Archive for 2019

I AGREE.

ACHIEVEMENT GAPS IN EDUCATION: No, you’re not going to fix them by blaming the schools.

SO I ASKED ABOUT GARY TAUBES EARLIER, but in this post I’m asking people to share their experiences following Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength advice. Chime in in the comments. (Bumped).

NARATIVE UBER ALLES:

Dems do everything they can to inflame their supporters, and everything they can to ensure that their opponents can’t be similarly roused.

OPEN THREAD: Share your thoughts and dreams.

SO YESTERDAY HELEN POSTED A LINK to Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, and some people commented on how it had changed their lives. But in this post I’m actually soliciting your experiences. Let us know how it worked out. (Bumped).

SHE’S MEAN. Kamala Harris Offers a Crappy Apology to Parents Who Went to Jail Because Their Kids Missed School.

When the Insta-Daughter missed a lot of school because of repeated strep, followed by the flu, the school called us with threats of jail. (They literally wanted a separate doctor’s note for each day she missed, under a stupid and short-lived policy). The Insta-Wife responded “fine, I’ll bring my sick daughter to your office right now and you can clean it up when she pukes.” They never called again. Someone should take a few puking kids to Kamala’s office to give her some perspective.

“BUT.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Air-Breathing Rocket Engine Gets Green Light for Major Tests. “The Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE), which is being developed by the U.K. company Reaction Engines, can switch between two modes. In aircraft-engine mode, it uses oxygen from the atmosphere, and in rocket-engine mode, it burns an oxidizer carried onboard together with the fuel liquid hydrogen.”

QUESTION ASKED: Who Gets to Define What ‘Art’ Is?

That was a topic that Tom Wolfe explored in depth in his 1975 book, The Painted Word, beginning with the endless procession of artists trekking to SoHo praying with all their might to hit the big time, while posing as non-bourgeois as humanly possible:

[B]elieve me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same … You can see them six days a week … hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up in front of the real-estate office on Broome Street in their identical blue jeans, gum boots, and quilted Long March jackets … looking, of course, for the inevitable Loft…

* * * * * * * *

During the 1960s this entire process by which le monde, the culturati, scout bohemia and tap the young artist for Success was acted out in the most graphic way. Early each spring, two emissaries from the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller, would head downtown from the Museum on West Fifty-third Street, down to Saint Marks Place, Little Italy, Broome Street and environs, and tour the loft studios of known artists and unknowns alike, looking at everything, talking to one and all, trying to get a line on what was new and significant in order to put together a show in the fall … and, well, I mean, my God— from the moment the two of them stepped out on Fifty-third Street to grab a cab, some sort of boho radar began to record their sortie … They’re coming! … And rolling across Lower Manhattan, like the Cosmic Pulse of the theosophists, would be a unitary heartbeat:

Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me … O damnable Uptown! By all means, deny it if asked!— what one knows, in one’s cheating heart, and what one says are two different things!

Heh, indeed.

JOURNALISM: