OT: Berkeley

What did Larkin suggest, above, that makes you think he was being less than straight forward. Milo is hilarious. Hes a foriegn gay that gets right under the left's skin. What's not to like? OK, he's not a african-American, native-American, foreigner, but...

Hey, if they didn't allow you on the road, they wouldn't get in so many traffic jams.

10/10 on the ignoring facts scale.

But sadly a popular passtime for stinkin' commies and anarchists nowadays.

I don't think they know enough to be "stinkin' commies and anarchists"... I think they're just stinkin' village idiots >:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142    Skype: skypeanalog |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 

     Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.

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Some civil services are less political than others. If you don't fire a who le raft of civil servants every time another political party comes to power , the civil service can be much closer to apolitical as it is in pretty muc h every other English-speaking country.

The civil service isn't a small group, and only rabid right-wingers see any actual advantage in making it smaller. Thye seem to be able to understand that entrusting national defence to a mercenary army isn't a good idea, but haven't taken on board the more general lesson, despite Enron.

So every advanced industrial country suffers from a military takeover every few years?

What James Arthur means is that most university academics don't share his s illy ideas. They get paid to know what they are talking about. James Arthur has fixed ideas about the reality of climate change which ignore the resul ts of a couple of generations of academic research.

Strange. I haven't heard about that. James Arthur will - of course - produc e all sorts of right-wing nonsense purporting to prove something different, and I'll have fun tearing it to shreds.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Their "common man" had enough property to qualify as a voter - about 6% of the population at the time, so not all that common.

Provided that he had enough property to qualify as a man of affairs. Adam S mith was well aware that the well-off tended to conspire to rip off the res t of the community

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and the US constitution doesn't seem to have any articles directed at restr aining them. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1895 didn't get enacted until lo ng after all the founding tax evaders were safely dead.

The design of the US constitution owes a lot to earlier constitutions and t o Moderate Enlightenment thinking. More recent constitutions reflect more R adical Enlightenment thinking - the Radical Enlightenment won because it is based on more rigorous thinking, while the US constitution hung onto a lot that was familiar, and not all that well thought out.

Even if the US constitution had had any intellectual respectability, it's a document of it's time - which didn't involve any kind of rapid communicati on.

The first semaphore telegraph was invented in France in 1792, after the US constitution had been ratified, and it value was first demonstrated by Napo leon.

James Arthur gets his political opinions from Bastiat - who died in 1850 - and his admiration for the US constitution is of a piece with his enthusias m for antique political technology - but if he were consistent in his prefe rences he'd only travel by horse-drawn coach, and only read by candle-light .

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Larkin is comic, but probably more often than he intends to be.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

What Cursitor Doom is complaining about - like James Arthur - is that unive rsity-trained academics don't share his fatuous ideas.

I find this a perfectly natural state of affairs. There are always idiots a round with silly ideas about how society should work, but it's only the rig ht-wing idiots who are silly enough to think that the establishment should share their perverse delusions.

This would work better, if Cursiotr Doom had ever mastered critical thinkin g. His idea of fearless scrutiny consists of recycling the mindless abuse t hat gets published in the UK Mail newspaper.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

The history behind this is sort of interesting. When the UK decided that gi ving people civil service jobs on the basis that they had relatives with po litical influence wasn't a good idea, they'd just been exposed to the Chine se civil service, where selection depended on passing a competitive examina tion.

What wasn't realised in the UK was that all the Chinese examination system was testing for was literacy - learning to read and write a logographic syl lable-based writng system is difficult, and you have to put in roughly an h our a day of practice to maintain your skill.

There were barely enough literate Chinese around to sustain a civil service , so the examination system served to select from the qualified candidates available.

The UK examiners were fooled by the Confucian twaddle about selecting the s uperior man. Testing for competence in reading and writing English would ha ve produced too many qualified candidates, so the UK examiners went for com petence in Latin and Greek - Latin because it was an international language at the time, and Greek because the Romans had though that competence in Gr eek was a necessary part of an adequate education.

This winnowed down to the civil service candidate pool to pretty much the s ame well-connected pool who had always got the jobs before, but added a nic e competitive examination gloss.

UK secondary schools prepared candidates for the civil service so they alwa ys taught Latin and Greek, but were less enthusiastic about mathematics or modern languages, which prepared people for less prestigious - and lower-pa id - jobs.

When I started secondary school, Australian medicals schools were still ins isting that medical students could read Latin, and my parents wanted me to do it. Happily, it wasn't on offer at first year in my high school and by the next year the Latin requirement had been dropped - reading Galen in the original wasn't seen to be quite as necessary as it had been

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Thanks Spehro, I look at the BBC sometimes too... but I think most conservatives here (SED) would call them liberal. Hmm maybe I should check out some Australian papers?

George H.

Most of the conservatives here think that Mein Kampf was dangerously libera l.

There's the Murdoch owned media - which is roughly as far right a Fox News

- and the Fairfax newspapers, mainly "The Age" in Melbourne and the Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney, which are pretty much the same, with a lot of sha red content.

Both strike me a deliberately middle of the road, with articles from journa lists who can be classified as perceptibly right-of-centre and perceptibly left of centre but all belong to the rational middle.

I preferred the UK Guardian and the Dutch Volkskrant (which happen to be ow ned by completely different organisations, but do tend to publish one anoth er's articles - translated, of course). Both are slightly further to the le ft - there are quality papers in the UK that cater to the right-leaning pub lic, though most of them seemed to be owned by Murdoch now, and no UK right

-winger - or even right-leaning middle-of-the-roader - would be caught dead reading the Guardian.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

BBC is pretty invested in leftist propaganda, which displaces balanced thinking. It also displaces good writing.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

OK fine, Do you have a source that tries to do balanced thinking? For me I find that NPR does that on the left. (But also I'm "mostly liberal", so biased.) I don't watch much TV, but Fox and MSNBC(and others) seem like news arms of the two parties.

George H.

Nowadays, no. Even AP and Reuters and the big news outlets tilt their stuff with their perspective. All you can do these days is read the left and right-biased articles and make your own judgements.

Real Clear Politics presents opposing left/right links alternately, about as close to balance as you can get these days. The other Real Clears (science, tech, health, history) are pretty good links.

Fox is a bit closer to center than, say MSNBC or the New York Times.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle was tedious juvenile Trump bashing front to back. People were justifying the Berkeley arson as a reasonable response to facism. Even the business section was full of Trump insults. The only relief from political ranting was the obituaries.

I canceled my NYT subscription when they did that. I'd cancel the Chron, except that Mo likes the sports section.

The quality, the writing, of journalism has really declined. I guess there is so much demand for content, for so many sources, they have to hire hacks.

Drudge is amazing

given that it's nothing but links.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

OK thanks. I sometime listen to "left, right and center" on npr, but there's not much of a right left. (NPI) Rick Lowry (national review) or David Frum (atlantic)

The last few shows (I listened to) have been almost all Trump bashing. And I can barley stand whomever they have on the left.. just whining all the time.

George H.

[snip]

[snip]

I like barley soup. Please eat yours, then you can, possibly, properly spell "barely" >:-} ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 |

Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.

I've only seen a little, but...definitely funny.

Here's Milo back in his hotel room after the communists(*) rioted at Berkley:

Quite reasonable.

(*) No, REALLY. Check the footage--revcom.us signs everywhere.

Cheers, James Arthur

Nothing, but bitrex was complaining in general. Larkin's funny, but irony doesn't always internet well.

Cheers, James Arthur