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September 06, 2014
The Blogspam Bombing of WAC/P: The 3 or 4 weekly comments at What About Clients/Paris. Where did they go?
We are still trying to fix this. Over the last 6 months we have been blogspam-bombed to the tune of nearly 1000 a day. Which means we finally stopped sifting through comments to find the 2 or 3 legit ones out of the same number. In the meantime, you have to register at our site to comment and hopefully that still works. Again, we are trying to fix this. Work keeps getting in the way. Besides, we're mostly Boomers here so we have our avoidance mechanism on for Anything Tech That Is Unpleasant. If we were any good at this sort of thing, we would have gone to medical school. But we are learning. We endure. We get better.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)
Washingtonian: Photos of Depression-Era D.C.
Compliments of the Library of Congress and yeoman labors by the Yale University photo archive, there are over 170,000 pictures taken between 1935 and 1945.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2014
Harvard, Steven Pinker and Cultural Literacy: What should we all know something about?
Once again, Cultural Literacy, anyone? What should we all know about, anyway? What does it mean to be educated?
See in The New Republic "The Trouble with Harvard: The Ivy League Is Broken and Only Standardized Tests Can Fix It". Now forget this article's title, Harvard, standardized tests or the liberal reputation* of the magazine (TNR) publishing it. About halfway through, author Steven Pinker gives us a fine summary in two thoughtful paragraphs of What It Means to be Educated. We could not ask for more:
.... It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
*Some conservatives wrongly believe there can be nothing worthwhile in The New Republic; likewise, many liberals have the same unintelligent knee-jerk reaction to the right-leaning (Bill Buckley's) The National Review. Both are fine--very fine--publications. It's time to grow up.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2014
Posted by JD Hull at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2014
In Rolling Stone: "Last Tango in Kabul"
A current Rolling Stone feature by Matthieu Aikins covers the Kabul expat community from government contract boon days to the present, giving a vivid if troubling picture of increased danger to expats and contractors still in Afghanistan. It was originally published in mid-August. Excerpts:
It was so easy to make money in Kabul that it felt like we were all citizens of some Gulf oil state. If you could string a few coherent sentences together into a grant application, odds were that there was some contracting officer out there who was willing to give you money, no matter how vapid your idea. Want to put on a music festival in Kabul? Here's a few hundred thousand. Shoot a soap opera about heroic local cops? A million for you. Is your handicraft business empowering Afghan women? Name your bid.
The Kabubble economy was so hot that kids out of college were making six-figure salaries, and former midlevel paper pushers were clearing a thousand a day as consultants for places like the World Bank. "All of your expenses are paid for, you don't buy anything, you're getting this massive salary that you bank," Peter, the journalist, says. "Do that for a few years and you've saved half a million before you're 30. You could basically class-jump, by going to Kabul."******
These days, expatriate life in Kabul is a sad reflection of its former self. Diplomats and aid workers operate under drastic security restrictions that keep them from attending restaurants or private parties, a condition that has been prolonged by the drawn-out crisis over the presidential election and who will succeed Karzai. Several of the restaurants and guesthouses that sustained the expat scene here have closed down. "A lot of people reached the point where they were like, 'OK, I'm out, I'm done,'" says Luisa Walmsley, a media consultant living in Kabul. "You start realizing that you're really close to all this stuff and that it's just a matter of time that you're going to lose someone."
Posted by JD Hull at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)