There are times when nothing very interesting seems to happen, when the years fly by like one of the uneventful periods in the history book that connect one war to another. Of course, as Americans learned on Sept. 11, 2001, it is those uneventful and uninteresting periods of history that provide a superior quality of life for those actually living through them. It may be tedious for future historians to read of people living peacefully for year after year in prosperity, but no sane individual would prefer the excitement of famine, chaos and war to comfortable boredom.
Category: Uncategorized
On the modern Ivy League education
In which Tom provides an eloquent summary of the present state of the elite American university education:
“Cicero’s The Republic and The Laws”? I admit I’m an Ivy leaguer, but I thought Plato wrote those?
If you, like me, are familiar with a sufficiently large number of Ivy Leaguers, this response no doubt strikes you as a highly unlikely one. One is forced to conclude that Tom is only pretending to possess a degree from an Ivy League university, not because he doesn’t know the works of Cicero, but because he isn’t anywhere nearly pretentious enough about the chance to correct someone else he assumes is insufficiently familiar with Plato. Any genuine Ivy Leaguer would surely have phrased his response thusly:
“The Republic and The Laws? Um, Plato, anyone?”
Ivy Leaguers are, almost to a man, moderately intelligent but uneducated individuals who nevertheless believe they are very well-educated and extraordinarily intelligent. MPAI applies to them with an ironic vengeance. They tend to be heavily inclined towards intellectual bluffing, presumably based upon the magical properties of their sheepskins, which is why you should always call them on their assertions and ask pointed questions on any occasion when you are not already certain that they are demonstrably incorrect.
For example, Tom is partly right. Plato did indeed write both The Republic and The Laws. The dialogues have been famous for centuries and anyone with a halfway-decent university degree will have heard of them, or at least The Republic. (On the other hand, very few of the degreed folk who are prone to happily citing the question “Who will watch the watchers?” at the drop of a hat has actually read either dialogue.) And even fewer happen to know that Cicero, who was a learned admirer of Ancient Greece, (albeit not to the extent of his great friend Atticus), also wrote a number of dialogues, among them De Re Publica and De Legibus.
While the more proper translation of these two dialogues would be “On the Republic” and “On the Laws”, they are more commonly known as “The Republic” and “The Laws”, which, as it happens, is exactly how the new Oxford translation to which I was referring has them.
VPFL Championship Game
It’s the Swamp Spartans vs the regular season champion Sidhe. The winner claims the championship and a place in the league next year. The first round games:
70 MS Swamp Spartans
68 Valders Quixotes
61 Bane Sidhe
52 Greenfield Grizzlies
Post-university education
This is a rather interesting historical insight courtesy of an Instapundit reader:
We are somewhat poorly served by applying the term “education” to what is now much more properly referenced as “schooling.” Those two used to overlap almost completely, and some the the greatest damage wrought by easy funding with other people’s money is that from pre-K to Ph.D. schools these days offer bloody little real education apart from the sciences and engineering. Things are likely to change.
Eight hundred years ago education was controlled by the church. Groups of independent scholars, using Latin as a common language, began to congregate apart from the church to pursue a true education. By mid-12th century this grew into the university movement — Hic et ubique terrarum (here and anyplace on earth) as they said in Paris in 1163. It took a century or so, but by AD 1400 the church no longer controlled education.
In our time education is controlled by the universities and their lower level minions. Once again groups of independent scholars, using English as a common language have begun to congregate apart from the universities — internet, home-schoolers, independent researchers, and many others — to pursue a true education. The pattern is repeating, for the very same reasons. Hic et ubique terrarum indeed.
A friend of mine who is a well-regarded university professor took a look at a few of the Voxiversity quizzes not long after we had finished the study of Thucydides. He remarked that the quiz was harder and more comprehensive than any test that would be given at his university. I think one can quite reasonably argue that it is now not only possible, but probable, that one can get a better education outside the elite university system in four years than one can inside it. One can’t obtain marketable credentials, of course, but then, the whole point of the email was to distinguish between schooling credentials and a genuine education. And, of course, the ironic thing is that the university’s usual defense of the humanities depends upon the importance of education rather than credentials.
Speaking of my own ongoing education, I was delighted to receive some Christmas gifts that may or may not make an appearance in a future Voxiversity, including the complete Plutarch’s Lives, Cicero’s The Republic and The Laws, and best of all, The Landmark Arrian. I can also attest that Tim Layden’s book about tactical NFL inventions from Pop Warner’s Single-Wing to Jim Johnson’s Double-A Gap Blitz, Blood, Sweat and Chalk is a light and easy read, but it is as interesting as Peter King claimed it to be.
Merry Christmas, one and all
I wish you all a Merry Christmas today. To the believers, that you may know joy and hope in the fullness of your faith. To the unbelievers, that God will help your unbelief and one day grant you that which you truly seek, whatever that may be. Regardless of whether you are a believer or not, I encourage you to set aside a few minutes amidst the happy chaos of the celebration today to reflect upon what we are celebrating today.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.(John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
– John 1:1-17
The Christmas Puppy
Because it’s just not Christmas without a Vizsla in the house. Enjoy your Christmas Eve, everyone, and don’t forget that Santa comes quicker if you close your eyes.
I’m working on it
This is courtesy of an award-winning graphic artist with whom I have been collaborating on the map and interior art for the sequel to Summa Elvetica. It’s not the cover, just an image that he was inspired to create as a reminder that there is a second book on the horizons for the fans of Selenoth. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a very productive year on the writing front; I ended up being very busy with some other projects that required priority and kept me too occupied to get very much done in either fiction or non-fiction terms. Also, I’ve thrown out the planned structure at least three times now, so I wasn’t ever able to really get rolling.
But, I’ve put myself on a strict writing schedule now, so I’m determined to finish the book in 2011. I can’t promise that it will actually be published then, since that’s somewhat outside my control, but it will be completed. Marcus is at an important nexus and is facing a difficult decision; having turned away from the presumably brilliant clerical career that everyone was expecting of him, he now has to decide what he is going to do with his life. As a scion of a wealthy patrician family, the world is literally at his feet, but how does he reconcile his ambitions to make a meaningful mark in life with his scholarly pursuits in an empire that stands upon the twin pillars of its unshakeable faith and its unbreakable legions?
Note: “Summa Elvetica II” is not the title. It’s merely for reference.
Reversion to the mean
It would appear that the Federal Reserve is beginning to wake up to the harsh reality that the power to create money through credit is not tantamount to either omnipotence or even intermediate term price supports. It’s not what they’re saying that is interesting, as all they’re doing is stating the completely obvious. But it is very interesting indeed that it is two economists at the Dallas Fed who are stating it in public in their Economic Letter entitled “The Fallacy of a Pain-Free Path to a Healthy Housing Market“. They write: “Without intervention, modest home price declines could be allowed to resume until inventories clear. An analysis found that home prices increased by about 5 percentage points as a result of the combined efforts to arrest price deterioration. Absent incentive programs and as modifications reach a saturation point, these price increases will likely be reversed in the coming years. Prices, in fact, have begun to slide again in recent weeks. In short, pulling demand forward has not produced a sustainable stabilization in home prices, which cannot escape the pressure exerted by oversupply.”
Speaking of stating the obvious, the “analysis” sounds like a joke. Home prices have been around 170,000, so 5 percent is $8,500. Coincidentally enough, the 2009 federal tax credit was $8,000. Imagine that. Anyhow, consider yourself warned, as housing prices should be heading down next year and the decline probably won’t be as modest as the Fed would prefer.
People aren’t people
This new genetic analysis has a lot of interesting implications for everyone from equalitarians and evolutionists to theologians and racialspecies supremacists, given that it is increasingly obvious that not only are all human beings not equal under the skin, strictly speaking, they are not even all homo sapiens:
An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea. All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.
This discovery underlines the utter foolishness of placing one’s faith in science in any of its three aspects as anything but a very interesting and powerful tool. Not only is scientage never anything more than a mere snapshot in time, but it very seldom expands in the predictable and progressive manner so often envisioned by those who subscribe to what Rothbard described as the “Whig theory of the history of science”.
Science has now reached a point where it can inform us that one group of people are less genetically evolved and less human than another group. What it cannot do is tell us how one group should treat another group, it can only help us determine how our predecessors decided to behave in the past. The uncomfortable reality for those who hope to rely upon science for their moral touchstone is that one can as easily construct a science-based case for eliminating the Denisovian genes as restoring them entirely.
Science assignment: Provide a science-based justification for either a) eliminating Denisovian genes from the human race or b) restoring the Denisovians as a genetically pure and distinct species.
I has pretty feet
This may be the best NFL scandal yet. I don’t dare think about this too much or I might hurt myself from laughing… F-E-E-T, Feet, Feet, FEET!:
Just when it appeared that one of the craziest NFL seasons in NFL history could get no crazier, one of the craziest stories we can ever recall has emerged. On Tuesday, I was rendered speechless (a rare occurrence for me) when I saw the Deadspin item about the eerie similarities between the wife of Jets coach Rex Ryan and someone who previously posted a series of foot-fetish videos on YouTube.
My only regret is that it was Rex Ryan’s wife and not Deanna Favre. That would have served as the perfect capstone on #4’s career. People are so awesome, they really are. And to think some people still can’t figure out why God created Man and gave him free will.