An interesting article on going back to pre-industrial wheat.
It isn’t clear the degree to which grain is intrinsically bad for us, and to which it’s been made much worse by the current varieties and processing methods.
I found this an interesting statement: “The giant band of wheat that stripes the center of America is a byproduct of the industrial age.”
That could be said of many unhealthy things, including the public school system.
Apparently, credentialed doesn’t indicate educated.
You’d think he might have Googled the word before making an asshat of himself.
…but:
In less awful news, 95 percent of the students surveyed said that free speech is important to them. However, as I have long predicted and discussed, when you ask Americans if they like free speech, they nearly always say “yes.” But when you get into the nitty gritty details about what kind of speech warrants protection, you discover that some folks (especially college students) are more in the “I love free speech, but…” camp. And I fear the list of exceptions is growing larger by the day.
Not sure which is more dismaying, that they’re unaware of the First Amendment, or that they oppose it. But clearly the Left is continuing its march through the institutions. Which is why books like this one could be very valuable:
Why a father-son collaboration? That’s what I wanted to know, too, so I asked the elder Paulsen, who was a year ahead of me at Yale Law School. Mike reported that he had given a lecture at Princeton in 2006, after which the law professors and college professors at dinner complained about their students’ “goofed-up ideas” about the Constitution. The law professors blamed the college professors, the college professors said “they came to us this way,” and blamed pervasively bad ideas about the Constitution in the culture, the media and even textbooks. Stuck in an airport the next day, Prof. Paulsen killed time writing an outline.
If they can get them to read it. The problem starts in kindergarten, and extends all the way into post-docs.
What Bernie Sanders doesn’t understand about it.
To be fair, of course, I don’t think Bernie Sanders understands anything about anything.
Related: Bernie Sanders and the fixed-pie fallacy. He (like all Marxists) doesn’t understand that wealth is created, or how. He thinks it’s just something to be magically redistributed.
[Update a few minutes later]
Unfortunately for the Marxists, the American people don’t think that wealth inequality is a crisis. They don’t think that climate change is, either. It barely makes the list.
[Update a few minutes later]
Dems appeal to “progressives,” not all Americans.
There’s nothing progressive about them. Forced wealth redistribution is the oldest game in the book. Free markets are what are new and revolutionary.
Eleven tough questions you’ll have to answer.
Four questions men should ask when selecting a college:
Since most college handbooks now define sexual assault broadly to include pretty much everything, one’s best bet is to avoid sex in college altogether. Colleges have enacted policies that allow non-students to bring accusations against students, so dating off campus isn’t safe either.
There’s really nothing that can be done to protect oneself from an accusation in the current climate. Sorry to sound so dire, but when a school puts up posters suggesting that even a sip of alcohol renders a women unable to give consent, things have gotten dire.
…I apologize if this seems like fearmongering, but college campuses are no longer safe for students accused of sexual assault. Due process rights have gone out the window because, activists tell us, this issue is so important that draconian measures must be taken. Their message is clear: Due process is fine and dandy for criminal courts, but this is a college campus, damn it, due process has no place here for those accused of felonies.
This is all making on-line education look better and better. And once again kudos to Ashe for being all over this beat.
Thoughts on his suggested reading list:
Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly homogenistic in comparison to them.
The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.
All part of the reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did as a kid.
Some perennial thoughts from Instapundit (and Jim Bennett).
I agree that Columbus gets too much credit, and I don’t disagree that his behavior was depraved by modern lights. But the Carib Arawak were hardly the noble savages that the SJWs would have us believe. They had themselves subjugated the Taino, killing, raping, assimilating, into a brutal patriarchal society that practiced human sacrifice and, by some accounts, cannibalism. So it’s amusing to see all the whining about Columbus in that context.
…are actually superstitions. An interesting essay from Steven Pinker:
I have long recognised the need for a style guide based on modern linguistics and cognitive science. The manuals written by journalists and essayists often had serviceable rules of thumb, but they were also idiosyncratic, crabby, and filled with folklore and apocrypha. Linguistics experts, for their part, have been scathing about the illogic and ignorance in traditional advice on usage, but have been unwilling to proffer their own pointers to which rules to follow or how to use grammar effectively. The last straw in my decision to sit down and write the book was getting back a manuscript that had been mutilated by a copy editor who, I could tell, was mindlessly enforcing rules that had been laid out in some ancient style book as if they were the Ten Commandments.
As in many other life activities, it’s OK to break the “rules” if a) you know the rules and the reasons for them and b) you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, that’s a rare combination.
I liked this:
The real problem is that writing, unlike speaking, is an unnatural act. In the absence of a conversational partner who shares the writer’s background and who can furrow her brows or break in and ask for clarification when he stops making sense, good writing depends an ability to imagine a generic reader and empathise about what she already knows and how she interprets the flow of words in real time. Writing, above all, is a topic in cognitive psychology.
It’s what I try to do when I write, though it’s always best to have someone else read it to say, “what do you mean by that?”
…environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented.
Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency standards.
Since then, evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.
Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts.
But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters. “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel noted, “is the most important driver of increasing losses.”
People like the Bills McKibben and Nye look like fools when they seize on every weather event to evangelize their religion.