Murph

Murph

Yesterday's notebook entry had already been written when I came across reports of the chaos in the administration that bothered me so much that I rewrote the blog and saved the blog I had planned to send.

In that blog was this line: Everyone should wear black armbands. On this day in 1799, George Washington died on his Mount Vernon estate.
I was going to rewrite that for today when another event occurred: early this morning our extraordinary family dog, Murphy--who can only be described as Chris' companion--died. He was a sweet, loving guy and had a small life well worth celebrating for how giving he was and for the warmth those around him, especially Chris, provided him. This gave him a soulful glow that warmed even strangers. His was a life that joined, inextricably, with others.

Loss is always painful, and should be. It is a measure of the original, living attachment, and if tight, like a string instrument, is more tuned, beautiful, and meaningful.

Loss, of course, has a hierarchy. It is a function of give and take. A drachma is only a drachma. And Washington, perhaps one of modernity's most important men, has tremendous significance in our minds--but not our hearts. And it is in our hearts where life lives and flourishes.

Lives should not just collide with other lives. Each life, if meaningful, should merge and change the other, creating an alloy that continues on.

Such a life is immortal.

How Couples Meet

Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.--Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872, with "settled science"

Mom's meetings in Wheeling went well.

Before England became colonizers, they were colonized/conquered by Romans, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, Vikings, and Normans. The locals vented by killing their new lords. So the law came down that any murder of a Norman was to result in a heavy fine for the whole village. On the other hand, if the person killed was an Englishman or a Englishwoman: ech. This fine was known as murdrum. A palindrome!

Bankruptcies are rising in the U.S. oil patch as Wall Street’s disaffection with shale companies reverberates through the industry. (wsj)

Success Academy
Founded in 2006, Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest and highest-performing free, public charter school network in New York City. Admission is open to all New York State children, including those with special needs and English language learners. Students are admitted by a random lottery held each April. Success Academy operates 45 schools serving 17,000 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Across the network, 76% of students are from low-income households; 8.5% are current and former English Language Learners, and 15% are current and former special needs students. About 93% of students are children of color.
Of the 30 elementary schools in the entire state of New York (the top 1.24% of schools) with the highest Average Standard Score for the 2018-2019 school year, two-thirds of those top schools (20) are Success Academy Charter Schools. There were four other Success Academy elementary charters that didn’t rank in the top 30, but they weren’t far behind at No. 32 (Success Academy Charter School-Harlem 1) , No. 37 (Success Academy Charter School-Harlem 2), No. 40 (Success Academy Charter School – Springfield Gardens) and No. 45 (Success Academy Charter School-Bronx 3). In other words, 100% of the elementary Success Academy Charter Schools (24 out of 24) ranked in the top 2% of all of the 2,413 elementary schools in New York State (actually the top 1.865%). And when you compare the demographics of the Success Academy Charters Schools above to the other 10 top-ranking schools in the table above, you’ll see that the students attending Success charters: a) are more than two times as likely to qualify for free or discounted lunch, b) nearly four times as likely to be black, and c) 1.4 times as likely to be Hispanic.
It's hard to say which is stranger, the success of Success or DeBlasio's hatred of it.

So what Hilary did was wrong, illegal but not court-worthy and what Comey did was wrong, illegal but not court-worthy. If you were of a suspicious sort, you could see a pattern here. But it does raise a question: Are we poor worker bees held to a higher standard than our queens?

Sherlock Hibbs, a wealthy alumnus of the University of Missouri who passed away in 2002, set aside $5 million from his estate to endow up to three chairs and three additional professorships in the study of Austrian economics. The gift’s terms included an awkwardly worded stipulation that the positions must go to “dedicated and articulate disciples” of Ludwig von Mises. The University of Missouri acceded to those terms and accepted the gift. Indeed its failure to follow them would invoke another clause, in which case the money would transfer to Hillsdale College — a small conservative-leaning institution in Michigan that also has an established program in Austrian economics.
Missouri took the money and, over the past two decades, used it to endow positions for four faculty members. The recipients specialize in management and marketing. None appear to have any discernible research or teaching interests that even tangentially connect them to Austrian economics or to Mises. As a result of what appears to be a violation of the terms of the original endowment, Hillsdale is now suing Mizzou to invoke the transfer clause.

Between 1525 and 1866, about 380,000 Africans were brought to the United States over the course of the slave trade, out of the estimated 10.7 million African slaves brought to North America, the Caribbean and South America (nearly 5 million to Brazil alone, or almost half of all African slaves). Some scholars estimate that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans ended up in the United States after landing first in the Caribbean, so that would bring the total to approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the United States over the course of the slave trade. Therefore, only 4.2% of African slaves brought to the New World ended up in the U.S. and the vast majority (95.8%) ended up outside the U.S. And yet the narrative we frequently hear is that slavery was a uniquely or predominately American phenomenon. And, of course, in America it was a British phenomenon.

After speaking at a factory in Moscow, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin was shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin was seriously wounded but survived the attack. The assassination attempt set off a wave of reprisals by the Bolsheviks against the Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents. Thousands were executed as Russia fell deeper into civil war.

                    How Couples Meet

"We present new data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For heterosexual couples in the U.S., meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013. Moreover, among the couples who meet online, the proportion who have met through the mediation of third persons has declined over time. We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together."

  from the article “Research Note: Disintermediating Your Friends” 

Love and Mourning

I went to church on this sad day in a small hospital chapel. The chapel was plain and spare, a dim echo of the magnificent Catholic churches of even the recent past. The congregation was sparse and scattered about the pews, everyone alone. There were ancient nuns, one or two strangers--patient relatives, I suppose--and three physicians. Each of those physicians had lost a child under shocking and horrible circumstances. It was an insubstantial time in an insubstantial place. The service was short and then the chapel was empty.

I am old enough that I can look back on my life with some clarity and precision. I have started to write a little to raise points about things I have learned and I think of value. But there is one overriding single truth that surpasses all others: There is nothing as important as the love you have for your family and friends and the responsibility that love creates in you. And it is crucial that the love be returned.

This love is not simple; I believe it to be the building block of much of our species' accomplishments and monsters. It becomes Romeo and Othello, the bond of the warrior band, the community of the Pequod, the ideal of revolutionaries, the xenophobia of the Hatfields. Like the staircase, it goes two ways but is one. It has provided us much of our spark. Noble and trashy, austere and effusive, searching and content, kind and vengeful--it is us.