Latest libertarian obsession

I'm not entirely sure why libertarians seem so enamored of the charter school idea.   I see the CIS is pushing it, as is Rupert Murdoch*, and of course Catallaxy has the CIS Youtube up which (perhaps unluckily) gives the impression from the frozen initial image that it's all about training young men to be the paramilitary libertarians of the future.   (Libertarians who got there via Starship Troopers tend to get excited by the idea of a righteous military dispensing justice throughout the universe, I reckon.)

I thought that the achievements of this movement was decidedly mixed;  it anything, I thought the initial enthusiasm for them had become somewhat  tempered.

But as I'm sure I've said before, modern education seems a field particularly prone to fadish ideas as to what works and what doesn't.   I tend to think that the silliest ideas did come from the Left side in the 70's, but have been debunked and are no longer  influential. 

I guess the libertarian/small government obsession with market competition alone makes them love the idea of charter schools just on principle, I think.  (That and a hatred of State school teachers more often than not leaning Left.)   Yet a recent story on 7.30 indicated that there is scope for very different approaches within the public school system.

I would have thought that society is better served by improving all schools via such discretion within the public system.  I doubt you need a charter school system at all. (I don't think they played any role in Finland's much lauded school system, did they?)

*  who tweets this morning:  "School choice vastly improves education, thus liberating all families and forever eliminates "victim" excuse. Only one enemy teacher unions"

Wearables and snooping

What could derail the wearables revolution? : Nature News & Comment

I can't work out whether people are going to worry about this much in the future or not.  I figure Google already knows where about a third of the global population slept last night.

Incoherent Molan

Was just listening to retired Army Major General Jim Molan talking on Radio National about the European/Syrian refugee issue.

His performance was utterly incoherent.  He's very keen on endearing himself to the Coalition government, however. 

Retire already, Part 2

Come on, Tony.  You've failed in your attempt to gain political brownie points by suggesting that Europe could, with a land and ocean connection to probably 10 or 20 times the number of refugees who were seeking to get to Australia, follow your high seas quasi piracy and bribing technique.

Still 54/46 to Labor, even with a so-so leader.

Just retire.

Retire already

I see that Thomas Sowell, the black conservative/libertarian economist, has another book out.  He's 85, which is well into the danger zone where public intellectuals are usually best advised to just stop talking, but actually it sounds like he's been pretty foolish for quite a long time:

It’s a funny line—and an instance of what sets Mr. Sowell apart: candor and independence of mind. No one can suggest that he doesn’t say what he thinks. In 1987, while testifying in favor of Judge Robert Bork’s ill-fated nomination to the Supreme Court, he told Joe Biden, a senator at the time, that he wouldn’t have a problem with literacy tests for voting or with $1.50 poll taxes, so long as they were evenly and fairly applied. When I ask whether he remembers this exchange, Mr. Sowell quips, “No, Joe Biden is forgettable.”

In our interview he maintains that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should have stuck to desegregating buses and government services, and let market forces take care of integrating lunch counters. Mr. Sowell says that the precedent set by imposing integration on people like Lester Maddox, a segregationist governor of Georgia who also owned a chicken restaurant, has opened a Pandora’s box. “If you say that Lester Maddox has to serve his chicken to blacks, you’re saying that the Boy Scouts have to have gay scout masters. You’re saying—ultimately—that the Catholic Church has to perform same-sex marriages.”

She drives (some) men nuts

I don't know that it was a good idea having Rosie Batty Australian of the Year, and certainly I have sometimes found her hard to "read" in the few TV appearances on which I have seen her.   But then, so did the public with Lindy Chamberlain, and she paid for that with an unwarranted jail term.  Following that terrible incident, I would have thought that sensible people should take the lesson that, for people who have gone through the horror of a child lost through murder or violence,  it never pays to think you understand them from a handful of media appearances.

Having said that, it is clear that she drives some on the Right absolutely nuts.

I cannot see the offensiveness of the on-line survey she promoted for Father's Day.  What I can see is the repetition of offensive, defamatory and ill founded slurring of the woman that has been commonplace at that blog since her son's death. 

An industry by Royal decree

King of Couture: How Louis XIV Invented Fashion as We Know It - The Atlantic

Even though caring little about fashion, this article about how the Sun King pretty much invented it for France (and the world) is interesting.  Here are a couple of key bits:

When Louis came to the throne in 1643, the fashion capital of the world
wasn’t Paris, but Madrid. Taste tends to follow power, and for the past
two centuries or so Spain had been enjoying its Golden Age, amassing a
vast global empire that fueled a booming domestic economy. Spanish style
was tight and rigid—both physically and figuratively—and predominantly
black. Not only was black considered to be sober and dignified by the
staunchly Catholic Habsburg monarchy, but high-quality black dye was
extremely expensive, and the Spanish flaunted their wealth by using as
much of it as possible. They advertised their imperial ambitions, as
well, for Spain imported logwood—a key dyestuff—from its colonies in
modern-day Mexico. While Spain’s explorers and armies conquered the New
World, her fashions conquered the old one, and Spanish style was adopted
at courts throughout Europe...

Now, how Louis changed this:

Luxury was Louis’s New Deal: The furniture, textile, clothing, and
jewelry industries he established not only provided jobs for his
subjects, but made France the world’s leader in taste and technology.
His shrewd finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously said that
“fashions were to France what the mines of Peru were to Spain”—in other
words, the source of an extremely lucrative domestic and export
commodity. Louis’s reign saw about one-third of Parisian wage earners
gain employment in the clothing and textile trades; Colbert organized
these workers into highly specialized and strictly regulated
professional guilds, ensuring quality control and helping them compete
against foreign imports while effectively preventing them from competing
with each other. Nothing that could be made in France was allowed to be
imported; Louis once ordered his own son to burn his coat because it
was made of foreign cloth. It was an unbeatable economic stimulus plan.

As he waged a never-ending series of expensive wars across Europe, the
French luxury goods industry replenished his war chest and enhanced the
king’s reputation at home and abroad. Louis transformed Versailles—a
dilapidated royal hunting lodge buried in the countryside 12 miles from
Paris—into a showplace for the best of French culture and industry; not
just fashion but art, music, theater, landscape gardening, and cuisine. A
strict code of court dress and etiquette ensured a steady market for
French-made clothing and jewelry. Louis has been accused of trying to
control his nobles by forcing them to bankrupt themselves on French
fashions, but, in fact, he often underwrote these expenses, believing
that luxury was necessary not only to the economic health of the country
but to the prestige and very survival of the monarchy. 

Double down

BBC - Future - The disturbing consequences of seeing your doppelganger

A good read here, relevant to the matter of out-of-body experiences, as well as perception generally.

One of the lengthier stories told also has a "message from the dead" paranormal element too, although the message was a pretty routine one, as far as these things go.  

An interesting disorder

Depersonalisation disorder: the condition you’ve never heard of that affects millions | Society | The Guardian

I haven't heard of it before, but I also wonder whether publicising it may help it spread.  (I am reminded of the Mind Hacks post about the glass body delusion that was once "popular" centuries ago, but no longer is.  I wonder if depersonalisation disorder - while not a delusion as such, I guess - can be contributed to by modern loss of faith in the soul.  The idea that we are all essentially robots for whom consciousness is an illusion would seem to me to be a good precursor to developing  "a sense of complete detachment, a life lived as an automaton or on autopilot, characterised by an absence of emotions, either good or bad.")

I never thought much of him from the start

Alex Gibney's 'The Man in the Machine': Is it Time to Rethink Steve Jobs? - The Atlantic

This may sound silly, but I resist buying into the world of Apple for two reasons:  the way they retain complete control of what's going on under the hood, so to speak; and the disdain with which I view Steve Jobs.

Happy Father's Day (ha!)

Wealthy sperm donor fears contact from more than two dozen offspring

Degree of sympathy I have for this man - approaching zero.

Yet more about "What? Our base are nuts?"

The GOP's Problem Is Not Donald Trump | Mother Jones

It's very hard to feel sorry for those Republicans (and Right wing journalists) who are shocked at the continuing popularity of Trump, when they did nothing for years to tell their nutty base that they are nuts.

As David Corn says, it's not as if the evidence for the nuttiness has been hidden:

Republicans are pissed off. (In polls, they express far more dissatisfaction with the nation's present course than Democrats.) And they believe the nation has been hijacked by President Barack Obama, whose legitimacy most Rs still reject. A recent Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus participants found that 35 percent of Republicans
believe Obama was not born in the United States. A quarter said they were not sure. (Nine out of ten Democrats said the president was born in the United States.) So nearly 60 percent of Rs believe there is cause to suspect Obama has hornswoggled the nation. Meanwhile, according to
another poll, 54 percent of Republican voters say Obama is a Muslim. A third were not
sure. Only 14 percent identified the president as a Christian.


These findings—which echo a long string of surveys conducted during the Obama years—would seem to indicate that at least half of the GOP is unhinged and living in its own fact-free and perhaps Fox-fed reality. To top it off, many Republican voters have expected the GOPers in control of Congress to kill Obamacare, shut down the government and slash the
budget, prevent Obama from issuing executive orders, and impeach the pretender who inhabits the White House. Oh, and there's this: Benghazi! So they are mighty ticked off and seriously disappointed. The Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll found that half of GOP caucus-goers said they were unsatisfied with the US government and 38 percent were "mad as hell" at it. Slightly more than half were unsatisfied with Republicans in Congress; a fifth were mad as hell at them.

 

More black hole speculation

New law implies thermodynamic time runs backwards inside black holes

Maybe all black holes feed back into the big bang?  That's just my speculation: not sure if this article supports it. But it's an idea that appeals, no?

The blog of fools continues...

Steve Kates, who is in perpetual competition with Judith Sloan in the category of "most startlingly ignorant yet arrogant contributor to Catallaxy on climate change", now complains incessantly that the media is useless because they refuse to challenge politicians who believe what scientists say.

But his post yesterday that Obama was "Ignorant and stupid" for talking about projected temperature increases in Alaska if CO2 keeps rising reached some sort of new height for dumb and utter lack of self awareness, even for him.

Obama's comments, if taken to be in Fahrenheit (and why wouldn't they, given the country he leads) are entirely within the range in the National Climate Assessment issued by the US in 2014.

I see that Bolt has seemingly read Kates, and does a Steyn, calling it fraud.

Right wing politics will not be fully respectable again until these fools are called out by Right wing politicians as utter fools on this topic.

One party drug helps another?

Alcohol sales get higher after weed legalization contrary to industry fears | US news | The Guardian

"Weed" is a bit quaint in the headline, but still it's interesting that in Colorado, legal cannabis has not hurt alcohol sales at all.  In fact, they've increased.

So much for drug reform advocates who like to argue that cannabis is a much less harmful drug than alcohol, if it turns out legal cannabis increases alcohol consumption anyway...*


* mind you, given my post about how drug use varies extremely widely from one place to the next, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be a purely local effect.