come against the conventional explanation rather than an argument for an alternative.

According to a Rand study, of the 900 billion dollars spent on Medicare, 166 billion to 304 billion is unnecessary.

Chronicle: A list of events in the order they happened. A history. From the Greek Chronos, the ancient personification of Time, like Father Time. The source of chronometer, chronology and chronic. Not related to the titan Chronus.


AAAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd......a graph:

The Other Side of the Gold Coin

NPR recently interviewed journalist Matthew Hart who wrote Gold: The Race For The World's Most Seductive Metal. He spoke about the huge Mponeng Mine of South Africa which produces about one billion dollars of gold a year. The biggest mines are in the Carlin Trend of Nevada, U.S. but the Mponeng is huge, 2.5 miles deep, serviced by a project with tunnels and chutes the size of Manhattan and worked by 4,000 men a day.

As one goes deeper into the Earth (or any planet) there is an increase of temperature, called the geothermal gradient. This is the result of radioactive decay, the effect of ancient impacts and some other, debatable, causes. The gradient averages 1°F per 70 feet of depth in most of the world.
In Mponeng the geothermal gradient at the mine's deepest level is 140 degrees Fahrenheit. They cool the depths with an ice-salt slurry they pump to deep reservoir and use giant fans to cool the area down to about 85 degrees.

A big component of mining in South Africa is theft. From 10 to 20 percent of the ore in all of South Africa is stolen, probably 2 billion dollars a year. The thieves, called "ghosts" because of their sickly appearance, live in the mines and refine the gold there with dangerous chemicals (mercury). This requires a lot of collaboration, including the legitimate miners themselves who make a good side income with black market food. (One dollar bread on the surface brings twelve dollars underground.)


Abuse. Theft. Deprivation. Cruelty. Another system to make a living.

Pre-School Education

White House musings cum executive orders continue. There are a number of high priority wishes to be made bureaucratic, something damaging to wealth, something to do with women's wages, something to do with alternative energy without batteries. One recurring favorite seems to be the oxymoronic preschool education. 

There are two major precedents for preschool education, Head Start and the highly acclaimed Perry Project. Each presents difficult but different logic questions.

First, Head Start. "Head Start is a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to five from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social, and emotional development," says their own website. The objective here was "school readiness," the preparation of children presumed disadvantaged in their preparation for the formal educational system. Regrettably, the government’s own evaluation of Head Start by the Department of Health and Human Services showed that, while there were some initial positive impacts from Head Start, “by the end of third grade there were very few impacts found in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices.” Support continues for the project, presumably because it has an optimistic feel and there does not seem to be an easy way to by-pass the negative effects of malignant social and family settings. (Emphasis on "easy.")

Other pre-K programs have emerged in less structured ways. Well-established pre-K programs in Georgia and Oklahoma also show that a majority of 4-year-olds failed to justify the money spent. Recently the Brookings Institution admitted that the supposed benefits of pre-K programs often “don’t last even until the end of kindergarten.” Brookings’ lead research analyst commented, “I see these findings as devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs.”

Second there is the Perry Project. 123 pre-school children were chosen to be tutored by experienced teachers. Each teacher conducted a two-and-a-half-hour-daily class with the children, and then had a 90-minute visit at each child’s home in the afternoon. There were a few prerequisites: The mothers in the Perry Project were required to be stay-at-home moms, married, and supported by the husband’s income. The results looked very promising.

There are a number of obvious significant problems here. First, the study was done from 1962 to 1967 when the society was quite different. Second, the families were highly selected: Married, stay-at-home moms are an unusual and increasingly endangered species. They--and their children--are certainly a special subset. Third, the cost, corrected for inflation, was about $19,000 a year per student. Finally, there have been many studies done to duplicate the results of the studies and none have.

President Obama is promoting universal tax-paid daycare for preschoolers with an estimated $75 billion in annual costs. Economist James J. Heckman asserts that “each dollar invested [in government daycare] returns in present value terms 7 to 10 dollars back to society.” This has been picked up by Obama economist Austan Goolsbee, who intoned the results of the Perry Project exceeded “the historical returns of the stock market.”

