Off Beat Humor

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Cardiff Docks by Lionel Walden

Cardiff Docks, 1894 by Lionel Walden

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Best of the Bee

New California Law Requires Separate Restrooms For People Who Think They Are Napoleon Bonapartehttps://t.co/AXLu7By4t8

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 2, 2019

They are disgusted by all this productivity and improvement in living conditions.

This whole article reeks of the ignorance and condescension of coercive idealism. In this instance, the profound disappointment that in free societies, men and women have different goals, pursue different strategies and achieve different outcomes - all without the approval of monlolithic statists.

From Too Many Elite American Men Are Obsessed With Work and Wealth by Derek Thompson. Filled with partial truths and overclaiming ("some research suggests" = "there is no rigorous evidence").

Even before men and women enter the workforce, researchers see this values gap and its role in the pay gap. A new study of several hundred NYU undergrads (elite students, not average 20-year-olds) found that young men and women with similar SAT scores express starkly diverging visions of their ideal job. Young female students, on average, say they prefer jobs with more stability and flexibility—“lower risk of job loss, lower hours, and part-time option availability”—while male students, on average, say they prefer more earnings growth, according to researchers Matthew Wiswall, at Arizona State University, and Basit Zafar, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The qualifier “on average” is important here. Genders are not uniform blocs. Some women are more interested in being millionaires than some men; some men are more interested in working part-time than their female friends.

Students’ values shape their majors and their jobs. Those who want to make a lot of money (on average, more men) are more likely to major in economics or business; men are more than 50 percent more likely than women to major in economics at every Ivy League university. Those who prize flexibility and accept lower pay (on average, more women) are more likely to be in the humanities. When Wiswall and Zafar followed up several years later, they discovered that college values predict first jobs: “Students with strong preferences for flexible hours and distaste for hours” were more likely to be in jobs with flexible hours and fewer hours.

Young American men’s preference for risk and reward has been established in other research. In a 2005 study from Stanford University, men and women solving math equations for money in a university lab were given the option to complete the problems in a tournament, where they had a smaller chance of winning but a higher potential reward. Men were twice as likely as women to enter the tournament—73 percent compared to 35 percent—and many who entered the tournament won less money. The study’s conclusion: Women sometimes shy away from competition, but also, “men compete too much.”

When Harvard Business School surveyed 25,000 of its male and female graduates, it found that high-achieving women failed to meet their career goals. At graduation, most women said they expected “egalitarian” marriages, where both spouses’ careers were taken equally seriously, but several years later, more women had deferred their husbands’ careers. This study, and others, suggest that while married couples often make work-and-home decisions as a unit, the cultural expectation that men be the top providers proves to be an insurmountable force, even (or especially) among the best educated households.

The grave disappointment in the fact that people are varied in ways the ideologists find repugnant is almost palpable. People are such a disappointment to the progressive Mandarin Class. Rather than celebrate the freedom of people to pursue their own goals and means, the clerisy find fault in diversity.

And who is to blame for this dystopian failure? Why, rich white men of course. They are working way too hard to make America the freest, safest, wealthiest, most innovative country in the world. They just better stop that because the progressive Mandarin Class are sick and tired of people getting to choose how they are fulfilled. They are disgusted by all this productivity and improvement in living conditions.

The Calf-Path

The Calf-Path
by S.W. Foss

One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day,
By a lone dog that passed that way.
And then a wise bell-wether sheep,
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep;
And drew the flock behind him too,
As good bell-wethers always do.

And from that day, o'er hill and glade.
Through those old woods a path was made.
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about;
And uttered words of righteous wrath,
Because 'twas such a crooked path.
But still they followed - do not laugh -
The first migrations of that calf.
And through this winding wood-way stalked,
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane,
that bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load,
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half,
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare;
And soon the central street was this,
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half,
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout,
Followed the zigzag calf about;
And o'er his crooked journey went,
The traffic of a continent.
A Hundred thousand men were led,
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent,
To well established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind,
Along the calf-paths of the mind;
And work away from sun to sun,
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.

They keep the path a sacred grove,
Along which all their lives they move.

But how the wise old wood gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah! many things this tale might teach -
But I am not ordained to preach.

Sacrificing principles for expediency.

Hmmm. RealClearPolitics is on fire. Another excellent piece from Trump's True Crime: He Made People Laugh at Congress by Frank Miele.

I empathize with the sentiment but am not wholly convinced. However, it is a clear and well-structured argument which introduces new facts and a new perspective to an otherwise tiresome debate over impeachment.

If there were any doubt that the House of Representatives in 1868 was engaged in a strictly political persecution of a president they hated, consider the language of impeachment Article 10, which argued:

“That said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony and courtesies which ought to exist and be maintained between the executive and legislative branches of the Government of the United States … did attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof, which all officers of the government ought inviolably to preserve and maintain, and to excite the odium and resentment of all good people of the United States against Congress and the laws by it duly and constitutionally enacted…”

In other words, Johnson was a boor who had the temerity to speak ill of Congress! This reveals the low bar of impeachment when it is wielded as a weapon and it is an echo of what truly annoys Nancy Pelosi about our lowbrow president. How easy to substitute Donald Trump’s name before the claim that “he did bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States.”

No doubt members of Congress don’t like to have their noses tweaked, but what they should remember is that the president (either Johnson or Trump) is usually doing it on behalf of us, the American people. Indeed, the last part of Article 10 brings to my mind a picture of Speaker Pelosi scowling as she watches Trump tickle the crowd at one of his MAGA rallies with his schtick about “Pencil-neck Schiff,” “Nervous Nancy” and the Do-Nothing Congress. You really would be forgiven for thinking that Johnson was an avatar of Trump, based on this further description of the 1868 bill of particulars against the president:

“... in pursuance of his said design and intent, openly and publicly and before divers assemblages of citizens of the United States, convened in divers parts thereof ... [Johnson] did … on divers ... days and times … make and declare, with a loud voice, certain intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces, as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby, amid the cries, jeers and laughter of the multitudes then assembled in hearing.”

There were other articles of impeachment as well — 11 in all — but none rose to any level of true seriousness. In the end, the Senate only voted on three of the charges, and Johnson narrowly escaped conviction despite the Senate being heavily dominated by Republicans. It was to seven of them who could not be bullied into submission that Democrat Johnson owed his survival. They put country ahead of politics.

Interesting. Andrew Johnson was not an especially sympathetic figure and is easy to dislike on many grounds, but impeachment centers us on the reality that we are talking about institutions that need to be defended rather than individual politicians. Johnson was a hardly defensible president but the institutions of the federal republic, due process, constitutionalism, etc. shouldn't have been ransacked and irresponsibly manipulated simply in pursuit of an expedient end.

An unhealthy asymmetry

An interesting opening. From Trump's Week vs. Washington's Week: It's No Contest by Steve Cortes.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” So begins Charles Dickens’ classic novel “A Tale of Two Cities.” The political reality in America reflects a sort of Dickensian dichotomy at present.

Indeed. A nice encapsulation of an argument I have made before.

I don't think we have the polarization the MSM and politicians like to chatter on about. For ninety percent of Americans, we all rub along more or less amicably. And most of us are sick and tired of the Mandarin Class - their arrogance, their ignorance, their corruption and their incompetence. Leave us alone and let us get on our with our productive lives, free from your statist agendas.

Both establishment parties are at risk in this view and it is worldwide phenomenon. In the US, one party is further along in learning to respond to real citizens rather than just to special interests but they are both struggling.

I have also made the argument that this all seems an existential crisis because the Mandarin Class, mainstream media, the entertainment industry and a good chunk of Academia are all concentrated in a handful of deep blue mega-cities which, because of their malign benevolent statist policies, suffer excessive taxes, poor government services, deep financial inequality, financial fragility, homelessness, poverty, mental health issues, etc. far in excess of anywhere else in the US. For journalists, they are reporting the hell they are living and think it is representative of the rest of America.

Cortes captures it nicely. A Tale of Two Nations, perhaps; the part within those blue cities and then everywhere else. And the Mandarin Class in those handful of cities have their own market square called Twitter. That is where they meet, talk, lament. But they fail to recognize that even if the Agora is outraged, it still only represents 22% of Americans. Primarily Blue America. Most people with rich complex lives out beyond the bounds of the metropolitan are too busy to indulge themselves on Twitter. Their voices are lost from the Mandarin Class conversation. And when not lost, when they speak up, they are deplatformed and cancelled.

It is definitely a partisan column but strongly argued. He makes an additional point on another topic which I have not seen elsewhere.

Like Osama bin Laden, Baghdadi met his fate with assistance from valiant U.S. special ops forces. Those troops eliminated this menace with bravery, skill, and precision. Their success reflects well on our unmatched military and on the commander-in-chief. President Trump dispatched Baghdadi and the larger geopolitical threat of his evil caliphate without the risks of a wholesale U.S. invasion and the concomitant costs and pitfalls of idealistic nation-building.

Somehow, the thoroughly biased media found fault with this unquestionable success. They wailed that the it had happened “in spite” of Trump, rather than at his direction. The obstinance of the liberal establishment press contrasted starkly with conservative media in 2011, which overwhelmingly congratulated President Obama following the great achievement of dispatching bin Laden. For conservatives, killing the 9/11 mastermind superseded partisanship. For mainstream media in 2019, hatred of Trump eclipses even patriotic tendencies to celebrate the elimination of a dangerous threat to our nation. So torn was the Washington Post that the headline on its obituary for this monster described him as an “austere religious scholar.” Reacting to that tone-deaf description, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo highlighted Baghdadi’s personal role in the rape and murder of American aid worker Kayla Mueller and stated: “To suggest that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was anything other than a murderous terrorist is truly sick.”

Everyone has been talking about the tone deafness and inappropriateness of the mainstream media response to the death of al-Baghdadi but I haven't seen anyone else comment on the asymmetry. That Republicans celebrated the Democratic achievement in 2011 but the Democrats cannot bring themselves to celebrate the same accomplishment on the part of Republicans.

Off Beat Humor

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The Three Sisters of Nauset-1880 by Charles Wysocki

The Three Sisters of Nauset-1880 by Charles Wysocki

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The Bean Eaters

The Bean Eaters
by Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering ...
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.