One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song,
read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a
few reasonable words. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist,
novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in
Brownsville accused
the Justice Department lawyers of lying to him during arguments in the
case, and he barred them from appearing in his courtroom. From an
article in the NYT on May, 16, 2016 titled "Federal Judges in Texas
Demands Justice Dept. Lawyers Take Ethics Class." The Feds are lying to
each other. Lawyers are lying to judges.
A
petition has appeared at Yale exhorting the college to “decolonize” its
English curriculum. Their demands: abolish the major English poets and
revise the remaining requirements “to deliberately include literatures
relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.” “It is
your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices,” the
letter concludes. “We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”
Split
infinitive aside, this is a peculiar request. First, there are a lot
of "alternative" options in the curriculum. In addition to featuring
names like Elizabeth Bishop and Ralph Ellison in its survey classes, the
course catalog presents such titles as “Women Writers from the
Restoration to Romanticism,” “Race and Gender in American Literature,”
“American Artists and the African American Book,” “The Spectacle of
Disability,” “Asian American Literature,” “Chaucer and Discourses of
Dissent,” “Postcolonial World Literature: 1945-present,” “Black
Literature and U.S. Liberalism.” This does not include the cross
listings with the comparative literature; American studies; and women’s,
gender, and sexuality studies departments. But more important, the
demands ask for the exclusion of accomplished poets from the English
canon because of the lack of representation of others. (an exclusion
they took no part of.)
One element that will never
enter this debate is "quality." In these discussions quantity always
trumps quality. To a certain mind, numbers always win.
Leftists
are as predictably nostalgic for dying firms as they are hostile to
whatever firms are today thriving and most profitable, applauding and
praising only firms that are currently in decline while despising and
criticizing firms that are currently at their peak. In some respects,
they support inefficiency and failure and oppose efficiency and
success. This strange behavior may encourage Mrs. Clinton when president
to underwrite coal companies.
People
have made lists of "honest national governments." Hierarchies of them.
170 countries ranked from declining honesty. Somehow the Scandinavians
do well on such lists. If you take one of these lists and separate out
the top 30 in perceived honesty, you would have under that group only
14% of the world's population. So 86% of the world's population is
governed by people on the low side of trustworthiness. That is quite a
vision of the world.
What is....gluten?
What
we measure--that is, what we think is a good metric for what we want to
achieve--is crucial to analysis. If we measure academic achievement by
the issuance of a college degree, but the process of earning that
degree does not measure real student learning, then what are we
measuring with college diplomas? What we’re really measuring is the
students’ ability to navigate an academic bureaucracy for four or five
years. Since we’re not measuring useful learning, we have no way to
hold colleges accountable for their demonstrable failure to teach
useful skills. We may not be measuring what is representative of what we
want to analyze, we may be analyzing what we can.
Irina
Nistor has one of the most famous voices in Romania. While working as a
translator of censored television programs in Romania under the
Communist regime, she secretly dubbed over 3,000 banned movie titles on
VHS tapes smuggled in from the West. The black market for these films
flourished during the Cold War, bringing visions of life outside
communism into the minds of the many. The documentary "Chuck Norris VS
Communism" is about Nistor and the impact Western movies had on the
imaginations of Romanians living under authoritarianism. Perhaps this is
overreaching sociology but recently there have been charges by Iran's
Revolutionary Guard Corps that Kim Kardashian is subverting Iranian
culture.
IMF--the
IMF!--authors Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri
issued a research paper titled "Neoliberalism: Oversold?" whose theme
is a stunning one: it accuses neoliberalism, (by
which they mean "capitalism") and its immediate offshoot, globalization
and "financial openness", for causing not only inequality, but also
making capital markets unstable. The IMF!
Freedom of Religion update: The
leader of a Pakistani Islamic council has proposed a bill that allows
husbands to "lightly beat" their wives as a form of discipline. In the
75-page proposal, Mohammad Khan Sheerani suggests a light beating is
acceptable should the need arise to punish a woman. The proposal bans
forceful beating, saying only a small stick is necessary to instill
fear. The Council of Islamic Ideology is a powerful constitutional body
that advises the Pakistani legislature whether laws are in line with
the teachings of Islam.