Heady stuff. But assessment of our previous experience with such ideas suggests this may be a tougher problem than our esteemed leaders are letting on. But it does appear to be easy.

Sunday Sermon 3/2/14

This area is built for holidays, transient and commercial. It is a lovely area, warm, bright and carefree but the church we found today was quite surprising. It had an unimposing structure, nautical with portal windows at the top, but it was simply beautiful. Heavy cast doors and stain glass windows from Italy, elegant statuary an open classic interior; it was inspiring.
The congregation was young--Opus Dei or winners of national fertility contests--with countless kids-twins and triplets with unruffled parents.
The church is a basilica; it has no congregation, no parish.
It just is there.

Cab Thoughts 3/1/14

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.--deTocqueville

The Federal Communication Commission was created in the 1930s to regulate airwaves to assure access by the public. Now there are a zillion stations with a zillion programs and almost unlimited public access. So what does the FCC have to do? Maybe newsroom monitors. Ahhhh, an idle mind.....

Clowney is recognized as one of the best athletes to come out of college football. A defensive lineman, he is 266 pounds. Last week he ran a 4.48 second 40 yard dash at the NFL combine. That is faster than any Steeler cornerback. Maybe ever.

"Rubber” was so named in 1770 when Joseph Priestly noticed how well it erased – "rubbed" out — pencil markings. Priestly was famous for his isolation of "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen) but was hampered in his science and his reputation by his devotion to theism and determinism. He also was a champion of phlogiston. His metaphysical works were very popular and influential, especially upon Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

A guy named Sornette is another guy with another model, this one predicting market crashes. It would be really good to know, if accurate. Until, of course, every one else knew.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/05/obama-wishes-americans-well.html

The Vikings in the 800s captured Kiev in the Ukraine. ("Russia" comes from the word "Rus" meaning "Viking.") The city of Constantinople guarded against them, thinking them barbarians. But a Viking King was converted to Christianity when he went to the Hagia Sophia, the church rebuilt by Justinian in the 500s. The Viking thought the church beautiful enough to be the proof of heaven.

J.K Rowling wrote her first mystery, The Cuckoo's Calling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Until it was revealed to be hers it sold 1000 copies. Then it sold millions. The sequel, The Silkworm, was written before the first was published. She has a seven book series planned, like Harry Potter.

Then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made a threatening phone call to the head of the parent company of Standard & Poor's after S&P downgraded the U.S. credit rating in 2011. Geithner placed the call to McGraw Hill Chairman and CEO Harold McGraw III just five minutes after leaving an Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama. This will be interesting since the Department of Justice and the esteemed Eric Holder are suing SandP over their ratings of mortgages in 2008--and only SandP although all the ratings companies rated them similarly. S&P is understandably crying retaliation. Hard to believe these guys would act like that.

Who is........Elizabeth MacKintosh?

Norway with 5 million people has won 303 Winter Olympic medals up to this year, more than any other nation. Trendelag, a small section of Norway with 8% of Norway's population has won 20% of Norway's medals and won 8 of their 9 gold medals in Vancouver.

The time line in weapon development in the U.S. from draft board to working weapon has gone from 4 years to 21 years.

Henry Stimson was U.S. Secretary of State in the 1920s and he closed down the "black chamber," the code breaking station, saying later, "Gentlemen do not read other's mail."

Cereal: n. Any grain, such as wheat, oats, barley, etc. It is a word derived from Ceres, goddess of farming and agriculture.

The history of education has been that of personal development. Modern education has emphasized job training. If the two of those objectives overlap in the real world, great. But historically, education prepared people for religious communities, not the boardroom or the factory floor.

The government has decided to downsize the military and it is having effect. The Navy has gone from 600 ships to 200, the army from 20 divisions to 10 and the average airplane is 21 years old. The Department of Defense staff, however, has doubled.

AAAAAAAaaaannnnnddddd......a graph showing a model and a reality: