Sustainability

As far as physical infrastructure is concerned, there are only a few doubts about what the blue model can achieve.

Most of my questions revolve around what, over time the blue model can sustain.

Well Hot Cow Crap!

We may disagree on a lot of down ticket issues, including the last 1/3 of this commencement speech, but on the issue of free speech I have nothing to say to Micheal Bloomberg but "Amen."

There is an idea floating around college campuses — including here at Harvard — that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism. [...] This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw, or have their invitations rescinded, after protests from students and — to me, shockingly — from senior faculty and administrators who should know better.

"The former Mayor of New York went on to note," according to the American Interest, "that 96% of the Ivy League faculties contributed to Barack Obama in the last elections. When the crowd began to clap, he continued, 'there was more disagreement among the old Soviet Politburo than there is among Ivy League donors.'"

Pit Bull Terrier

When things have gone this far, what are Pitt Bull Terrier enthusiasts to do?

If I was not a half-crazy dog guy, I'd be ready to put restrictions on them as well.

When this is the image in the popular imagination, when your breed is already a metaphor for wanton violence, you've already lost the media war.  It is time for Plan D.

What is Plan D?  Capitulation on restrictions for breeding, increased taxes, and insurance costs in order to avoid breed bans.  Make Pit Bulls more expensive to own so that the popularity among the gangster crowd goes someplace else. 

It is probably the Doberman's turn again.  Maybe they'll embrace some irony and start sporting standard poodles.

It is easy for me to make jokes, I like my dogs small.  It doesn't matter if pound for pound a ground working terrier is the toughest dog around, we don't live life in a pound for pound world and small dogs do not the gangster image.

It is sad.  I have known some great pit bulls and some of my favorite people are pit bull enthusiasts but I don't see what there is to do but cut your losses.

What ever breed becomes the next focus for the tough guy crowd and the resulting public fear, they'd do well to listen to the hard to hear but valuable advice given over at Terrierman's Daily Dose. 

No More Popes!

In response to the firing of the CEO of Mozilla because he refused to repent of making a campaign contribution to California's "Proposition 8," which sought to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, fifty supporters of same-sex marriage have made an important stand against gay-rights puritanism. 

Their common-sense proposal called on civil society to recognize the value in the freedom to dissent from popular opinion, in this case to oppose same-sex marriage.  Freedom of speech, what a concept!  Freedom to dissent on religious matters (and marriage is and always has been a religious matter, even if it is a secular religion) without fear. How novel! 

I'm not too interested in having anyone's Pope tell me how to think about marriage, let alone fire me if my ideas do not conform to local orthodoxy.

Opponents of same-sex marriage have, with just a small bit of defensiveness, recognized the gesture.  If we could get such attitudes into the mainstream culture we could have the makings of a revolution.

Ukraine: A Bend in our Road

With apologies to the Bob Dylan classic and a certain 2008 campaign theme , the times they are a changin' but not necessarily in the manner we hoped.  Change is, of course, unavoidable but it does not always unfold as the optimists promise, pessimists fear, or self-certified experts imagine.  Those of us in the trenches should recognize their words as statements of intention or estimation. We get the same from car salesmen.

Today two Ukrainian helicopters were shot down.  Grassroots protesters with shoulder fired anti-aircraft weapons?  Ri-ght.  No one doubts that Russia is taking advantage of the mis-steps of a demographically ignorant EU and American alliance.  Western mistakes of the past two decades do not excuse Russia's contributions to the destabilization of Ukraine, but context is important.

However we got here, a fight is brewing.  The French contributions to the rise of German fascism did not negate the need to respond to the destructive military force it unleashed on Europe.  The failures of Czarist Russia does not make right the Stalinist gulags or the Ukrainian Famine.  We live in the present and at the present troops are moving.  A later generation will have the luxury to apply the lessons of recent history's mistakes.

If willing to suffer the cost, Russia can dismember Ukraine.  I doubt they'd swallow the whole thing history has seen those boundaries change many times before.  The biggest cost would be to the nation's standing as a member in the world community.  The expense of this cost is uncertain.  As China seeks to remake Asia, and Iran and Sunni Islamists each seek to alter the status quo of the Middle East to their own design, the world community could look a lot differently in the decade to come.

The past is outside of our control.  The future is yet to be made.  Today troops are moving and this Washington Post graphic illustrates.




Nature is change.  It is natural that we should change with it and today that requires accepting the possibility that Europe, like much the rest of the globe, is becoming a dangerous place that we must meet with wisdom, resolution, and courage.

A Stoic Foreign Policy

Syria: What is in our control and what lies outside our control?

Discussing the tug of war between idealist foreign policy choices and realism the folks over at War on the Rocks hint on a policy truth that is just as true in our private lives, "the true path to immorality and catastrophe was found in mistaking the ought for the is." 

Anytime the world as we conceive it inside our head deviates from how it is in the flesh-space dimensions outside of our imagination, we are set up for disappointment at the least and tragedy at worse.  Some deviation is impossible to avoid, we do not have perfect knowledge.  Even the hardest nosed realist makes mistakes.  Yet when our view of the world is tinged by ideals, any set of ideas, we will develop a false view of the universe and, consequently, respond poorly.  The more ideals color our perception of the universe, the greater the error we are prone to inflict upon either ourselves or others.

The humility of stoicism is that the practitioner trains their mind to accept that which is outside of their control and to distinguish between our preferences and what is.  Perhaps we would prefer the world to be different but in in the very naming it as a preference we remove from the idea the power to delude us.  "Ought" is reserved for things within my control: my thoughts, my actions, my attitudes and even then what is ought is brought in line with the nature of the universe.  I ought to be an exemplar of what it means to be human and human.  I ought to execute my role well, whatever that role is.  I ought to be a model homo sapiens.     

