CapitalistImperialistPig

Andrew Sullivan, riffing on the statement of Pope Francis about gays, Lexuses, and other matters. One of the most telling things about Jesus is that he did not elucidate a theology. It had to be inferred by Paul. Jesus merely told stories of great charm and mystery. But he also clearly transformed the lives of those he encountered by the way in which he lived and died. It was that that convinced so many that this human being wasn’t just any other human being, that the divine had somehow transformed him, and he could transform others.

In my debates with the anti-MOOCitariat, one of the most frequent claims made for the in-person professoriat is that they "teach students how to think." I was talking recently to a entrepreneur who had been involved in trying to set up a program in his industry at a local University. He described how the committee of young professors and he had worked out what skills an entry level person in his industry needed and were all in general agreement. At that point the Dean showed up. He pronounced that the University could not be a "trade school" school because that wasn't what they did. What they did do, said the Dean, was teach people how to think. At this point, the entrepreneur gave up in disgust. You can teach people skills, he said, but nobody ever taught anybody how to think. My instinct was to agree, but I had a nagging feeling that there were parts of the thinking process that could be taught. How to analyze a problem or an argument, for example. So...

The modern recourse for anyone (or anyone wealthy enough) caught in public misbehavior is rehab. San Diego Mayor Bob Filner tries it out. If Hitler were alive today he wouldn't kill himself but instead promise to do six months intensive rehab.

G. K. Chesterton is a big fan of the medieval period and of the Catholic Church. He may not be an entirely reliable reporter, but has some interesting ideas. One of them is the notion that medieval times were an age of great human progress, perhaps especially in England. He credits the Church with the major influence in transforming a world of landholders and agricultural slaves into first serfs and later peasant proprietors. He also sees nascent democracy and egalitarianism in medieval institutions of guilds and charters. At the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This startling and silent transformation ...

From Josh Marshall : Bizarro fairyland country decides helpless newborn infant will be future head of state.

I've been reading G. K. Chesterton's A Short History of England . It's not so much a history as some idiosyncratic commentaries on English history from an unconventional point of view. One early comment that got my attention: ...the Romans returned and turned Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular indifference to questions that have excited so many professors. What they cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got and given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then, or for that matter the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know that in a short time they were Roman. Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith) (2012-05-12). A Short History of England (Kindle Locations 93-96). . Kindle Edition. However the Romans found Britain, they left it Roman, says Chesterton. Of course the same is true of much of the rest of Europe, and was true of much of the Middle East and North Africa. Despite repeated invasions f...

Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi let slip to his 26 year-old girlfriend that he and Whitey Bulger were FBI informants. For this, Whitey decided, she had to die, so Flemmi stood by while Bulger strangled her.

Everyone wants to reform education, but current trends, focusing on high stakes testing and extremely narrow measures of achievement seem more calculated to drive good teachers nuts than actually improve educational outcomes. So many teachers I talk to these days seem desperate to get out. If they have a lot of years in they are trapped by their pension plans. Meanwhile, an ever growing bureaucracy strangles initiative and eats up prep time and teaching time.

It seems that the leaker of Jo Rowling's pseudonym as mystery novelist has been revealed. A lawyer for her law firm leaked it to his wife's best friend. Through her publicist, Ms. Rowling released a statement saying that she was “disappointed.” “A tiny number of people knew my pseudonym and it has not been pleasant to wonder for days how a woman whom I had never heard of prior to Sunday night could have found out something that many of my oldest friends did not know,” she said. “I had assumed that I could expect total confidentiality from Russells, a reputable professional firm and I feel very angry that my trust turned out to be misplaced.” Well the friend got her ten minutes of notoriety. I would guess that she will lose a best friend, the best friend's husband will lose a cushy job, and his law firm will lose at least one very high profile client. If Rowling sues, can she claim damages for the extra two million or so she gets in sales?

I have now finished Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and I have to say that it wound up being pretty satisfying. He's a good writer, even if the tribulations of his family of characters are sometimes a bit much. If implausible coincidences aren't your thing, you might disagree, but he does have wit and style. I sometimes thought of the book as a sort of anti-pornography, in that there are rather explicit descriptions of sex, but never done with any enthusiasm. Another topic close to the heart of the book is food, and while it also rates a lot of semi-technical description, I rarely felt any stirrings of appetite inspired thereby.

Every happy family, said Tolstoy, is the same. The unhappy family in Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections gets annoying pretty quickly. Mainly it gets annoying because the main characters, though otherwise intelligent, are so thoroughly dedicated to making themselves miserable.

Jonathan Franzen has a certain penchant for the odd sentence or two, but I suspect he puts them in there just to annoy B R Myers, since he is a wonderful writer. Here is one paragraph that I like - which might also shed some light on the cost of college question: D—— College, with an elite reputation and a middling endowment, depended for its survival on students whose parents could pay full tuition. To attract these students, the college had built a $ 30 million recreation center, three espresso bars, and a pair of hulking “residence halls” that were less like dorms than like vivid premonitions of the hotels in which the students would book rooms for themselves in their well-remunerated futures. There were herds of leather sofas and enough computers to ensure that no prospective matriculant or visiting parent could enter a room and not see at least one available keyboard, not even in the dining hall or field house. Franzen, Jonathan (2001-09-15). The Corrections: A Novel (Recent Pic...

It looks like Pope John Paul II will achieve something gravity hasn't really managed, being canonized. The qualifications seem to be a good cheering section in the appropriate places and two certified miracles. It seems that someone prayed to him and was cured of cancer. I'm not too sure whom the other 100 million or so people with cancer prayed to, but they mostly had less luck. Still, considering that the guy was Pope of the whole world, one cancer cure seems like a pretty modest result, given the frequency of spontaneous remissions. I'd be more impressed by a more global miracle - say curing everybody's cancer, or maybe just the cancers of all Catholics. You could do it very scientifically, dividing up a large cohort of victims and having half pray to JP and the other half to Martin Luther or somebody. Don't we need a higher standard for full sainthood of a Pope? A one person miracle might be a nice intervention for the priest of a small village, but really...

The inflation rate for a University education has been growing explosively for decades - far faster than inflation and even medical inflation. Opinions on the shape of the Earth differ, here as elsewhere. This Forbes guy says it's simple: It's a subsidized good. That inflates demand. The economic logic has a certain truthiness to it, but it's lacking in the specificity I want. If education is sucking up a lot more money, into what is that money going? Lavish amenities for students and staff? Proliferation of new departments and majors (Asian Transgender Text Analysis, anyone?), big money for faculty and administrators, greedy bankers sucking on the bloating corpse of higher ed? I haven't been able to come up with numbers. Besides, higher education has been a subsidized public good in the US for well over a century. Why was it still dead cheap 40 or 50 years ago? It's at least plausible that the explosion in private college costs is mostly decoupled from th...

Like most of the rest of the people in my department, I'm being furloughed one day a week, which would be OK except that I won't get paid. It seems that the rules are quite strict. Like most other people, federal employees often work a bit more than a 40 hour week, but during furlough, no meetings are allowed to be scheduled before 0800 or after 1600 (4pm). Laptops and Blackberries must be turned off after work and on furlough days. I don't suppose I would be busted if I accidentally stayed a bit after my quitting time, but you never know.

A frequent topic on this blog has been the question of how a group of tiny, fiercely divided states in Western Europe managed to gain control of much of the world between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. They did this despite lacking significant advantages in technology, relatively tiny populations, and confrontation with the long established centers of human progress in the East. That, apparently, is one of the subjects of John Darwin's new book After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 , which is one of my latest non-fiction reads - just started. He begins by reviewing some of the history of history writing on this subject, from naive triumphalism, to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist critiques, to more sophisticated triumphalism ala Max Weber, to the anti-colonial critiques following Edward Said in the 1980s. I take it that he thinks he has a somewhat original vision, but I haven't gotten there yet. I heard about the book from Josh Marshall, who ha...

Josh Marshall has a series of simulated images based on various planets being as close as the moon . Jupiter and Saturn get pride of place naturally, but frankly I'd be a little concerned about the 1000 ft. tides.

I've been reading more of Christopher Boehm's books on hierarchy, egalitarianism, and the origins of our moral instincts (Hierarchy in the Forest and Moral Origins). It seems that the human race's political modes have followed a sort of U shaped trajectory. Our close ape relatives are all highly hierarchical, and quite likely we all had some sort of hierarchical society back before the divergence of our species. Modern human hunter-gatherer societies are the closest proxies we have for the way humans lived before the invention of agriculture, and it seems likely that for most of human history, or rather, the prehistory of our current species, we lived very much like them. These modern and recent counterparts seem invariably to be quite egalitarian in the sense that adult males of a band lack regular hierarchies. Since the delopment civilizations, however, we have all been stuck in relatively hierarchical societies. Even our most egalitarian democracies are pretty hier...

One of my resolutions for this year was to read ten novels, at least some of them contemporary and literary. So far I've read: Heart of Darkness, by Conrad A Bend in the River, by Naipaul Things Fall Apart, Achebe Infinite Jest, Wallace The Great Gatsby, by Fitzgerald Dracula, by Stoker Hunger Games, by Collins Any nominees for the rest?  I have a few queued up that I'm not too enthusiastic about (Age of Innocence by Wharton, Frankenstein (Shelley) and another Naipaul.)  Maybe something modern but not too obnoxious.

Wikipedia reminds us that: The Luddites /ˈlʌd.aɪts/ were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work. The professors now protesting the onset of the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) have a lot in common with their counterparts two centuries ago. Like them, they have a well-founded fear that their highly skilled occupations could disappear. Unfortunately, that seems to be the designated doom of a lot of middle class jobs today. I am disappointed in the quality of many of their protests. I'm old enough to know that professors have most of the vices of their fellow humans, but damn, they should at least be smart.

A new study (gated) by Ralph and Todd Stinebrickner reports that the relatively low number of science, technology, engineering and math graduates is not due to lack of interest in those subjects but by the fact that students planning to major in them find them too difficult. Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen have linked and commented, but I have yet to see anything deep on exactly why this is. I am absolutely confident that this result will surprise absolutely no one who has taught or studied physics or engineering. Anyone who gets an advanced degree in one of these subjects has noticed that they are better at that sort of thing than most of their contemporaries. For the overwhelming majority of us, we are also aware that we are not nearly as good at it as some other members of the profession. What factors account for these differences? There is a popular meme that it takes about ten thousand hours of fairly intense work to get good at anything "hard," whether it's ches...

Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse and played a key role in the development of text editors, hypertext, windows, and the internet. So far as I know, none of these activities made him fabulously wealthy, though he did achieve belated fame. His life is another illustration of the principle that great wealth comes not to those who make great inventions, but to those who figure out how to extract rents from those inventions - the Gates and Jobs of the world.

MOOC providers seem to be producing a few math courses, but most of them aren't on a level I think I would like. Coursera is offering a new course in Complex Analysis which slightly tempts me. Now it's true that I have taken a course or three in Complex Analysis before, but that was a long time ago, and I can't remember using it for decades. Maybe I might learn (or relearn) something.