This week’s essay of the week calls to mind this bit of poetry from The Modern Traveller by Hilaire Belloc. I have to admit that I find it impossible to separate the irony implicit in the Modern Traveller from Belloc’s debates with H. G. Wells.
We here at the Ethereal Voice don’t much care for the factory method of educating kids. But if you are going to throw 30 odds kids and put them under one teacher, it is foolish to make them 30 odd kids with vastly different needs. The only way one teacher can have a hope teaching 30 kids is if their needs are roughly similar.
This is the basic fact of life that lies behind Scott Walker’s rant. Only, he wants to save public schools so we don’t think that he shares our views on factory education.
Here is question to confound the theologians of our modern civil religion.
It is an article of faith in our civil religion that democracy should be imposed in any and all situations. No other form of government is valid. Therefore, should we not be pushing hard for democracy in Rwanda?
Read this excellent essay and consider the question.
Derek has an interesting post up discussing the failure of the drug torcetrapib in clinical trials. I found these two paragraphs particularly interesting….
And that’s about where knowledge of this field stops among the general population, and I can understand why, because it gets pretty ferocious after that point. As with everything else in living systems, the closer you look, the more you see. There are, for starters, several subforms of HDL, the main alpha fraction and at least three others. And there are at least four types of alpha. At least sixteen lipoproteins, enzymes, and other proteins are distributed in various ratios among all of them. We know enough to say that these different HDL particles vary in size, shape, cholesterol content, origin, distribution, and function, but we don’t know anywhere near as much as we need to about the details. There’s some evidence that instead of raising HDL across the board, what you want to do is raise alpha-1 while lowering alpha-2 and alpha-3, but we don’t really know how to do that.
How does HDL, or its beneficial fraction(s) help against atherosclerosis? We’re not completely sure about that, either. One of the main mechanisms is probably reverse cholesterol transport (RCT), the process of actually removing cholesterol from the arterial plaques and sending it to the liver for disposal. It’s a compelling story, currently thought to consist of eight separate steps involving four organ systems and at least six different enzymes. The benefits (or risks) of picking one of those versus the others for intervention are unknown. For most of those steps, we don’t have anything that can selectively affect them yet anyway, so it’s going to take a while to unravel things. Torcetrapib and the other CETP inhibitors represent a very large (and very risky) bet on what is approximately step four.
I never would have thought that the Japanese would treat their houses as throwaway objects. I have always heard so much about what fine craftsmen the Japanese were that I always imagined that they built their houses with the same kind of care. They don’t.
The typical lifespan for a house in Japan is only 30 years and buying a used house is almost unheard of. You can read more here.
I never would have thought that rising construction cost would so quickly become a problem for governments trying to build or repair their infrastructure. Obviously, I knew that this was going to be a problem in the future because I wrote a post on the problem. But serious problems are starting to pop up now.
Your boss is the one who tells you what work you must do and who authorizes your paycheck. Many people tell you to do thus and so, of course, but it remains convention that only one person is responsible for the ongoing decision to reimburse you for services rendered.
Your dotted-line boss, within Acme, is a Click Here to continue reading.
Plumbing the depths has a new post up. Good news is that he has been down because business has been so good he did not have much time. But this lack of time has also caused him to have a little trouble with the powers that be….
The best part, as always, was dealing with the Inland Revenue. In all the huff and puff of plumbing I had forgotten to send in our annual PAYE return. Since we don’t pay PAYE I wasn’t overly concerned and, when I finally I remembered, I popped on-line and sent ‘the-powers-that-be’ a series of zero’s. Three weeks later I received a letter thanking me for sending them nothing but informing me that I had been fined £100 for sending them nothing far too late. Before I could get annoyed with this, I received another letter to tell me that the Revenue was going to pay me £200 for shunning the old paper-based system and not sending them anything ‘on-line’. This was very nice of them, so I rang up and asked if they could just deduct the fine from the reward and send me a cheque for £100. Surprisingly enough they didn’t have a problem with this and two weeks later I received the cheque. Then, just as I was beginning the think that the Inland Revenue wasn’t quite the bureaucratic monster everyone said it was, I received another, rather stroppy letter, pointing out that the Inland Revenue had had to send me a cheque for £100 and telling me to get my act together and make sure I didn’t over pay them again next year!
Mr. Dueck has a new poem up. Not his best ever, but we like to encourage new work.
The hysteria on the on the political right that makes radical Islam out to be this great horrible threat is a dangerous thing. It is dangerous because it obscures the real problem. Even if radical Islam was wiped off the face of the earth, western society would still be in danger of collapsing. The problem is not that radical Islam is so dangerous but that western society is so rotten.
Popular conservative columnist Rod Dreher comes close to admitting as much in his rant entitled Dildos versus scimitars.
The growing tension between Black and Hispanic communities has not received much attention in the main stream press. But it is a very real problem that could lead to lot of blood being shed in the years to come.
The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates by Steven Malanga is a good introduction to this issue. It is main problem is that Mr. Malanga is obviously not sympathetic to the immigrants, and that leads him to be unfair on a number occasions.
For example, he says….
A recent study by Harvard economist George Borjas and colleagues from the University of Chicago and the University of California estimates that immigration accounted for a 7.4 percentage-point decline in the employment rate of unskilled black males between 1980 and 2000.
Given that incarceration rates for black males also went up during that time period, I am highly skeptical of any study that can precisely pinpoint the porportion of the the fall in black male employment can be blamed on Hispanic immigrants. Even after you get out of jail, a record is a hard thing to get a job with.
You cannot blame Mr. Malanga for the conclusions of Borjas study of course. But Mr. Malanga does not seem inclined to even consider the alternate explanations.
But one Mr. Malanga’s unfairness is one of the things that helps makes “The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates” a good introduction to issue of Black and Hispanic tensions. After reading his piece, you will have no doubt about how many in the Black community have come view the immigration issue.