Tuesday, February 28, 2023

No consideration should ever deflect us from the pursuit and recognition of truth, for that essentially is what constitutes civilization itself.

From Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson.

The Ten Pillars of our Civilization:

The last of our laws follows from the ninth, and in a sense embraces them all. It is this: no consideration should ever deflect us from the pursuit and recognition of truth, for that essentially is what constitutes civilization itself. There are many around today who concede, in theory, that truth is indivisible; but then insist, in practice, that some truths are more divisible than others. If we want to identify a social enemy we need go no further than examine his attitude to truth: it will always give him away; for, as Pascal says, 'The worst thing of all is when man begins to fear the truth, lest it denounce him.' But truth is much more than a means to expose the malevolent. It is the great creative force of civilization. For truth is knowledge; and a civilized man is one who, in Hobbes' words, has a 'perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge.' Hobbes also writes: 'Joy, arising from imagination of a man's own power and ability, is that exaltation of mind called glorying.' And so it is; for the pursuit of truth is our civilization's glory, and the joy we obtain from it is the nearest we shall approach to happiness, at least on this side of the grave. If we are steadfast in this aim, we need not fear the enemies of society.

When quality control goes out the window, an opportunity is created for someone

Universities are among the few institutions allowed to select based on merit post-Griggs vs. Duke.  If IQ tests are out for commerce, and IQ tests being among the most reliable forecasters of performance, particularly if combined with selective other criteria), then the only way for commerce to recruit based on IQ is to recruit via universities. 

Back a few years ago, it was easy to calculate the average IQ for a student at most of the top universities.  If you wanted bright candidates you recruited at bright universities.

For inexplicable, but probably ideological, reasons, universities have been both admitting less and less well performing students under the flag of DEI and moving away from objective measured performance (SATs, ACTs, etc.).  They have given up one of their few genuine competitive advantages.  

There has been another trend going on which has been less obvious - the pervasiveness of cheating.  This has been around and trending upwards for the past twenty years but with relatively weak means of measuring the trend.  I hear horror stories of how rampant, pervasive and how brazen cheating is but have no ready way to distinguish the horrifying anecdote from the empirically sound observation.

From Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm? by Suzy Weiss.  The subheading is: Students say they are getting ‘screwed over’ for sticking to the rules. Professors say students are acting like ‘tyrants.’ Then came ChatGPT . . .

She provides additional evidence that universities may be further diluting not just their brand but the quality of their product.  

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.” 

Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.

“It’s the Wild West when it comes to using emerging technologies and new forms of access to knowledge,” Gregory Keating, who has a joint appointment at USC’s Department of Philosophy and Gould School of Law, told me. “Faculties and administrations are scrambling to keep up.” 

If commerce was hiring talent from universities based on confidence that the universities were recruiting the cognitive cream and that they were winnowing them for performance, what happens when universities deliberately recruit lower performance students, cease to measure performance, and provide an environment where cheating disadvantages high cognitive performers?  

If it is like any other industry, demand for product declines.  I wonder how long their endowments will sustain them?

There is also a theoretical opportunity for the striving university outside the big leagues.  Recruit the best, select for the best, prepare student the best and reliably and likely you will both raise demand in a declining market and start advancing up the prestige leagues.  A pretty radical notion but perhaps among the 4,000 or so universities, a notion that might take hold.  

Don't forget Land Use

A very good piece, How land use changes the climate by Roger Pielke Jr..  The subheading is Roger Pielke Sr. explains (SERIES: Pielke Sr., Part 2)

I have long argued that even without humans we would have global climate change owing to variations in solar activity, geological activity, ocean/cloud activity and dozens of lesser factors.  Of course climate changes.  The question is what are the drivers and to what extent are each of the contributors responsible.

Is CO2 a contributor?  Probably but the case is open.  Is CO2 the only driver of climate change (much less global warming)?  Certainly not.  

And if it is not the primary driver of climate change, just how much of a role does it play?  We don't know.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe 5%.  Possibly 10% but likely not much more.

This cannot be discussed with anthropogenic global warming fanatics because they cannot concede other contributors.  If CO2 is only potentially one among many drivers, then the cost-benefit justifications for their preferred policies, already weak, go out the window.

More interesting to me has been the willful avoidance of what I think is much more a clear driver of local climate change.  Land Use.  It is clear anecdotally and it is clear by the data.  Land use has a clear and material linkage to changes in local climate.  It is the easiest argument to win but there is no engagement with it.  It is not clear to me why not.

My speculation is that if you concede land use, then you take the focus off the coercive CO2 control policies and perhaps they are concerned that diffusion of focus might be defeating.  Alternatively, they might wish to avoid the debate because land use is so clearly tied to practical and real world consequences to people.  It is one thing to argue that people ought to pay 1% more in costs or taxes for a possible payoff a century from now.  As long as you keep your demands at least somewhat moderated, you have a chance of winning.  Nobody wants to waste time fighting bad policy, especially if the win has only a small savings.

It is a different thing altogether to ask a farming community to give up farming or a manufacturing community to give up manufacturing or an urban community to give up urban living.  You are almost guaranteed defeat.  You are an existential threat and therefore many if not most have an incentive to resist your policies.  

I don't know whether that is what is going on, I just know that land use seems to get very little coverage even though it is a greater and more certain impact on climate.  

Large-scale alterations to the land surface can affect the weather and climate. For example, changing the land surface can alter albedo (its reflectivity of solar radiation back into space) which directly alters sensible heat (heat that we can measure with a thermometer) and latent heat (which is in the form of water vapor) mixed into the atmosphere. 

There are many peer reviewed papers that have for decades convincingly shown that land use can change regional climate. For instance, Gordon Bonan, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, explained the significance research that I led on the effects of land use on the weather and climate of south Florida:

“Nobody experiences the effect of a half a degree increase in global mean temperature. What we experience are the changes in the climate in the place where we live, and those changes might be large. Land cover change is as big an influence on regional and local climate and weather as doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide—perhaps even bigger….. Climate change is about more than a change in global temperature. It’s about changes in weather patterns across the Earth… The land is where we live. This research shows that the land itself exerts a first order [primary] influence on the climate we experience.”

Academia passing off poisonous ideological opinions as scientific research

Years ago, I used to be entertained by research that political ideologies carried with them particular behavioral attributes or markers.  It makes logical sense why that might be the case if you ignore that the labels for conservative, liberal, progressive, or whatever keep changing over the years.  Those who were once Classical Liberals are now "conservative" and those who were Progressive and now authoritarian.  

It took me a while to cotton to the fact that these studies are both meaningless and childishly intended.  

From A Master Class in Confirmation Bias by Holly Math Nerd.  The subheading is a fresh snarkfest on why #trustthescience is nonsense.  While she disclaims this as a disciplined rebuttal of the propagated research, she is still pretty comprehensive and entertaining.  

It is entirely clear that this was motivated research intended to produce a specific finding regardless of how many scientific protocols had to be breached in order to do so.

MSN reported on the study here. The short version: COVID jab refusers evidence a “lack of problem-solving skills” and “rigid thinking,” as well as an “inability to see complexity.”

Where shall we begin?

The Many Ways This Study is Bullshit 
 
This essay would be longer than the study itself if I gave it the dissection it deserves, so I’m going to have to limit myself to just a few points. This is more snarkfest than serious refutation because, frankly, it’s so goddamn dumb that it doesn’t deserve the time investment that a serious refutation would take.

So let’s laugh together.

Way #1: Their Construct Is Bullshit

And thus she proceeds, entertainingly laying waste to their construct, their methodology, their data, etc.  She clearly is having a good time striking down the rotted piñata of "research."




History

 

Emotionally overwrought fanatics

Oh my goodness. 

I saw this video on Ann Althouse and it is indeed somewhat bemusing.  She is asking her readers for context.
And one of her readers is able to provide it.  Apparently this was a trans protest at the University of North Texas in 2022.  A young boy is being prepared for transition by his mother and against the objections of the father.   Legislation is being proposed to forbid the practice of transitioning young children. 

Althouse's commenter shares a British podcast which covered the incident at the time.  From the Lotus Eaters.  

Double click to enlarge.

It is striking to me that I learn of an incident like this from overseas media.  I hear nothing of it in the US.  

What is most striking to me in this whole folderol is at 5:40 on the above clip.

A whole room of similarly attired fanatic protestors shouting in unison at a single speaker up front.  Accusing him of being a fascist.

The irony is holistic.  A chanting mob behaving in the fashion of fascist brown shirts seeking to overwhelm and censor a single person by accusing him of being a fascist.  The intellectual rot is deep and we are being swayed by emotionally overwrought fanatics.  

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Nine Rhetorical Devices - (3) Anadiplosis

Via @cultaltutor and Wikipedia.

Anadiplosis (/ænədɪˈploʊsɪs/ AN-ə-di-PLOH-sis; Greek: ἀναδίπλωσις, anadíplōsis, "a doubling, folding up") is the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause. The word is used at the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence.

Example:

The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
  - W.B. Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"

Further examples:  

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas and hath not left his peer.
  - John Milton, Lycidas

Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard. Standard performance is sub-standard. Sub-standard performance is not permitted to exist.
  - Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny.

Having power makes [totalitarian leadership] isolated; isolation breeds insecurity; insecurity breeds suspicion and fear; suspicion and fear breed violence.
  - Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism

Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.

Data Talks

 

The Vale of Health, Hampstead, 1940 by Stanley Spencer

The Vale of Health, Hampstead, 1940 by Stanley Spencer





















Click to enlarge.

Monday, February 27, 2023

Rely on science, based on objectively established criteria and agreed foundations, with a rational methodology and mature criteria of proof

From Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson.

The Ten Pillars of our Civilization:

Of course using words in their true sense is one element in precision of thought. And trained skill in thinking precisely to advance knowledge is what we mean by science. So the ninth commandment is: trust science. By this we mean a true science, based on objectively established criteria and agreed foundations, with a rational methodology and mature criteria of proof - not the multitude of pseudo-sciences which, as we have seen, have marked characteristics which can easily be detected and exposed. Science, properly defined, is an essential part of civilization. To be anti-science is not the mark of a civilized human being, or of a friend of humanity. Given the right safeguards and standards, the progress of science constitutes our best hope for the future, and anyone who denies this proposition is an enemy of science.

History

 

Failed Urban Jurisdictions

We have the term, 'failed nation state,' to cover countries like Haiti, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, etc.  Nations which lack functioning national institutions or capcity to execute the bare fundamentals such as policing, functioning courts of justice, border security, dissipation of resident commitment to the nation, absence of critical infrastructure, effective public health, etc. 

Here in the US, I wonder whether we ought to be thinking about 'failed urban jurisdictions?'  Detroit and East St. Louis would be poster children for the notion, along with Trenton, Cherry Hill, New Jersey and others.

New Orleans has been on the brink for a couple of decades.

Failed urban jurisdictions as a concept seems to be creeping up the ladder of our formerly respectable cities.  Baltimore probably belongs on the list.  Portland seems to be headed in that direction.  San Francisco, with more time, seems, based on current policies, to be headed onto that list.  

And we can't forget about one of our largest cities which is routinely in the headlines due to failed governance and failed policies.  From Chicago’s pursuit of ‘criminal justice reform’ an utter failure: Windy City homicides top nation for 11th year in a row with crime still rising.  by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Rising crime is the number one crisis facing Chicago today. More specifically, the city’s propensity for murder. Chicago was the nation’s extreme outlier for homicides in 2022, with 697 deaths. More people were murdered here than anywhere else. 

What’s worse, Chicago has out-paced the entire nation in murders for 11 years in a row. It’s become an embedded, chronic wound for the city.

That’s not a surprising result given the failed policies of Chicago’s leadership in recent years, from a dramatic drop in arrests to ever-fewer prosecutions to reduced sentencing. The pursuit of “equity” and “social justice,” instead of actual justice, has only increased the protection of criminals, crushed police morale and increased the violence inflicted on ordinary Chicagoans.

That’s just one of the facts contained in Wirepoints’ latest Special Report: Chicago, New Orleans were the nation’s murder capitals in 2022: A Wirepoints survey of America’s 75 largest cities.

Read the whole thing for the astonishing numbers.  

There is no such thing as hate speech

The latent authoritarians are always trying to chip away at out freedom through lawfare or by changing language a la 1984.

Specifically, for the past thirty some years, the left have tried to create a category of hate speech which would be deemed illegal.  The definitions are ambiguous but almost uniformly come down to this:  we want to ban speech by free citizens that might threaten our authority.

It has been a patently absurd argument all along and remains so.  But academia, state agencies and the mainstream media keep pretending that controlled Hate Speech is a real thing.  It is not.

From Yes, hate speech is constitutionally protected by Jonathan Turley.  A useful reminder that just because authoritarians keep wanting to pretend that there is no right to speech with which they disagree, it absolutely remains a base principle of our system of government.  We are now and have always been constitutionally committed to free speech.  All speech.  No matter the passing authoritarian fancies.

An Insight

 

A willingness to protect enhances attractiveness

From An Instinct That's Basic and Deeper by Rob Henderson.  The subheading is The willingness to physically protect.

I am in the process capturing the sixteen years of Thingfinder posts, transferring it all over to paper so that there is a physical record of that which is only digital at the moment.  

I am up to 2012 and a couple of days ago transferred over the July 24, 2012 post, We are rich and blessed to have such young men, a celebration of the young men who gave their lives at the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting in Colorado so that their dates might live.  Having just revisited that old post, this morning I come across Rob Henderson's most recent post, An Instinct That's Basic and Deeper which starts with the same tragedy.

Henderson is addressing some recent research which explores why men are willing to sacrifice for others.

At a population level, there is simply the biological reality that men are the disposable sex.  A village of two hundred who suffered some tragedy and ended up with 100 women and one man, might conceivably still survive as a community.  With 100 men and one woman, there would be no future community.  Men are far more disposable than women from nature's perspective.

The research Henderson is discussing approaches from a slightly different angle.  Their question is whether willingness to sacrifice might not be a mate selection strategy.  That both men and women, but especially women, are strongly attracted to partners who are willing to sacrifice for them.

Here you see that women rate male dates (described in this particular version of the study as average in physical strength and average in physical attractiveness) who make no attempt to protect them as a 2 out of 10 in attractiveness. Women rate a man who attempts to protect them but fails as a 7.5 out of 10. And a man who attempts to protect them and succeeds is an 8 out of 10.

So the major bump in attractiveness comes from willingness, rather than ability.

The paper also finds that people judge same and opposite-sex individuals as more desirable as friends if they show a willingness to protect them. The most extreme real-world cases of this may be the documented accounts of military members who intentionally use their bodies to absorb blasts from explosive devices to protect their friends, as in the case of detonated grenades.

Overall, people (especially women), prefer romantic partners (and friends) who are willing to protect them. The ability to protect is a factor in desirability ratings. But people assign more importance to willingness.

More from the paper:

“Discovering that a person is willing to physically protect you, independent of their ability to do so, is very attractive in both mates and friends…especially when women are judging targets and when the target judged is a man…Conversely, unwillingness to protect was unattractive. In fact, it was a deal-breaker for women rating male dates: male dates who stepped away when a woman was being attacked were rated near the floor of the scale.”

In short, willingness to protect gives people (especially men) a strong boost in attractiveness.

In contrast, the ability to protect gives a small (and mostly statistically insignificant) boost. The drive to protect seems to matter most for attractiveness judgments.  

Mate choice has been a powerful force in shaping human evolution. And mate choice has been sensitive to cues of violence in the ancestral environment.

It is likely that the preference for partners who are willing to protect us has led to humans becoming particularly willing (relative to our primate relatives) to incur costs to help others.  

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Nine Rhetorical Devices - (2) Polyptoton

Via @culturaltutor and Wikipedia.

Polyptoton /ˌpɒlɪpˈtoʊtɒn/ is the stylistic scheme in which words derived from the same root are repeated (such as "strong" and "strength"). A related stylistic device is antanaclasis, in which the same word is repeated, but each time with a different sense.  Another related term is figura etymologica.

Example:

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  
  - Lord Acton

Further examples:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
Who shall watch the watchmen themselves
  - Juvenal (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes)

Diamond me no diamonds, prize me no prizes… 
  - Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lancelot and Elaine

The healthy man does not torture others—generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. 
  - Carl Jung

With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder. 
  - William Shakespeare Richard II II, i, 37

Data Talks

 

I Saw Three Ships by Maxwell Ashby Armfield (1881–1972)

I Saw Three Ships by Maxwell Ashby Armfield (1881–1972)






















Click to enlarge.

The countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features.

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

But even if a reader acquires no new language, or for that matter does not even acquaint himself with some new or hitherto unknown literature, he can endlessly go on with his reading, making finer distinctions, heightening, strengthening. For every thinking person each verse of each poet will show a new and different face to the reader every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. When as a youth I read for the first time, only partially understanding it, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, that was a completely different book from the Elective Affinities that I have now read perhaps for the fifth time! The great and mysterious thing about this reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in its uniqueness, its individuality, in its precise limitations and see that all beauty, all charm depend on this individuality and uniqueness—at the same time we come to realize ever more clearly how all these hundred thousand voices of nations strive toward the same goals, call upon the same gods by different names, dream the same wishes, suffer the same sorrows. Out of the thousandfold fabric of countless languages and books of several thousand years, in ecstatic instants there stares at the reader a marvelously noble and transcendent chimera: the countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features.

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Beware of those who seek to win an argument at the expense of the language

From Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson.

The Ten Pillars of our Civilization:

When we are dealing with concepts like freedom and equality, it is essential to use words accurately and in good faith. So the eighth commandment is: beware of those who seek to win an argument at the expense of the language. For the fact that they do is proof positive that their argument is false, and proof presumptive that they know it is. A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones. The correct and honourable use of words is the first and natural credential of civilized status.

You must exaggerate much and you must omit much.

As with nations, so with individuals.  I harp about the fact that the individual is not the average.  

As a consequence, the fetish among some ideologues, to impose monolithic identities based on some singular attribute is rendered nonsensical.  An individual's identity is an aggregation of experiences and opinions and knowledge and emotions and attributes.  

Everything is about the individual and the abstract concept of monolithic identities such as black or white, Christian or Muslim, rich or poor, male or female, etc. is rendered largely useless.  The average is not the individual and the individual is an aggregation.  

Walter Bagehot discusses this in Physics and Politics, published in 1872, in the context of nationalism.  

No nation admits of an abstract definition; all nations are beings of many qualities and many sides; no historical event exactly illustrates any one principle; every cause is intertwined and surrounded with a hundred others. The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen. To make a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.

But his insight is equally true for the individual.  With only minor adjustments . . . 

No person admits of an abstract definition; all people are beings of many qualities and many sides; no personal experience exactly illustrates any one principle; every personal action is intertwined and surrounded with a hundred others. The best personal biography is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen. To make a single person illustrate an abstract principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.

History

 

An Insight

 

Life is long enough.

From De Brevitate Vitae ("On the Shortness of Life", trans. John W. Basore), Ch. 1

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough.

Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdidimus. Satis longa vita.

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Nine Rhetorical Devices - (1) Antimetabole


In rhetoric, antimetabole (/æntɪməˈtæbəliː/ AN-ti-mə-TAB-ə-lee) is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order; for example, "I know what I like, and I like what I know". It is related to, and sometimes considered a special case of, chiasmus.

An antimetabole can be predictive, because it is easy to reverse the terms. It may trigger deeper reflection than merely stating one half of the line.

Example:

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. 
  -  John F. Kennedy, "Inaugural Address", January 20, 1961.

Further examples.

Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno (One for all, all for one)

Eat to live, not live to eat. —attributed to Socrates

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. —Mark 2:27

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair — William Shakespeare, Macbeth

All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray


And bread I broke with you was more than bread.

Music I Heard
By Conrad Aiken
 
 
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Now that I am without you, all is desolate,
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
 
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved:
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
 
For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.
And in my heart they will remember always:
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!

Love and the Pilgrim, 1897 by Edward Burne-Jones (English, 1833–1898)

Love and the Pilgrim, 1897 by Edward Burne-Jones (English, 1833–1898)















Click to enlarge.

A thousand ways lead through the jungle to a thousand goals, and no goal is the final one; with each step new expanses open.

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

And each year we see thousands and thousands of children entering the first class, drawing their first letters, deciphering the first syllables, and we see again and again that for a majority of these children the ability to read quickly becomes an ordinary matter of little value, while others from year to year and decade to decade become more and more enchanted and astounded by the use they can make of the magic key that school gave them. For if today the ability to read is everyone's portion, still only a few notice what a powerful talisman has thus been put into their hands. The child proud of his youthful knowledge of the alphabet first achieves for himself the reading of a verse or a saying, then the reading of a first little story, a fairy tale, and while those who have not been called seem to apply their reading ability to news reports or to the business sections of their newspapers, there are a few who remain constantly bewitched by the strange miracle of letters and words (which once, to be sure, were an enchantment and magic formula to everyone). From these few come the readers. They discover as children a few poems and stories, a verse by Claudius, or a tale by Hebel or Hauff in the reader, and instead of turning their backs on these things after acquiring the ability to read they press forward into the realm of books and discover step by step how vast, how various and blessed this world is! At first they took this world for a little child’s pretty garden with a tulip bed and a little fish pond; now the garden becomes a park, it becomes a landscape, a section of the earth, the world, it becomes Paradise and the Ivory Coast, it entices with constantly new enchantments, blooms in ever-new colors. And what yesterday appeared to be a garden or a park or a jungle, today or tomorrow is recognized as a temple, a temple with a thousand halls and courtyards in which the spirit of all nations and times is present, constantly waiting for reawakening, ever ready, to recognize the many-voiced multiplicity of its phenomena as a unity. And for every true reader this endless world of books looks different, everyone seeks and recognizes himself in it. One gropes his way from children’s tales and books about Indians to Shakespeare or Dante, another from the first schoolbook essay about the starry heavens to Kepler or to Einstein, a third from a pious child’s prayer to the holy cool vaults of Saint Thomas or Saint Bonaventure, or to the sublime complexities of Talmudic thought, or to the springlike similes of the Upanishads, to the moving wisdom of the Hasidim, or to the lapidary and yet so friendly, so genial and merry teachings of ancient China. A thousand ways lead through the jungle to a thousand goals, and no goal is the final one; with each step new expanses open.

Saturday, February 25, 2023

When the claims of freedom conflict with the pursuit of other desirable objects of public policy, freedom should normally prevail

From Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson.

The Ten Pillars of our Civilization:

 We have seen that there is a close connection between the rise of the middle class, and the growth of political and economic freedom. But it is not true, as Lenin contemptuously asserted, that 'freedom is a bourgeois prejudice'. Freedom is a good which any rational man knows how to value, whatever his social origins, occupation or economic prospects. Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom, above all their freedom to earn their livings how and where they please, has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues. We need not suppose that the exercise of freedom is bought at the expense of any deserving class or interest - only of those with the itch to tyrannize. So the seventh commandment is that, when the claims of freedom conflict with the pursuit of other desirable objects of public policy, freedom should normally prevail; society should have a rational and an emotional disposition in its favour. In our times, liberty's chief conflict has been with equality. But absolute equality is not a good at all; it is a chimera, and if it existed would prove as fearful and destructive a monster as that grotesque creature Bellerophon killed. And the regarding and indiscriminate pursuit of relative equality, itself desirable, has led to many unwarranted restrictions on human freedom without attaining its object. In short, for many years the bias has been in the wrong direction, and it is now necessary to strike a new balance of moral good by redressing it. Where there is genuine doubt between the legitimate claims of liberty and equality, the decision taken should be the one most easily reversed if it proves mistaken.

History

 

An Insight

 

Would you look at that.

I am not sure I ever really focused on the fact that the U2 has bicycle configured landing gear.  Which is pretty astonishing.

Double click to enlarge.  

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

Virgin and Child with Saint Nicasius and Saint Francis of Assisi ( Castelfranco Altarpiece ), c. 1500 by Giorgione (1478-1510)

Virgin and Child with Saint Nicasius and Saint Francis of Assisi ( Castelfranco Altarpiece ), c. 1500 by Giorgione (1478-1510) 



























Click to enlarge.

Suddenly rise resplendent from the grave as though time did not exist

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

But in much narrower and simpler circles we can observe every day how completely marvelous and like fairy tales are the histories of books, how at one moment they have the greatest enchantment and then again the gift of becoming invisible. Poets live and die, known by few or none, and we see their work after their death, often decades after their death, suddenly rise resplendent from the grave as though time did not exist. We saw in amazement how Nietzsche, unanimously rejected by his people, after fulfilling his mission for a few dozen minds, became several decades too late a favorite author whose books could not be printed fast enough, or how Hodlderlin’s poems, more than a hundred years after their composition, suddenly intoxicated our studious youths, or how, from the ancient. treasury of Chinese wisdom, suddenly after millennia the one and only Lao-tse was discovered by postwar Europe; badly translated and badly read, Lao-tse became a fashion like Tarzan or the fox trot; nevertheless he was enormously influential on the productive level of our living minds.

Friday, February 24, 2023

The health of the middle class is probably the best index of the health of a society as a whole

From Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson.

The Ten Pillars of our Civilization:

The sixth of our rules is that there is nothing morally unhealthy about the existence of a middle class in society. No one need feel ashamed of being bourgeois, of pursuing a bourgeois way of life, or of adhering to bourgeois cultural and moral standards. That it should be necessary to assert such a proposition is a curious commentary on our age, and in particular its mania for the lowest common denominator of social uniformity. Throughout history all intelligent observers of society have welcomed the emergence of a flourishing middle-class, which they have rightly associated with economic prosperity, political stability, the growth of individual freedom and the raising of moral and cultural standards. The middle class, stretching from the self-employed skilled craftsman to the leaders of the learned professions, has produced the overwhelming majority of the painters, architects, writers, and musicians, as well as the administrators, technologists and scientists, on which the quality and strength of a culture principally rest. The health of the middle class is probably the best index of the health of a society as a whole; and any political system which persecutes its middle class systematically is unlikely to remain either free or prosperous for long.

They want you to suffer so that they can preen

From ‘Defund the Police’ Led to Lower Standards by Jason Johnson.  The subheading is Recruitment difficulties have reduced the quality of officers, increasing the risk of abusive conduct.

Heather Mac Donald has been making this argument as well (What Killed Tyre Nichols by Heather Mac Donald.)

The mainstream media has resisted acknowledging what has clearly happened.  There was a significant bump in crime after the Ferguson Riots in 2014 when police forces were stood down around the nation.  Or, more properly, police were constrained from regular police activities as a sop to violent activists.  

Violent crime ratcheted up further after the George Floyd riots in 2020.  Not only were police forces further constrained but police were threatened with defunding and with arrest for routine police activities.  

The increase in crime was across the nation but not nationwide.  It tended to be concentrated in jurisdictions where the political establishment were least supportive of police departments.  It didn't take actual monetary defunding.  All it took was the clear message that politicians would not support the police in whatever fashion.

The mainstream media works hard to deny that there is an increase in violent crime and are vociferous that it is not because of defunding. 

But crime is rising and political support for the police in many jurisdictions has evaporated.  

Both Johnson and Mac Donald are good with documenting the empirical reasons for this rise.  Police are retiring earlier and transferring out of non-supporting jurisdictions faster.  Recruiting is harder and slower.  Consequently, police ranks are thinned further because they are markedly understaffed.

Rising crime is a policy choice made by urban politicians and was entirely predicted and those predictions have been fulfilled and the mainstream media is just as befuddled at this turn of events as ever.  It is inconceivable to them and not part of their understanding of the world.  

Johnson does a very good job of tying the consequences of the political decline in support of the police to the recent tragedy in Memphis when five black officers viciously beat and injured a black motorist.  A case still under investigation.  But the dynamics are clear and highlight what is happening elsewhere.

By making a hard job harder. more dangerous and riskier, politicians have squeezed application pools.  Given that there are not enough qualified applicants, many departments are relaxing the critical standards they once had.  Standards which helped reduce police violence.

To fill vacancies, most large police agencies have lowered their standards. In 2020 Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown announced that certain applicants would no longer be required to obtain 60 college credits. The department received 400 applications the day of the announcement. Philadelphia dropped its residency and age requirements in 2017 and applications jumped 20%. But it didn’t work for long, as poor recruitment and high attrition have since returned to those departments.

The longer the staffing crisis goes on, the worse community-police tensions will become as faith in the competence and trustworthiness of law enforcement erodes. A four-year college degree may not be necessary to perform the duties of a police officer, but applicants with sketchy employment and education résumés are unlikely to possess the communication skills and self-control necessary to do well as cops. A history of drug and alcohol abuse or criminal activity has been shown to increase the risk that an officer will use excessive force or engage in serious misconduct on the job. Officers who are in poor physical shape can’t credibly protect the public from crime.

Demetrius Haley, one of the five officers involved in Nichols’s death, joined the Memphis Police Department in 2020 after the agency loosened its education requirements. Mr. Haley had previously worked as a Shelby County corrections officer and was sued in 2016 for allegedly beating a jail inmate. That case was dismissed on a technicality, but Mr. Haley was reprimanded by the Memphis Police Department after only six months on the job for not filing a report after using force during an arrest. Months later, he crashed a cruiser while responding to a police call. Three of the four other officers had also earned official reprimands during their short careers.

Memphis has been hiring questionable candidates since 2017-18, when it applied for six waivers to a Tennessee law preventing police departments from hiring recruits with criminal or drug histories. But the city lowered the bar further last year in a bid to get more recruits in the door. The college education and fitness requirements were watered down significantly.

Memphis isn’t alone. Other departments have relaxed standards. The Police Executive Research Forum has found that a majority of departments are accepting recruits who admit to having used illegal drugs. Visible tattoos were once a no-no, but a third of departments now allow them. And many departments are granting exemptions to rules against hiring applicants with criminal convictions.

The deprofessionalization of policing is a danger to public safety. Waiving or eliminating standards exacerbates the staffing problem by demoralizing veteran officers and turning off high-quality candidates. Excellence attracts excellence. Police officers who can’t handle the physical and ethical rigors of the job risk achieving through their actions what the “defund the police” movement never could by debasing the profession in the eyes of the American people.

Those who claim to want better and safer policing have, by their choices and actions, put everyone at greater risk and assured that there will be both more crime and more police violence.  That is their choice.  


History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

The only means by which humanity can have a history and a continuing consciousness of itself.

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

We need not allow ourselves to be robbed of the agreeable feeling of progress attained, instead we will rejoice that reading and writing are no longer the prerogatives of a guild or caste. Since the invention of the printing press the book has become an object of general use and luxury distributed in huge quantities. Large printings make possible low book prices and therefore every country can make its best books (the so-called classics) available to those in modest circumstances. Then too we will not grieve very much over the fact | that the concept “book” has lost almost all its former splendor and that very recently the book seems to have sacrificed even more of its worth and attractiveness in the eyes of the crowd because of the cinema and the radio. And yet we need not fear a future elimination of the book. On the contrary, the more that certain needs for entertainment and education are satisfied through other inventions, the more the book will win back in dignity and authority. For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulation in words and the handing on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and a continuing consciousness of itself.

Students by Richard van Mensvoort

Students by Richard van Mensvoort



























Click to enlarge.

Thursday, February 23, 2023

The return of the ozone hole

Well, I wonder if that is true.

I have seen some similar claims in the past but their sources seemed suspect.

To a first order of magnitude, virtually all public policies fail.  I thought that the global coordination to reduce ozone gases in the Montreal Protocol was one of the few successes.  Sounds like there is at least some data that suggests that it did not make a difference.

The fifth salient rule is always, and in all situations, to stress the importance of the individual.

From Enemies of Society by Paul Johnson.

The Ten Pillars of our Civilization:

The fifth salient rule is always, and in all situations, to stress the importance of the individual. Where individual and corporate rights conflict, the political balance should usually be weighted in favor of the individual; for civilizations are created, and maintained, not by corporations, however benign, but my multitudes and multitudes of individuals, operating independently. We have seen how, under the Roman empire, political and economic freedom declined, pari passu, with the growth of the corporations, and their organization by the state. The Roman concept of the collegia survived; it was built into the Christian church, and so was carried over into the Dark Age towns and into the guilds of medieval and early modern society. Guild-forms were eventually transmuted into trade unions. The liberal epoch, which occurred after the powers of the guilds has been effectively curbed, and before the powers of the unions had been established, was thus a blessed and fruitful interval between the two tyrannies - fruitful, indeed, because it produced the Industrial Revolution, the first economic take-off, and thus taught the world how to achieve self-sustaining economic growth. The trade union is now increasing its economic power and its political influence faster than any other institutions in western society. It is not wholly malevolent, but is has certain increasingly reprehensible characteristics. One is that it claims, and gets, legal privilege; it thus breaks our forth commandment, the rule of law. Another is that it curbs the elitist urge in man, the very essence of civilization, and quite deliberately and exultantly reinforces the average. As Ortega Y Gasset puts it, in The Revolt of the Masses, 'The chief characteristic of our time is that the mediocre mind, aware of its own mediocrity, has the boldness to assert the rights of mediocrity and to impose them everywhere." Such an actual or potential menace to our culture can be contained, provided we keep this commandment strictly, and protect the individual against corporatism.

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

The more progressive you are, the more you depend on really rich people.

I was in a discussion the other day, talking about how states with income taxes can end up hostage to a very small number of resident tax payers.  New Jersey was the poster child I offered up but it has been a while since I have seen current numbers.

From California Budget Deficit is Even Worse than Gov. Newsom Initially Projected by Leslie Eastman.  The subheading is In contrast, Florida Gov. DeSantis announces plans to expedite 20 major road projects across Florida using his state’s budget surplus.  A nut unexpectedly partisan piece.  But it does have some data.  

California’s top income-tax rate is 13.3% on earners making more than $1 million. The top 0.5% of California taxpayers pay 40% of state income taxes. Volatile equity prices and layoffs at Silicon Valley companies are hitting capital gains. Companies are also cutting bonuses.

That's not good.

Well, maybe it's not so much of a problem if the state has multiple and diversified sources of income.  

Nope.

Income taxes make up 66% of the General Fund revenues.  

Through the magic of maths (66% X 40%), we can see that 26% of California's total spending depends on 0.5% of the richest taxpayers.  

There are two obvious problems with that.  One is a liberty and corruption issue.  As George Orwell noted in 1984, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."  If you are one of the 0.5%, it is inescapable that you have outsized influence because the state has made itself dependent on you.

The second problem is that which afflicted New Jersey back circa 2008-9.  They were dependent on a small number of wealthy taxpayers for a disproportionate amount of their annual budget.  Not just a random selection of wealthy taxpayers either.  They were dependent for their budget on the incomes of a small number of individuals all working in the financial sector. 

It didn't take a general recession to destroy their budget.  Just a bad year in the financial sector.

Data Talks

 

Today, so it seems, the world of writing and of the intellect is open to everyone

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

Today all this is apparently completely changed. Today, so it seems, the world of writing and of the intellect is open to everyone; indeed he is forcibly initiated into it if he hesitates. Today, so it seems, being able to read and write is little more than being able to breathe or at most knowing how to ride horseback. Writing and the book have apparently been divested of every special dignity, every enchantment, every magic. In religious circles, no doubt, there is still the concept of the “holy” book based on revelation; but since the single, still really powerful religious organization in the Occident, the Roman Catholic Church, puts no great value on seeing the Bible distributed as reading matter, there are in reality no holy books at all except those of a small number of orthodox Jews and the members of a few Protestant sects. Here and there the requirement may still persist that, when taking an oath, the person swearing must place his hand on the Bible; this gesture however is only a chill, dead remnant of a once blazing power and for the average person contains, like the form of the oath itself, no magical force whatever. Books have ceased to be mysteries, they are accessible to everyone, so it seems. From a liberal, democratic point of view this is progress and is accepted as a matter of course; from other points of view, however, it is a devaluation and vulgarization of the spirit.

Winter Landscape by Reinhold Ljunggren (Sweden 1920-2006)

Winter Landscape by Reinhold Ljunggren (Sweden 1920-2006)






























Click to enlarge.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

We seem monomaniacally focused on ensuring that bad services are equally distributed instead of ensuring that all citizens receive minimally acceptable services.

Revisiting some work by Peter Rossi.  In 1974, he published with others The Roots of Urban Discontent: Public Policy, Municipal Institutions, and the Ghetto.  The Abstract:

The central concern of this volume is to examine the interrelationships between three levels of urban social structure: (1) local public policy-makers, comprised of elected public officials, the heads of major municipal departments, and "civic notables," or persons who play important roles in urban civic life; (2) "institutional agents," or persons who operate on the grass roots levels of important urban structures, for example, policemen, teachers, case workers, retail merchants, and personnel offices of major employers; and (3) rank-and-file black citizens. The design of the study is comparative. Fifteen cities were examined, representing 13 of the 15 major metropolitan areas of the U. S. The historical context is early 1968 when the field work for the study was undertaken. The research described in this volume tends to support three major conclusions: First, the central institutions of different cities treat their black citizens quite differently. Second, black citizens keenly appreciate those differences. Third, the different treatment of blacks from place to place depends on the political strength that they can muster. In cities where blacks are a large proportion of the electorate, municipal administrations tend to be more attentive to black leaders. In cities where blacks are poorly organized or constitute a small minority, black citizens tend to get short shrift. (Author/JM)

There seems an implied assumption that in all fifteen instances, blacks were a minority percentage of the City population.  I wonder if that was the case?  

Rossi's report focused on the fact that African-Americans were receiving different levels of service while they were minorities in those large cities.  

That clearly and obviously is unacceptable where all citizens should have equal standing under the law and equal access to services.  

I would assume that we have substantially tackled and resolved clearly race-based differentials in cities simply because that is such a rich lawsuit environment.  I would also be confident that we still have substantial variances in city services but due to class rather than race.

Three quick spot-checks, Detroit, Baltimore, and Atlanta, confirms that all three of them were majority white in 1965 or 1970.  Apparently Washington, D.C. was the first large city to become majority black, which occurred in 1957.  

Today there is a long list of sizable cities which are majority black.  

Detroit (82.70%)
Jackson, Mississippi (79.40%)
Miami Gardens, Florida (76.3%)
Birmingham (73.5%)
Baltimore (64.3%)
Memphis (61.4%)
New Orleans (60.2%)
Richmond, Virginia (57.2%)
Flint (56.6%)
Montgomery (56.6%)
Savannah (55.0%)
Augusta (54.7%)
Cleveland (54.3%)
Atlanta (54.0%)
Newark (53.5%)
St. Louis (51.2%)
Shreveport (50.8%)
Portsmouth, Virginia (50.6%)
Baton Rouge (50.2%)

Class discrimination is no less repugnant than race discrimination but it is also dramatically more complicated and therefore, to some degree, more easily obfuscated.  (Some demographic history here)

What interests me is this:  if many (a plurality?) of our large cities are minority majority, how might that change the findings from 1974?

It is one thing to ensure that all citizens are receiving equal access to city services.  It is an entirely different issue to ensure that all citizens are receiving the minimum acceptable services.  And in many ways, a much more challenging objective.  

It is no accomplishment if everyone has equal access to bad city services.  We want them to have equal access to minimally acceptable city services.

But from public safety, to K-12 education, to public infrastructure, property security, to basic garbage collection, across the land complaints abound about declining services.  In many cases, especially public safety and K-12 education, it is empirically clear that measured service has declined while cost has risen.

That is not a racial discrimination issue, that is a governance effectiveness issue.  Yet we still seem wholly obsessed and monomaniacally focused on ensuring that bad services are equally distributed instead of ensuring that all citizens receive minimally acceptable services.