Category Archives: View

View 778 Friday, June 21, 2013

SUMMER SOLSTICE

The longest Day of the Year

Actually for Californians the moment of solstice was last night. Tonight will be the brightest Full Moon of the year. Go have a look. I don’t think it matters to werewolves. Though. Full moon is full moon…

I have been gathering information for my education reform piece, but the deeper I get into the miasma that education has become, the more I realize that before there can be actual reform there needs to be some recognition of the problem – and that we are due to lose a lot of children to this monster before anything can be done. I’ve also been working on suggestions as to what parents can do to save their kids.

As Charles Murray observed in his Coming Apart (http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-America-1960-2010-ebook/dp/B00540PAXS/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 and see also Murray’s talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBxqDTA0hc4 ) in many places it is not so apparent that we are in an educational mess. The ruling classes mostly live in their own small worlds, and they don’t see the problems. Fairfax County Virginia may notice that the schools aren’t quite as good as they used to be – at least those who have lived there a while will. There are problems, but they aren’t so acute as they are for the rest of the world. On the other hand, the disastrous No Child Left Behind – which meant No Child Will Ever Get Ahead – policies imposed on most of America have had and are having terrible effects. Other ‘reforms’ have been equally ineffective.

Of course all this thrashing about is a misguided attempt to pay attention to the 1983 Commission on education headed by Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, which famously concluded that “If a foreign country had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.” This produced a flurry of top down actions dictated across the nation, most of which, by the time the bureaucrats and unions had got through with them, made things worse.

The Golden Age of American education came back when the question of “Federal Aid to Education” was an actual political topic, and there was no massive Federal Aid to education. American schools were run by mostly local school boards, and the school boards were elected by the local taxpayers who paid for the schools. The result was a mixture, of course, with some schools being starved of funds while others had plenty of money but it was not well spent, but overall it worked quite well. In a few places like Los Angeles where the schools were consolidated into enormous districts of hundreds of schools the system was so large that the only controls were bureaucratic, and the school boards were professional politicians, but by and large local communities got the schools they wanted and deserved.

But meanwhile the experts and bureaucrats were growing more powerful. The Cold War presumably showed our schools inferior to the Communist schools of Russia and the Captive Nations. A cry went up for Federal Aid to the schools, and the long and successful tradition of resistance to Federal and even State control of the local schools was defeated. Money came in, and with the money came bureaucratic control, and that mean ‘credentials’. It was no longer possible for a local school board to hire a teacher because the board considered a retired military officer qualified to teach high school history, or a local educated housewife facing an empty nest to become the fifth grade teacher. Everyone had to have credentials, and the credentials could only be granted by increasingly expensive colleges of education, and the disasters became worse.

Everyone knows that standards at colleges of education are not high compared to the other departments on campus. Getting credentials requires a lot of effort and even some work, but what it learned in an education department course on teaching a subject is small compared to what would have been learned has the prospective teacher taken a course on the same subject from the English, or mathematics, or history department at the same university. If you don’t know this, go to any nearby college and ask the first twenty people you meet which is the least difficult department.

So the prospective teacher graduates as an indentured servant, owing a debt that will take years to repay and possibly will never be paid, and which cannot be avoided even by bankruptcy. It reminds me of the Soviet Union, which had “free” education, but anyone who had partaken of it was refused permission to emigrate because they owed the state for that education.

I am rambling because I really hadn’t intended to write an essay but rather explain some of what I am doing just now. I haven’t been terribly active this week and there’s a reason.

If you are happy with the schools we have then what I am working on will not be of much use; but for those who see just where our school system is taking us, it might be important.

But before we analyze the school system and try to see what can be done to save it, we first need to identify the really critical groups at risk.

First and foremost are the bright children in a hopeless school from which there is no escape. There are a lot of them.

The second group in the most danger are children of normal intelligence, who are going to be sent to college because they learn nothing useful in high school, and will graduate from college with huge debts and few to zero marketable skills. These are the kids who ought to grow up to be the middle class that governs America: as Aristotle noted, the best government is government by the middle class, the middle class being defined as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. Note that this group includes what used to be called skilled workers.

All of which bring us to a controversial point: I am assuming that most of my readers understand that equal education for everyone is expensive, counterproductive, and impossible. The attempt to do it inevitably bring on bad results

This objective truth conflicts with the American ideal of treating everyone equally, and of course has been used as an excuse for arbitrary discrimination, and might be so used again. The fact remains that not everyone will benefit from a university education. Not everyone can benefit from a college education. When we get down to community college – what used to be called junior college – level the question is different: of those who should not go to college or university, how many must go to junior college only because the high schools are so awful? Will more benefit from expanding the junior colleges, or reforming the high schools?

These are the questions to address as citizens.

There is also the question of what to do now? If you are the parent of children in need of an education, what must you do? Clearly they can’t be neglected while waiting for this system, so bad that had it been imposed on us by a foreign power we would rightly consider it an act of war, is dismantled and rebuilt?

I invite comments.

View 778 Tuesday, June 18, 2013

I had several possible leads today but this mail really got my interest.

I came across this blog today on math education, it is not behind a paywall:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

I don’t any formal experience with evaluating ideas, but this makes sense to me. For instance, back in the 8 bit world when I was teaching myself programming, I could flounder around and figure out a routine for myself, that took a lot of lines, took a lot of processing time, and kind of did want I wanted, a friend of mine, who was from the magnetic drum era, knocked it out in 3 lines. He then gave me a book on algorithms which both saved me a huge amount of time and made me a much better programmer.

tonyb

The article by Alice Crary and W. Stephen Wilson is very much worth your attention. My children are long out of school, and while I have been following the repeated disasters in public education as education theory takes over from experience to produce teachers with credentials who can’t teach I hadn’t seen this one.

At stake in the math wars is the value of a “reform” strategy for teaching math that, over the past 25 years, has taken American schools by storm. Today the emphasis of most math instruction is on — to use the new lingo — numerical reasoning. This is in contrast with a more traditional focus on understanding and mastery of the most efficient mathematical algorithms.
A mathematical algorithm is a procedure for performing a computation. At the heart of the discipline of mathematics is a set of the most efficient — and most elegant and powerful — algorithms for specific operations. The most efficient algorithm for addition, for instance, involves stacking numbers to be added with their place values aligned, successively adding single digits beginning with the ones place column, and “carrying” any extra place values leftward.

What is striking about reform math is that the standard algorithms are either de-emphasized to students or withheld from them entirely. In one widely used and very representative math program — TERC Investigations — second grade students are repeatedly given specific addition problems and asked to explore a variety of procedures for arriving at a solution. The standard algorithm is absent from the procedures they are offered. Students in this program don’t encounter the standard algorithm until fourth grade, and even then they are not asked to regard it as a privileged method.

The battle over math education is often conceived as a referendum on progressive ideals, with those on the reform side as the clear winners. This is reflected, for instance, in the terms that reformists employ in defending their preferred programs. The staunchest supporters of reform math are math teachers and faculty at schools of education. While some of these individuals maintain that the standard algorithms are simply too hard for many students, most take the following, more plausible tack. They insist that the point of math classes should be to get children to reason independently, and in their own styles, about numbers and numerical concepts. The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth. The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.

Reform math has some serious detractors. It comes under fierce attack from college teachers of mathematics, for instance, who argue that it fails to prepare students for studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. These professors maintain that college-level work requires ready and effortless competence with the standard algorithms and that the student who needs to ponder fractions — or is dependent on a calculator — is simply not prepared for college math. They express outrage and bafflement that so much American math education policy is set by people with no special knowledge of the discipline.

There is considerably more, and all worth your time.

The problem is that we no longer know what the public schools are for, and we no longer recognize that a good public school system would make high school the normal education for citizens, with junior colleges to teach skills not so easily learned in apprenticeships, colleges as the place for those who want more education or need some credentials to make a living (teachers, accountants) and universities for those who are seriously going into professions needing high levels of technical competence. Liberal arts colleges we will leave for another discussion – there are many publications on that.

But the essential point is that public education can’t give everyone the same education. We need not go to the extremes they have in Japan and other places where early examination scores determine the course of your education and your life from then on; but we do need to recognize that not everyone needs to know algebra and calculus, and trying to bestow that as a right is to doom the ones who should know it to being forced to learn at the pace of those who never will learn them.

Jacques Barzun dealt with much of this a very long time ago in his Teacher in America, and anyone who hasn’t read that has both a treat and an epiphany in store. http://www.amazon.com/Teacher-America-Jacques-Barzun/dp/0913966797 alas not in Kindle, at least as yet.

I have errands but I recommend the Crary and Wilson essay to everyone and strongly urge it on all those with children in grade school.

I will also point out that many elementary schools no longer require learning the plus and times – addition and multiplication – tables by heart in first grade (an age at which it’s easy to learn such things by heart). Not knowing the plus and times tables by heart is a great handicap for the rest of one’s life. Like being able to read from an early age on, knowing those algorithms – I recommend learning them to 20 rather than the traditional 10, largely because if you know them to 20 you will inevitably notice some patterns that will make learning some other things about number easier – is a great gift. It saves time in everything from counting change to calculating the tip in a restaurant, and a hundred other things you do daily.

If you are involved with elementary education, either as a teacher or a parent, read the Crary and Wilson essay – and go read Barzun. And if you have read Barzun it won’t hurt to read him again.

"Playing balance of power games, subsidizing one enemy to fight another, is a game of high risk and high skill."

Does anyone really think the current administration possesses the talents to manage this?

s/f

Couv

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

I have no evidence to suggest that we have those skills at the cabinet level in the United States, nor have we politicians who understand their own limits at such matters of state.  This has always been a defect of a republic: it has to go to war to develop long term professionals in such matters.  We are at a war without such development, and the result is that it appears to be war without end.  We do not have a Richelieu or a Metternich, nor indeed a Pitt or a Palmerston. We have people capable of such finesse but they are not likely to be put in power, nor left there if they get there. 

It was not from lack of understanding of political history that many of our Framers concluded that America’s best course was to be the city on a hill, a shining example of the fruits of liberty.  We are the friends of liberty everywhere but we are guardians only of our own.

Thor

Hi,

A friend sent me a link. I’ve seen THOR referenced in a couple of science fiction books, sure, but in a comic about 20-somethings working in a coffee shop?

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2468

Ed

Ed Hahn

Complete with tungsten.  Well, my original papers were never classified.  The proposals that were generated by them were, but I suspect that even they have long been declassified.

Subject: Educating Educators Lost

A new study rates almost all U.S. college programs that try to prepare persons to be teachers at mediocre or below.

One quote, "We don’t know how to prepare teachers"

I guess, at one time, we did know how to prepare teachers. We must have forgotten along the way.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/university-programs-that-train-us-teachers-get-mediocre-marks-in-first-ever-ratings/2013/06/17/ab99d64a-d75b-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html?hpid=z2

—

Dwayne Phillips

Go to any college campus and ask the first 20 people you meet which department is toughest and which is easiest.  Ask the next 20 if they have any Mickey Mouse majors.

Teaching is part knowledge and part skill.  The knowledge should come from the same place that other students get it. To teach math one ought to know some math. Etc.  The Ed Dept. courses in math and science are generally taught by education theorists, so the result are expected.  Of course there are exceptions.  There are some good education schools.

When the Rev. Moon bought Bridgeport University they asked me as one of a list of consultants what they ought to do with it.  I suggested starting a University Grammar School that took in neighborhood kids – it is not in a university district so there would be plenty of diversity – and had the classes taught by teachers who actually could teach, and who were the advisory council for the department of education and had full control of it. A different picture.  I pointed out that we could get a number of people involved in this including Barzun and Annette Kirk who was one of the principal authors of the 1983 National Commission on Education “Seybold Report”.  We could probably get Seybold himself – he had just attended one of Moon’s International Society for the Unification of the Sciences meetings in Seoul and I had actually discusses this with him.  We could in other words get things started well and use the actual school results as the criteria, and perhaps change the world.

Alas it didn’t happen, in part due to opposition of the Bridgeport faculty who were afraid of Moon and his interference:  I tried to point out that not a single one of the consultants he had brought in to try to organize this was a member of the Unification Church.  Some were Catholic, some were Protestant, some were Jews, and at least one public atheist.  Ah well. It would have been a lot of work for me, and for my wife who would have had to organize the reading instruction program for first and second grade and probably would have worked directly with the first teacher class. 

It didn’t happen but it still could, somewhere.  We used to do that sort of thing. Look what I learned in Capleville with 2 grades to the classroom in the Depression.  It can be done but we have to want to do it, and the progressives  — well, we’ve been through all this before.;

View 778 Sunday, June 16, 2013

Rumors abound as to how we will be involved in our new little war in Syria. We are about to subsidize al Qaeda, against whom we are in a formal war if we assume that our War on Terror has an actual opponent to be at war with, against the government of Syria which as the support of Hezbollah and Russia. I don’t know how this ends, but it is easy to predict some results: things will go badly for someone. There will be civilian casualties with a teddy bear involved. The US will be blamed for it. Eventually someone will win. If they don’t hate us, there will be a subsidized terror program designed to install a government that does hate us.

Our enemies are shooting at each other.

Jerry-

Has it been considered that the Sunni Shiite conflict has been suppressed since colonial times? And that our enemies are basically shooting at each other?

Could Obama be trying to balance the sides and keep the young men fighting each other and wasting energy and hate on each other. Last face off was Iran/Iraq war 1980-1988. I was in high school (and hence oblivious), but I don’t recall that being a time when we were concerned about terrorism. Facing down Russia, yes.

The strategy has been used, and filed in the back of my head is the notion that it is unpredictable and risky. But could it be the strategy? Could it be Putin’s strategy to encourage their Muslim minorities to send off the young hotheads to . . . I confess the temptation to insert something about David and Goliath and blood in the sands and I really must stop.

But, freely quoted "I will have more freedom of action after I am re-elected." And on Fox News Sunday Britt Hume noted that Whitehouse strategy for presidential exposure seems to have changed in the last few weeks. NSA basically sent out the press secretary to the Sunday shows. Hmm. . .

David Schierholz

Playing balance of power games, subsidizing one enemy to fight another, is a game of high risk and high skill.

Roberta doesn’t compact her Outlook.pst file often and the result is that today we got the dreaded corrupt pst message instructing us to run scanpst. That works – it’s running now and I assume it will run to completion and all will be well since it always has worked for me – but first you have to get it working. Windows and Outlook between work to make that difficult. First off, although the error message tells you to run scanpst.exe, you will not easily find scanpst on your Windows machine. The new and improved Windows search program sucks dead bunnies through a straw. Roberta’s computer had never heard of scanpst and told me to go away. Microsoft Help was as helpful as usual, which is not very. Since Roberta’s system was installed with everything using the default places you’d think this would be easy, but the Microsoft Find can’t find many program files. It doesn’t think it should let you know they exist.

Eventually I figured out where scanpst resides, which is in the same place the outlook startup file resides, hidden away in a deep drill; once you find the scanpst file you can click on it to open it, and browse for the outlook.pst file it needs to scan. Good luck on that one. It’s buried deep in the users area. Fortunately the actual path is given in the error message that sent you doing this task, so if you kept it alive can find where the pst file is hidden; if you didn’t you can try to start Outlook again, which will produce the error message again. This time keep it. Now start scanpst.exe again because the program can’t work if any part of outlook is open. Now browse down and down and down until you find the outlool.pst file, and Bob’s your uncle.

The default place for scanpst.exe is in program files (or program files x86 on a 64 bit machine) Microsoft Office/Office 12/ for Office 7. There are other folders for other versions of Office. Whoever thought up the Microsoft default folder scheme must have had access to controlled substances and a wicked sense of humor.

When Work Disappears – Excellent essay and comments

Dear Jerry,

Megan McArdle had an excellent essay Friday on the point that you have been making for decades: What happens when work opportunities disappear for those who most struggle to be employed?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/14/when-work-disappears.html

Jim Ransom

Good essay. Recommended.  Thanks.

The free trade people, the comprehensive immigration reform people, the unions, the ruling cless and all its branches, and almost everyone else have been talking past each other on these points for years to no effect.

One would presume that “social scientists” would at some point see that as Moore’s Law continues the need for low skill work other than personal service vanishes into automation, and that a “Better Safety Net” translates into a large part of the population living off the dole and enjoying television. I believe back when historians studies history they called I Bread and Circuses, perhaps spiced with subsidized drugs. A nation with a large voting bloc that knows it does no useful work – I vote the X Party for a living – often develops undesirable character traits. We have known this for a long time, but it is now not politically correct to say so.

And we are still discovering what is in the Affordable Health Act, which turns out to be incentive to eliminate much of the health care that is already afforded.

We live in interesting times. And we have yet to discover what else is in the Act that we had to pass so that would could find out what’s in it. Sometimes I think they put things in the DC water supply several years ago and are now getting around to doping the water in Fairfax County.

View 777 Saturday, June 15, 2013

Russell Seitz has been thinking again:

THE END OF OBSCURITY

Dear Jerry :

As we have both experienced the often-frustrating reality of ‘original archival research’ in the great libraries of the world, I want to report that change is in the dusty air. It used to be the case that the more distant events were in time, the less the likelihood of retrieving novel information about them. The problem was not the lack of ancient records, but their sheer abundance.

There is nothing novel about the latest NSA privacy scandal- the tendency of state bureaucracies and courts to gather and hoard information about citizens is as old as time, and it is from the court’s own realization of the horrors of information retrieval in bottomless archival pits that modern statutes of limitation have arisen.

The consequence of manuscript hoarding was to sink most of the historical record in oceans of trivia deep enough to drown all but the most persevering scholars. You could easily spent a month in the archives or the stacks retrieving just one new kilobyte to add to the sum of history, and far more of that time would be spent flipping through thousands of cards in a paper catalogue than reading the few documents you elected to retrieve.

Nowhere was this problem more evident than in the dozens of Staatsbibliotek holding the gathered sum of paper once held in the archives of the 300-odd principalities and city-states that preceded the unification of Germany under Bismarck. This archival opacity did not pass un-noticed, and a few decades ago many foundations, like Volkswagen, committed future cash flows to synoptic efforts to map both archives and archaeology with equally Teutonic thoroughness. In short, they decided to upload the middle Ages,

But as the foundation subsidized scanning began, something unexpected happened. Computer search software got smarter at a pace eclipsing Moore’s Law, and the project began to run ahead of schedule, as software fixes reduced the redundancy of uploading the same documents from many different archives, creating a positive feedback that eliminated multiple record entries that wasted scholarly reading time. So while a generation ago, it could take a lifetime of scholarly stack time to find enough new material to extend history by a handful of pages, the intellectual productivity of the paper chase has soared.

Today anybody can go online and find material that holds new meaning in a matter of hours rather than months

Forget the fast forwarding of history by technological change – we are experiencing the acceleration of historiography, and just as personalized medicine is rapidly arising from the now completed sequencing of the human genome, the nearly completed indexing of deep historical time has begun to personalize history in an unanticipated way. Our ancestors’ distant lives are swimming into three-dimensional focus in the newly illuminated archival depths.

Once all the curious could hope for was dry genealogy, filtered through imperfect recall, and linear parish records decimated by everything from the Thirty Years War to the Blitz. But as the new search algorithms chew on the whole surviving record, they keep spitting out startling vignettes of cases, events and conflicts that though centuries old, come with names attached, names that until now, were, for lack of automate indexing, for all practical purposes permanently forgotten. The old rule of thumb was to expect the average ancestral trail to fade and go cold in the ten generations or so it took for mice, bookworms or lightening to strike out parochial records.

No longer- we are witnessing a sort of historiographical phase transition, as opaque archives melt down into pools of data clear enough to see the bottom, inviting even amateurs to dive in to look for and surprisingly often find pieces of history with their family’s names on them, or even spot familiar faces in the long dead crowds, for the Great Uploading does not stop at all the words the archivists can scan. It aspires to include every image of the last millennium. Here’s a splendid book length example of what one worthy amateur medievalist, Jeffrey Hull ,has done with such a freshly scanned manuscript

http://www.thearma.org/pdf/Fight-Earnestly.pdf <http://www.thearma.org/pdf/Fight-Earnestly.pdf>

Overlawyered modernity may owe much to defendant’s strong desire not to have to defend themselves by having plaintiffs hack at them unarmored to let God sort out the torts, but we owe even more to the archival software hackers who have so abruptly brought transparency to the not-so-recent past.

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

And a note

Jerry, the scanned Ms that got me stated on this subject, because it contained the startling images of the 1370 Seitz-Theobald Munich fight is the Bayerische Staats Bibliothek onlone facsimile of De Arte Athletica , by Paul Hector Mair, a printed and illustrated 1542 book based on 14th and 15th century illuminated manuscripts and incunabuli , in his case including Sigismund Mesisterlin’s 1457 Augsberg Chronik. http://www.thearma.org/essays/Theobald-versus-Seitz.pdf

It may intrigue you to know that the judge of the 1370 trial, Stephan II, Duke of Bavaria and vogt of Swabia and Alsace married Elisabeth of Sicily, a daughter of Frederick III of Sicily <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_III_of_Sicily> and Eleanor of Anjou <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Anjou> , also known as Isabel of Aragon. As if to prove my very brief essay’s point, I didn’t even have to ask- the Teutonically Thorough hyperlinks just up and told me.

SO the equivalent of the NSA has recorded much of the  High Middle Ages, and it is being made available to the world – and we can conclude that similar sources will be available to historians of our era.  Just when did this begin, I wonder?

What did you search on that started you thinking on this? I am formatting now, but I want to be thorough

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

It began with the report in a Harvard hard copy of Gaines’ New York Gazette that in 1778 a Major Seitz was stationed in the city at the head of a regiment from his native Hesse-Cassell.

Intrigued by the fratricidal possibility of his running in to Lt. Charles Seitz of the Continental Army, I began a Googling and soon discovered that

1. the major had made colonel and ended up heading the Regiment von Seitz , and briefly commanding the British garrison in Halifax Nova Scotia, where he has been safely buried in the crypt of St. Pauls Church. <http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=70849504&PIpi=43433355> , beneath an explanatory hatchment, since expiring in 1782 Wanting to know if he was a for real Freiherr, or bumped up from Ritter like von Steuben when he achieved field rank,

2. There was a second Hanoverian Major named Seitz, this one from Wurttemburg, who died of his war wounds aboard the ship returning him to England and was buried at sea off the Scilly Isles.

I entered the late ‘Colonel de Seitz’ s full name, and shazam , in chronological order their appeared every one of the name in uploaded history, commencing with the Seitz von Altheim acquitted in the 1370 trial by combat– I had no idea there were so many.

I think the cutest thing about the scanning software that’s been deployed is that it tells all the librarians to stop if they try to scan a second copy of something already uploaded elsewhere– , which enormously speeds the process, since on average, I’d guess that ten or more of the hundreds of institutions involved may hold surviving copies of the same work. This assures that for the first time in archival history , _most _ of what they are putting up is of some historical novelty– they are literally making the past new.

Russell

I wonder how far back the records in Normandy go…

Formats.

The projects for uploading the various historiographically-significant records and images are, at least within the demense of each individual project, utilizing self-consistent file formats, thus making it relatively easy to search and correlate the data.

However, the records of our computerized era, starting from the 1960s, are quite the opposite – a veritable Cloud of Babel.

The irony is that thanks to the efforts of these scholars and the corporate donors who made their work possible, we can perform combinatorial analysis of data from centuries past, we have problems reading storage devices and parsing file formats from a mere 20 years ago.

Progress?

Roland Dobbins

climate

Nice to see that you agree with so many others that climate warming is all just a product of grant favoritism.

I guess those rising sea levels aren’t going to be a problem for you. You’ll be dead before Florida and Louisiana is washed away.

Henry Stipple

Every now and again I post an example of why I do not allow unedited contributions to my site.  I am certain Mr. Stipple believed he was contributing to rational discussion.

Of course sea levels have been rising for millennia, due to the melting of glacial ice and the rise of land that had been under the ice.  How much the sea levels are rising and more to the point why they rise is a complex matter.  I agree that I will be dead well before Florida and Louisiana have been washed away but I don’t see how that is relevant to discussing rational industrial policies on energy generation.  We know that the climate has been warming since 1776 when the guns of Ticonderoga were brought across the frozen Hudson to General Washington in Haarlem Heights. We also know that a good bit of the warming since that time took place before 1880.  Beyond that we aren’t dealing with observations but models and beliefs.  But that is too complex a concept to be expressed in one snarky sentence.

I recall during the 70’s and well into the 80’s the concern at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was the coming Ice Age.  I recall Gus Spaeth one of Carter’s environmental advisors and on the White House Staff telling a AAAS meeting that the reason we had to store nuclear wastes so carefully was that he feared a return of the Ice Age and he would not want the return of the glaciers to spread nuclear waste across the land.  When it was pointed out to him that if your house were under a kilometer of ice you might have a larger problem than contamination by the4 actinides left in the nuclear waste he really had little to say in answer.

I welcome rational debate but I do not accept proof by repeated assertion as evidence.

U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

Companies are “trusted partners” of our spy agencies? What does this mean?

Our corporate and governmental overlords are collaborating. Where will this lead? With such collaboration there is no counterbalancing force. I fear Lord Acton’s observation about power – something our Constitution was designed to prevent.

The Constitution. Sic transit Gloria mundi.

Ed

I happened to think of this tonight and realized that a good half of my readers will never have read it nor had it read to them; and that’s a pity.  General Wolfe, being rowed up the river the night before the Battle of Quebec settled whether North America would be French or English, recited this to those in his boat, and said he would rather have written those lines than take Quebec on the morrow.  It is not likely to be required in today’s schools, which is a shame.

"ELEGY WRITTEN IN
A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD"

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

 

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault
If Memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes,

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.

Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E’en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who, mindful of th’ unhonour’d dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, —

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;

‘There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high.
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

‘Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.

‘One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,
Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

‘The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,-
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.’

The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.

By Thomas Gray (1716-71).