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There were death threats and violence though:
http://www.newcriterion.com/po...

Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have, and I say that as someone who's part Jewish.
Jewish Americans were not:
- effectively barred from living in most of the country.
- prevented from attending public schools and later institutions of higher learning, which allowed them to gain the skills they needed to succeed.
- paid less than their non-Jewish counterparts doing the same job.
- beaten or killed as a common recreational activity in large areas of the country, with police either ignoring it or actively supporting it.
- prevented from borrowing money from banks, which allowed them to buy homes and start businesses.
- targeted by America's current system of racial oppression called the "War on Drugs".

While that is perhaps true *in* the US (though not entirely), all of that -- EVERY SINGLE POINT -- was literally the law of the land where the bulk of Jewish immigrants to the US came from. Some of it until quite recently.

To wit: being (not "effectively" - literally) barred from living in most of the country, being excluded from academic institutions (official policy as recently as 15 years ago), being beaten and killed as a common recreational activity in large areas of the country, with police either ignoring it or actively supporting it, being targeted by a system of racial oppression in campaigns against crime, etc. Not to mention fully one third of their world population being wiped out less than a century ago, and still below pre-WWII levels.

No question that blacks have had a rough go of it in the US. But the claim that "Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have", while partially true on a technicality, is both misleading and laughably ignorant. If you gave the ancestors of today's black Americans -- as mistreated as they were -- a good look at the lives of the same generations of ancestors of today's American Jews and offered them to swap, most of them would keep what they had in a heartbeat.

that 23% is also the difference between a successful product line and one shut down.

Should an isolated product suddenly cost 23% more it will suffer badly in the market, therefore domestic manufacturing is not viable. This argument is unrealistic and naive at best, or disingenuous at worst. Trade with China isn't about iPhones. It's about EVERYTHING being manufactured in Asia. All products, all brands. In fact, it's really about all imports that allow you to accumulate stuff while eluding the regulatory burdens imposed by the government you elect and eluding the cost of employing fellow citizens that don't, for some strange reason, care to live in factory dormitories to provide you with low, low Walmart prices.

The net result of eliminating the cost savings of outsourcing to Asia is that the final cost of all products that currently do not incur domestic manufacturing costs will be higher. No one brand or product will suffer an isolated cost increase; everything will cost more.

Will that mean fewer iPhones and Nexus Galaxies sold? Yes. Will the smart phone market disappear? No. Of course not. People will replace their stuff less frequently and be less reckless with their purchasing in general. That isn't a bad thing. God forbid we do not all replace our $500+ phone every 12 months or suffer with only one x-box.

Let's consider the other side effects of not outsourcing our manufacturing base. Read this to understand the consequences of forsaking the working class for low, low walmart prices. US income disparity is accelerating and this is caused by making our working class compete with dormitory housed disposable Asian workers that live, sleep and breath their foreman's whim, on your behalf.

Another effect will be a vast reduction of environmental impact. The US has a regulatory regime with teeth. Some meat packer in butt-fuck Texas dumps blood in the river and it's news, the EPA swoops in and corrections occur. The Chinese have deadened whole regions of their land recycling your electronics and the Chinese government just chases out the journalists. If you actually care about the Earth and it's fate then your path is clear; stop the export of western pollution to the third world. If you're really just a NIMBYist and can't live without disposably cheap stuff swirling around your life, then continue advocating "free trade."

70% of all imports to the US are tariff free. The largest part of the remaining 30% is fossil fuel in various forms. No other nation has anything approaching the abject surrender of its manufacturing base presently occurring in the US. No presidential candidates, incumbent or otherwise, are seriously advocating any change to this situation. Your Secretary of State is a former Walmart executive.

You frequently encounter a sentiment that goes approximately thus; "the days of prosperity in the US for unskilled workers are over; if you fail to incur huge education debt and assume a place among the well compensated elite you should expect to be miserable, and you deserve it." If that's you then you need to look around. Your lifestyle has an expiration date. Part of the coping mechanism we have used to offset working class decline is lowering the tax burden on lower end of the scale. As a result, 51% of income earners in the US are paying no net federal income tax while we're running a $1.3E12 defic

Coincidentally, I read a piece today comparing the core curricula of Columbia vs. that of Harvard over the years. The gist of the piece was that while Harvard has had some interesting experimentation, they've also been prone to basing their course requirements on esoteric themes that no one outside of academia really sees the point in, and that Columbia, by contrast, has been much more committed to the classical means of teaching and curriculum. In short, the article posits that Columbia is more concerned with the acquisition of knowledge (and hopefully, some wisdom), while Harvard is much more into being a trendsetter and concentrating on the process of learning. Columbia: it's what you learn. Harvard: it's how you learn. Most people have this mental image of Harvard as being a place where you're enveloped in Plato, Milton, and Shakespeare, and apparently, unless you choose to be, that's not true anymore. There's really not a reading list that all students are required to master anymore. If you want to leave all that dusty stuff behind, hey, fine by the profs. Columbia requires all students to study the important books of the western cannon. So if you're looking for a classical Ivy League education, ironically Harvard may be the last place you should go.

The book just had it's 75th anniversary a few weeks back. John Derbyshire over at National Review commented on it:

"When I was an earnest sixth-former (=highschool senior), a standard classroom discussion was: Which of the two books Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a more probable view of our future? The question looks pretty absurd now, unless you live in North Korea, I suppose."
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDYxOTc5M 2E3Y2VkMWYxOGM1YTQzNTYyMWUwMzcyMDA=

This might be worth reading too.

What happened to Aldous Huxley
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/feb03/huxle y.htm

It's the demography, stupid
By Mark Steyn
From: http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the -demography/

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands-- probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada, and Europe don't accept that proposition--than what exactly is the war about?

We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours fac

or "When they came for the cartoons I did nothing because I wasn't a cartoon"

Weren't there some government hearings on cartoon violence a few years ago? Didn't the television folks agree to straighten up and fly right? It sounds like that's about the time cartoons started getting lame. Coincidence? I don't think so. I got curious about what happened and did some googling....

STEP 1. OMG! Marvin the Martian just blew up the Earth, and that's supposed to be funny?

from TRUCE - Teachers Resiting Unhealty Children's Entertainment

"Too much of what children see on television is violence as entertainment. It undermines lessons we teach at home and school about how people treat each other, and encourages the use of violence to solve problems and to have fun. We have seen the effects of this glamorized violence in such events as school shootings."

STEP 2. I am shocked and appalled and am going to do something about it.

from lionlamb.org

"The mission of The Lion & Lamb Project is to stop the marketing of violence to children. We do this by helping parents, industry and government officials recognize that violence is not child's play - and by galvanizing concerned adults to take action."

"Lion & Lamb works to reduce the marketing of violent toys, games and entertainment to children in two distinct ways. We work with parents and other concerned adults to reduce the demand for violent "entertainment" products, and with industry and government to reduce the supply of such products."

"We believe that attitudes about violence as "entertainment" can be changed over time. Just as attitudes about drunk driving and smoking have changed, we believe that Lion & Lamb can help forge a national consensus that violence is not child's play. Just as it has become "uncool" to pollute and to litter, we are working to change the tolerance level for violence as a "cool" theme for toys and other entertainment products for children."

STEP 3. Well, if you think about it, we can't do it ourselves, so we need the government to force everyone to do the right thing.

"Too often, both government and the entertainment industry place all responsibility for monitoring the games children play on the shoulders of their parents. Certainly, parents need to be vigilant and provide their kids with guidance. But in a culture where $1 billion a year is spent by industries of all sorts to advertise their products directly to children, parents can't stem the tide of "entertainment" violence on their own." - snippet from an article at LionLamb.org

STEP 4. The Government is only too happy to oblige. Who could vote against protecting children?

"Senator Paul Simon, speaking to a conference organized in Beverly Hills on August 2 by the National Council for Families and Television, told some 650 representatives of the broadcasting business who were present that he was giving them sixty days to come up with a plan to regulate themselves with respect to the portrayal of violence--or else they would face some sort of government regulation." - from newcriterion.com article archived from Sept. 1993

Step 5. Mission Accomplished

"Culminating a protracted campaign against TV violence, both Houses of Congress have passed legislation requiring that new televisions be equipped with the so-called v-chip -- a computerized chip capable of detecting program ratings and blocking adversely rated programs from view." - from an article in the ACLU Archive

Physics is based on observation and on mathematics. And anyone without overweening ego issues can have the courage to admit that mathematics is particular and specific to our cognitive, embodied perception.

Platonic ideals are as likely as Great Sky Gods, or GUTs. There are no Natural Laws, but instead narrative descriptions of the world. These stories use metaphor and analogy, and their popularity waxes and wanes along with the lives and influence of their storytellers. Blend Kuhn (anti) and Kuhn (pro) and Foucault with a dash of Popper. And don't skimp on the hermeneutics.

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

An interesting and relevant article from the New Criterion points out that the backlash of censorship, at least in the US, often has an opposite affect of that intended:

"But the main reason why censorship has been discredited is that it is always stupid in practice, and whatever else it could prevent it could not, in America, prevent people from saying that."