For the longest time much of the media has fed us the idea that “union = overpaid/lazy/bad”. Now we should all have the following ingrained in our skulls by now, “the media lies”.
Proceeding from that “law” (it really should be a scientific law at this point) we can deduce that the media is lying about unions. The real question to ask ourselves is, “why?”
This quote (and the post it is from) makes no mention of the pilots, and was written from the point of view of the working man. But it explains clearly what is going on (you'll have to read the whole thing to see how this applies to pilots as well):
I think that in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak. Partly, the economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns would have taken years to heal even if the global industrial economy wasn’t already choking on excessive debt and running short of a galaxy of crucial raw materials. But there’s more to it than that.
If you want people to put up patiently with long hours of drudgery at miserably low wages, subject to wretched conditions and humiliating policies, so that their self-proclaimed betters can enjoy lifestyles they will never be able to share, it’s a really bad idea to make them stop work and give them a good long period of solitude, in which they can think about what they want out of life and how little of it they’re getting from the role you want them to play. It’s an especially bad idea to do it so that they have no way of knowing when, or if, they will ever be allowed to return to their former lives, thus forcing them to look for other options in order to stay fed, clothed, housed, and the like.
Like I said, no mention of the pilots. But when a corporation makes you merely one of the factors of production, you had damn well better be replaceable or they have a problem bigger than they think.
This is an outstanding post from The Blogger Formerly Known As The Archdruid. I cannot recommend this more highly. The Revolution will not be televised, but it sure as shootin' will be blogged.
I often say that classical music is alive and well, it's just decamped from the symphony hall to the movie theater. Today's composition from the soundtrack to the 1990 film Home Alone was nominated not only for The Best Original Song Oscar, but also for a Grammy. John Williams needs no introduction - for those of you who have never heard his music, go watch Star Wars for cryin' out loud.
The Queen Of The World not only suggested doing film scores for the Sunday Classical posts, but suggested this song in particular. She's not just a pretty face, but wicket smart as well.
Not original, or controversial. But the Queen of the World and I went to Monticello and holy cow, the man was a genius.
If you get a chance, you really should visit his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. Do NOT miss the museum there, which describes which architecture books or classical buildings he took ideas from. The dome is from the Temple of Vesta in Rome, but he had to adapt the design to his existing house which made the dome slightly longer on one axis. Jefferson used trigonometry and pencil-and-paper calculations (to 1/100,000 of an inch!) in his detailed design.
I was impressed in how he designed systems to channel rainwater away from where it otherwise might pool and cause rot. It's very ingenious. He also had a document copier, and corresponded with Eli Whitney about Whitney's patent application for the cotton gin. Reading the letter gives a sense of his unbridled curiosity.
More travel pictures later, but if you are anywhere nearby, this is worth a detour.
[Time] magazine had assigned a reporter named Virginia Bennett to find out
about “automation in America.” She went to see Remington Rand, whose
UNIVAC product was then the epitome of computing coolness…but,
“fortunately for us, they weren’t very forthcoming that day.” Walking
back to her office, she passed the IBM building, saw the “Defense
Calculator” (IBM 701) in the window, and decided to see if IBM would be
interested in doing the interview. When she asked the receptionist who
she could speak with, the receptionist was smart enough to say, “Well,
the head of this company is Mr Watson. He isn’t in the building today,
but his son Tom is the president and you can certainly see him.”
The resulting article was very powerful publicity for IBM, and surely
no help at all for Remington Rand’s relative industry standing. If the
receptionist had greeted the reporter with the all-too-typical
bureaucratic approach (“The Watsons are very busy men, you’ll have to
call Public Relations and make an appointment.”) the outcome would
likely have been quite different. Tom Jr notes that his father
considered the receptionist position very important, and always chose
those women himself.
You can't buy that kind of marketing exposure, and most marketing departments can't deliver it reliably - even IBM's. But someone who was "just" a receptionist - but smart and savvy and given decision making authority - made a big difference.
Devolve authority. Push it down all the way to the front line troops. Then watch as you run rings around your Pleistocene competitors.
This week, HarperCollins announced that a long-awaited JRR Tolkien translation of Beowulf is to be published in May, along with his commentaries on the Old English epic and a story it inspired him to write, "Sellic Spell". It is just the latest of a string of posthumous publications from the Oxford professor and The Hobbit
author, who died in 1973. Edited by his son Christopher, now 89, it
will doubtless be seen by some as an act of barrel-scraping. But
Tolkien's expertise on Beowulf and his own literary powers give us every reason to take it seriously.
Yeah, no kidding this is serious stuff. Tolkien was a genius when it came to languages - not only was he an Oxford Don, scholar of Anglo-Saxon (the still Germanic Old English root of our modern tongue), but he taught himself medieval Icelandic to read their tales in the original, and taught himself Finnish - a language seemingly unrelated to any other and very, very different from Indo-European - so that he could translate (!) their great saga, the Kalevala.
This is a big deal, as the Guardian points out:
Beowulf is the oldest-surviving epic poem in English, albeit a
form of English few can read any more. Written down sometime between
the eighth and 11th centuries – a point of ongoing debate – its 3,182
lines are preserved in a manuscript in the British Library, against all
odds. Tolkien's academic work on it was second to none in its day, and
his 1936 paper "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" is still well
worth reading, not only as an introduction to the poem, but also because
it decisively changed the direction and emphasis of Beowulf scholarship.
...
Tolkien was often criticised by his academic colleagues for wasting time
on fiction, even though that fiction has probably done more to
popularise medieval literature than the work of 100 scholars. However,
his failure to publish scholarship was not due to laziness nor entirely
to other distractions. He was an extreme perfectionist who, as CS Lewis
said, worked "like a coral insect", and his idea of what was acceptable
for publication was several notches above what the most stringent
publisher would demand. It will be fascinating to see how he exercised
his literary, historical and linguistic expertise on the poem, and to
compare it with more purely literary translations such as Seamus Heaney's
as well as the academic ones. Tolkien bridged the gap between the two
worlds astonishingly well. He was the arch-revivalist of literary
medievalism, who made it seem so relevant to the modern world. I can't
wait to see his version of the first English epic.
Hang out with people smarter than you. Shut your pie hole. Listen. Stifle the urge to be sarcastic, and listen.
Repeat until you think you're smart.*
Fortunately, there's an easy way to do this. Go to Youtube. Type "Christopher Hitchens gun control"** into the search bar. Watch what comes up.
Repeat until you think you're smart.*
I don't by any stretch of the imagination think that Hitch was right about everything, and I expect that if you confronted him with this idea (over Martinis, 'natch) he would have laughed. The point isn't about being right or wrong. The point is thinking. Few people have made me think so much as Hitch did. Maybe Tam and Sabra.
* When you think you're smart, contemplate Socrates' reply when told that he was the wisest man in Greece.
** The mention is brief, at about 25 minutes into the discussion. It's actually good advice he gives, which I would translate as "don't scare the white people".
You may have seen a news story circulating about how poverty makes you stupid.
It's not that stupid people are more likely to be poor, either. It's
that when you are impoverished, so much of your brainpower is devoted to
just keeping your head above water that you don't have any left to
figure out how to improve your life. I know from personal experience as
an adult that it can feel as though you are reeling from one emergency
to the next. How the hell do you get ahead? How do you build up
savings when you have to decide which bill to put off until next month?
How do you get a new, better job when the hours of the one you're
working right now are so screwy you can't schedule an interview?
There's almost no breathing room.
...
Poverty is not a moral failure. Ending up poor when you started out
poor is the default, just like ending up middle class when you start out
middle class is the default. The error comes in the common belief that
middle class is the standard and that poor people can easily end up
middle class unless there's something wrong with them.
The word "polymath", while accurate, falls short of describing him. The term "Renaissance Man", while accurate, also falls short. If there's a word that seems to describe how he ticked, it was always asking "why?" He had a seemingly inexhaustible curriosity.
I hadn't ever heard the bit about how he would sketch the girls at the topless bar, but the scene (very mildly NSFW) was actually sort of sweet in how the girls remembered him. What I had heard (actually back at Three Letter Intelligence Agency) - and what's missing from this - was how he would crack safes at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.
And I'd never heard that he was room mates with Klaus Fuchs in Los Alamos. It's plausible that he was the most interesting man in the world. Stay curious, my friends.
I think a retired English teacher was bored…THIS IS GREAT! Read all the way to the end, this took a lot of work to put together!
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse
He has a lot more, basically demonstrating that English makes no sense. I even added my own poor comment on how English is illogical and self-contradictory. But the question is brought to the fore: why was it English that has become the World's Language? Because that's precisely what it has become:
This series, The Story Of English, is one of the best things I've seen on TV. It's hosted (fabulously) by the great Robin MacNeil, and makes the point that answers the question: while there's a "correct" form of English* it's seen as more than a little bit stuffy - even quite simple "pigeon" English is easily understood by large numbers of people.
In particular English is the language to learn in the emerging world. The reason is that it opens doors to the upwardly mobile, and so is a language of status. This is a long, long way from the Old English of Anglo-Saxon days, as recounted by J. R. R. Tolkien (scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature). This is a little dated (California dynamism?) but covers the dynamism of the language.
This is highly, highly recommended - as is the book that went with the
series (no, you can't have mine, but you should be able to find it for
small money on Amazon). If you are remotely interested in why a
backwater language from the Dark Ages European Periphery became the
international language of air travel and business, you can do a lot worse
than a few hours on Youtube with this.
* Well, what incorrect people consider to be "correct".
I was 15. We were getting out of Vietnam. I was - as most teenagers do - was learning how to think as an adult, and not as a child. On that day, I watched this, and nothing was ever the same again.
This was the intellectual turning point for me, and it's now available to anyone who wants it, courtesy of Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway. It's a little dismaying to compare the 49,000 page views of this to the 49 Million (or whatever) from Honeybadger.
This might actually work. Two really good ideas for stopping the outflow of citizens from Detroit, protecting the city's tax base, and attracting more financially well off citizens to live there.
What's interesting is that these ideas wouldn't take any more government intrusion than the Left usually likes to do. It's just government intrusion directed towards groups the Left has usually exempted.
Sabra muses on the Rolling Stone's glam cover shot of Jahar Tsarnaev and reminds me why I read her every day:
The problem seems to be that, by failing to dehumanize a murderer, he is
somehow being glorified. Which is, of course, patently ridiculous.
Look, murderers all have one thing in common, beyond the obvious: they're human.
Evil is human. Uniquely human, perhaps. Animals kill for food, and
they kill for dominance, but they don't kill for ideology or jealousy or
momentary passing anger. Humans do all of those things.
But we don't like to admit that.
...
Susan Smith didn't go around torturing animals; she was from all accounts a devoted mother, right up until she wasn't.
And Jahar Tsarnaev was a nonviolent, chill dude right up until he wasn't.
Or maybe this quarter, or this year. I don't know what else to add, other than that these people will need computer and network security BIG TIME, and you can get in on it. People are already desperate for it, and if this is right (very likely indeed), they will only get more so.
Damn. Every time I read Kevin Baker, I gain IQ points.
This show had a huge influence on me, back when I was a teenager. Readers with a good memory* will remember that I once posted on Martianus Capella before**.