It always escapes the confines of the lab.

The life excellently lived is a microscopic example of realist political action.  The thinking errors which lead an individual into a workplace tryst, thinking it good and will make them happy, are of the same kind that lead a nation's leaders to undertake an ill-advised war: consequences are obscured by misinformed emotion.  The stoic understands the good life to be one lived with courage, justice, prudence and temperance regardless of the circumstances or limits imposed by the world-as-it-is.  A realist foreign policy should be driven by the exact same motivations.  People are people.  Decisions are decisions.  Good thinking leads to good decisions regardless of the subject.  Bad thinking leads to bad decisions whether the damage is personal or commit the populace of an empire to ruin. 


Realists are the true ethicists and the most effective practitioners of compassion.  Ideology is always a simplified view of the world that forces an interpretation on every event in order to fit the worldview espoused. Regardless of the title, ideologues have decided, before the details of a problem are known, the proper course of action on the basis of the theory they hold to be true. 

Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall."  Ideology makes predictions as if life were a dance: predictable and rhythmic.  Children often think their lives will unfold in a predictable and benign manner.  Success require putting away childish things and "getting real" both in how we approach our personal lives and the public policy we advocate.

270 Words

On this, the 150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg address we remember those husbands and sons who did not die in vain.  My grandfather tells me about his grandfather, who fought and returned home intact, at least physically intact, from that war.  We easily forget with our Facebook updates and Obamacare failures but these words remind us of the carnage that took place during those years and the relative magnanimity that followed the south's defeat, magnanimity born of the knowledge that we were all still, or rather again, one nation.  When we have difficulty giving grace to our political opponents who do no more than insult our own narrow conception of good sense, we demonstrate our own ignorance, shortsightedness, and vainglorious pride.

You don't have to say much to mean much.  It doesn't take much to forgive much.  Everything hinges on remembering, despite our differences, we are all Americans and "jaw, jaw is better than war, war."

 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Thursday is for Politics

The big policy disagreement in this household the last year has been how to read the "Common Core" standards.  This is the first critique that strikes me as having real substance.

Core Meltdown Coming

I’ve stayed mostly out of the Common Core nonsense. The objections are mostly fuss about federal control, teacher training, curriculum mandates, and the constructivist nature of the standards. Yes, mostly. But so what? Here’s the only important thing you need to know about Common Core standards: they’re ridiculously, impossibly difficult.

I will focus here on math, but I’m an English teacher too, and could write an equivalent screed for that topic.

I’m going to make assertions that, I believe, would be supported by any high school math teacher who works with students outside the top 30%, give or take.

Two to three years is required just to properly understand and apply proportional thinking–ratios and percentages. That’s leaving off the good chunk of the population that probably can’t ever truly understand it in non-concrete situations. Proportional thinking is a monster. That’s after two to three years spent genuinely understanding fraction operations. Then, maybe, they could get around to understanding the first semester of first year algebra–linear equations (slopes, more proportional thinking), isolating variables, systems, exponent laws, radicals—in a year or so.

In other words, we could use K-5 to give kids a good understanding in two things: fractions and integer operations. Put measurement and other nonsense into science (or skip it entirely, but then remember the one subject I don’t teach). Middle school should be devoted to proportional thinking, which will introduce them to variables and simple isolation procedures. Then expand what is currently first semester algebra over a year.

A co-worker was fired for a broach of public morality that our employer thought disregarded our "corporate values," which is to say the values of the institutions aristocracy.  In a free nation, with a freedom of association, I respect the rights of my employer to fire my friend, even as I am more in agreement with my friend than the aristocrats who fired him.  That right of free association, however, extends to all institutions and liberty does not mean that certain groups are afforded special protection as a political favor to tie up their votes.

ENDA is a bad idea

When Washington first passed employment discrimination laws, Congress saw that anti-black discrimination was so widespread, so destructive and so intractable that the government was compelled to impose a remedy on private business. The question today is whether another intervention is warranted — or will it do more harm than good.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed the Senate on Nov. 7 with supporters promising to end anti-gay discrimination in the workplace. The law may or may not do that — but it will certainly ban legitimate practices by private employers. Federal laws, after all, are not precision-guided weapons. They are blunt and they always inflict collateral damage.

If the Washington Examiner refused to hire a reporter simply because the reporter was gay, that would be wrong. But one can imagine cases in which an employer might justly place on employees conditions that are tied up with sexuality or gender identity.

The problem with the article is the psychological need to bring global warming into the story and emphasize as fact what is not yet understood: the many ways beyond luminosity that the sun impacts earth's climate.

Strange Doings on the Sun

Something is up with the sun.
Scientists say that solar activity is stranger than in a century or more, with the sun producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected and its magnetic poles oddly out of sync.
The sun generates immense magnetic fields as it spins. Sunspots—often broader in diameter than Earth—mark areas of intense magnetic force that brew disruptive solar storms. These storms may abruptly lash their charged particles across millions of miles of space toward Earth, where they can short-circuit satellites, smother cellular signals or damage electrical systems.
Based on historical records, astronomers say the sun this fall ought to be nearing the explosive climax of its approximate 11-year cycle of activity—the so-called solar maximum. But this peak is "a total punk," said Jonathan Cirtain, who works at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as project scientist for the Japanese satellite Hinode, which maps solar magnetic fields.