A guy named Glenn Reynolds writes for
USA Today argues that power is generally accepted in government if the
power is held by "your guy." George Bush never was questioned by FOX.
The left has let Obama's abuses slide because he is "their guy." He
writes: It’s terrible, we’re told, that Trump is issuing veiled
threats to journalists — though Obama joked about auditing his enemies,
seizing journalist phone records and threatened a journalist who
refused to reveal sources with imprisonment. Trump would be a
warmonger, we’re told, although in fact Barack Obama has been at war
longer than any other U.S. president, if without any particular success.
Trump would arrogantly ride roughshod over any opposition, though
Barack Obama famously used “I won” as an excuse to ignore opponents and
bragged that he had a “pen and a phone” to bypass congressional
disagreement. (And he’s used them a lot.)
Many of the journalists
and pundits who see Trump as the next imperial president were silent
over these Obama actions....Every president has some wiggle room, but
white male Republicans have less in our system. So if you want the
imperial presidency to wiggle less, that’s whom we should elect. And if
that’s what it takes to get the press to do its job of scrutinizing
and criticizing power, then that’s what we need.
There are many definitions of Populism but this is a good one: "the
political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common
people in their struggle with the privileged elite." Now that seems to
be a pretty benign and positive definition. So...how come people dislike
populists so much?
Vladimir
Nabokov on the demon of generalities: This demon is fond of words such
as “idea”, “tendency”, “influence”, “period”, and “era”. In the
historian’s study this demon reductively combines in hindsight the
phenomena, influences and tendencies of past ages. With this demon comes
appalling tedium – the knowledge (utterly mistaken, by the way) that,
however humanity plays its hand or fights back, it follows an implacable
course. This demon should be feared. He is a fraud. He is a salesman of
centuries, pushing his historical price list. And the most awful thing,
perhaps, happens when the temptation of completely comfortable
generalities seizes us in contemplation not of past, well-worn times,
but of that time in which we live.
Golden oldie:
Scholars
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth point out that China is the
closest the United States has to a rising rival but only on one measure,
gross domestic product. A better, broader measure of economic power,
Brooks and Wohlforth argue, is “inclusive wealth.” This is the sum of a
nation’s “manufactured capital (roads, buildings, machines and
equipment), human capital (skills, education, health) and natural
capital (sub-soil resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).” The United
States’ inclusive wealth totaled almost $144 trillion in 2010 — 4½ times
China’s $32 trillion.
Brooks and Wohlforth note
that half of China’s exports are parts imported to China, assembled
there and then exported — mostly for Western multinationals. The authors
also suggest that payments for intellectual property are a key measure
of technological strength. In 2013, China took in less than $1 billion,
while the United States received $128 billion. In 2012, America
registered seven times as many “triadic” patents — those granted in the
United States, Europe and Japan.
From the WashPo: A quiz given to students at Burns Middle School in Mobile, Alabama contains a lot of questions deemed by the teacher to be relevant to modern culture. A couple included:
"Tyrone knocked up four girls in the gang... There are 20 girls in the
gang. What is the exact percentage of girls that Tyrone knocked up?" and “Dwayne pimps 3 ho’s. If the price is $85
per trick, how many tricks per day must each ho turn to support Dwayne’s
$800 per day crack habit?”
It is always important to make lessons applicable to the lowest common denominator, isn't it?
Still
today, as always, trade and betterment are threatened by the scorn of
priest, knight, gentleman, poet, or thug, from Green to
neo-Nazi.--McCloskey
Foods are composed of three basic elements: fat, carbohydrate, and
protein. Gluten is a protein contained in wheat, rye and
barley—ingredients which are common, especially in processed foods. In
roughly 1% of adults and children, genetics plus gluten combine in ways
that we do not completely understand to trigger a condition called
celiac disease, which can damage the intestinal lining and lead to
serious nutritional and gastrointestinal problems among other issues.
For people with celiac disease, gluten is toxic and should be completely avoided in the diet.
However, in almost all children, gluten travels through the intestine
without causing disease and will never lead to problems. To date,
science has not shown that there is a toxin in gluten that makes it bad
for our bodies.
AAAAaaaannnnnddd.....a graph:
