Some of you know that I picked up a hobby last summer – backyard astronomy. A couple years ago I came up with an idea for an automated sextant (“celestial navigation system”) using a digital camera, a wide field lens, and little box of electronics – something Raspberry-Pi-like – to process the images. No takers for my proposal but it got me looking at the sky. With that as an intro, here are a few images I created using pictures shot from the backyard.
Music for Friday Night
Thought for the Day – October 21, 2022
Over the past couple years Carlos Lozada has become a must-read writer for me. His column in yesterday’s New York Times is a good example of why. Some excerpts from “How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It“:
[The] right-side-of-history argument… is rarely about history at all. It is a pre-emptive assertion of one side’s virtue and another’s wickedness; it is not about interpreting the past but about scoring points in the present to shape the future. Hirschman likened this argument to “the earlier assurance, much sought after by all combatants, that God was on their side.” The comparison is apt: God on your side will help you win, and history on your side will say that you did….
“You are extreme and destructive; I have history on my side.”… renders dialogue not just impossible but unfathomable….
“Talkin’ ’bout my generation…”
From Melanie McFarland’s, “Reality bites, so of course Generation X was always going to sell out and vote Republican“:
Halstead prophetically added: “Today’s young adults will be remembered either as a late-blooming generation that ultimately helped to revive American democracy by coalescing around a bold new political program and bringing the rest of the nation along with them, or as another silent generation that stood by as our democracy and society suffered a slow decline.”
Yes, I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my generation. Moderate Burkean conservatives we are not.
Music for Another Friday Night
Music for Friday night
I did not realize that this is the original. (H/t to Mike the Mad Biologist.)
Music for Thursday Night
Miscellany – September 2, 2022
Thought for the Week:
Any theoretical formation with a self-defense mechanism that refashions those that disagree with it into a symptom of the problem it is diagnosing has most likely cross the line from theory into theology. Like Marxists who reflexively label any criticism as petty bourgeois or Lacanians anxious to read any pushback as the outcome of unconscious repression, there is no way to test it except on the terms that it has itself provided.
I listened to Know Your Enemy: Christopher Lasch’s Critique of Progress, with Chris Lehmann again this week. It was even better the second time through. (Lasch’s writing was a big influence when I was forming my view of the world in my twenties.)
“Americans need to think about the choices contributing to student debt.”
As much as I agree with Addison Del Mastro re $10k of loan forgiveness now, Tom Nichols has the right take on the path forward. At this point, no one contemplating taking out a loan to pay for college tuition should have any illusions about the downsides. The $10k forgiveness was grace. Appreciate it as such. From Nichols’, The Trouble With Boutique Colleges (emphasis mine):
Going to a top-tier university, if you can afford it, is a life-changing choice that will likely work out well. Going to an affordable public institution for particular professional skills (such as nursing or teaching) is also a life-changing choice that will likely go well.
Going to an extremely expensive school that is neither selective nor known for a particular course of study and majoring in medieval Corsican poetry is a life-changing choice that is almost certainly not going to work out well…
Tuition-dependent boutique schools are keenly aware that they are competing for students, as I wrote in my book The Death of Expertise:
This entire [shopping] process means not only that children are in charge, but that they are already being taught to value schools for some reason other than the education it might provide them. Schools know this, and they’re ready for it. In the same way the local car dealership knows exactly how to place a new model in the showroom, or a casino knows exactly how to perfume the air that hits patrons just as they walk in the door, colleges have all kinds of perks and programs at the ready as selling points, mostly to edge out their competitors over things that matter only to kids.
… For students who refuse to go to a public school (which, in most states, is still a good deal) but did not gain admission to a top-tier school, the beautiful boutique school is a tempting debt trap. Debt forgiveness is a Band-Aid. In order to fix the broken system of higher education in America, we need to start changing our culture and how we think about what it means to “go to college.”
More on Student Loan Forgiveness
Addison Del Mastro’s essay, Could You Loan Some Forgiveness?, is the best I’ve read on the subject to date. An excerpt:
It’s the human cost of these loans, and the aura of fraud about them—the fact that they can’t be discharged via bankruptcy, the fact that parents might have urged their college-bound children to take them, the fact that colleges sold them with promises of employment and high salaries—that pushes me in favor of forgiveness. Many of these loans should never have been offered, many degree programs are oversold, and many students did not, and reasonably could not have, taken them with a clear-eyed understanding of what it would mean for them five, ten, or twenty years down the road.
Yes, some people made bad decisions. But there’s a limit to how much you can blame them, and to how severely they should be punished, for being starry-eyed 18-year-olds who believed what their parents and guidance counselors and prospective colleges told them. “Buyer beware” might work for used cars, but colleges, which trade on the notion that they have a higher, public-minded purpose, should be held to a higher standard.