Freedom

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We did not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
-Ronald Reagan

Baseball's Great Debate

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The great thing about baseball is the arguments. Not with the umpires, but who is the greatest hitter, player etc. One of the greatest arguments relates to the American League MVP for 1941: Williams or DiMaggio?
Williams hit .406 that year, the last hitter to reach .400. He led the league in home runs. He would have won the Triple Crown but fell five RBI's short.
DiMaggio had the legendary 56-game hitting streak, and after the streak was broken, started a 16-game hitting streak. He led the league in RBI's and his team won the World Series.

Most disputants in this argument will concede that at the time Williams' feat was more common as several players had hit .400 in the previous forty years. DiMaggio, on the other hand, broke a record of over fifty years.

Instead of looking back from 1941, let's look back over the ensuing seventy years. The closest anyone has come to 56 occurred when Pete Rose hit in 44 games. Proportionately, that means he got eighty percent of the way there. Now look at batting averages. Eighty percent of .406 is .3215, say .322. How many hitters have reached that number since 1941?

Rangers Clinch Home Field in the First Round

And the new magic number is 22? Eleven wins by the Rangers, eleven losses by their opponents. Whatever. We have a new candidate for the Herschel Walker award. The LA Angels, who traded Mike Napoli to Toronto for Vernon Wells (who was horrible this year). The Rangers traded Frankie Francisco to Toronto for Napoli, who ended up the hottest hitter in baseball since the All Star break, and to top it off, hit four home runs in the last two games against the Angels.

Cultural Literacy

Many Americans who have graduated from high school in the recent past have been deprived of the cultural vocabulary that was commonly possessed by educated persons in past generations. Some repair work is necessary for them and the members of the current school generation. They must be reintroduced to the cultural vocabulary that continues to be the foundation for literate national communication. The new illiteracy is sometimes excused by the argument that our schools are now educating larger proportions of our population. The point is that we are not educating them. We undertook the great task of universal education precisely in order to produce a truly literate population, but we have not succeeded in that task in recent years. We must assure that new generations will continue to be enfranchised in our medium of national communication as securely as they are enfranchised at the polls.
-E. D. Hirsch. Cultural Literacy. (107-108)

The Magic Number is Zero

The Texas Rangers have won the American League West!!!!!!!!!!!

Education

The adherence of the universities to the military involve the neglect and have carried far enough the betrayal of the university's fundamental reason for existence, which is the advancement of man's search for truth and happiness. It is for this purpose alone that universities receive and and should receive the community's support. When the university turns away from its central purpose and makes itself an appendage to the government, concerning itself with techniques rather than ideals, dispensing conventional orthodoxy rather than new ideas, it is not only failing to meet its responsibilities, it is betraying a public trust.
-J. William Fulbright

It's Magic Number Time

For the Texas Rangers, the number is 5.

Economics and How Green Was My Valley

Last week there was a mine accident in Wales. What caught my eye was the following quotation:

As of June 2011, 1,500 people in Wales worked in the mining industry, according to government sources.

1,500 people. That makes the automobile or cattle-ranching businesses look healthy. But the end of coal mining in Wales is more catastrophic to the identity of her people than Detroit jobs going overseas. Mining has been the lifeblood in those valleys for centuries. And its gone. Time moves on but can the people keep up with her?

My father grew up in a town with two industries: the railroad and a Celanese plant. As my father entered high school, the Celanese closed down. By the time he got out of college, the railroads were dying. There was no future for him in the town of his birth. Like others in his high school class, he left only to return when he was dying.

Wales is an example of that writ large: When the major job source left, there was a brain drain. What was left behind lives on the charity of the government.

Henry Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
-Henry Adams

Ignorance

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
-Bronson Alcott

The Heat

So on September 13, 2011 the temperature reached 107 degrees. 70 days of 100 or above beating the record of 1980. Let's hope it is another 31 years before we break this record.

An Example: When Bad Criticism Meets Great Literature

Howard Zinn argues that the telling of America in terms of heroes and their victims, which entails "the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress," functions as "only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders." If On the Road is about defining America, it is also about staging an intervention into official definitions of history and nationhood.
-Penny Vlagopoulos. "Rewriting America" in Jack Kerouac. On the Road: The Original Scroll. (60-61).

On History

One of the chief tests of the quality of historical work lies in its readability. History, even serious history, is interesting, and the historian who makes it dull deserves the pillory. One of the few benefits that advancing years bring to the historian is an increasing right to refuse being bored by his colleagues.
-G. R. Elton Return to Essentials (70-71)

The Big 12

Has anybody thought of the economic impact on Dallas-Fort Worth if the Big 12 is history? No Big 12 Championship (Football and Basketball) and no Texas-OU?

Last Visit to a Dying Friend

I visited a friend today for what will probably be the last time. I've known him for nearly twenty years and we have shared a lot of memories in that time. But now he is wasting away, a shadow of his former self. Yet he still had something to give me. And those memories will never die.
AVE ATQUE VALE BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC!

Values

And yet we do need, individually and as a society, some values, some belief in the foundations of our conduct, in order to make life bearable. If these too are lies, they are, as Holmes' great contemporary, Joseph Conrad, thought them, true lies; if illusions, then indispensable one. To abandon them is to commit moral suicide.
-Alexander M. Bickel. The Morality of Consent. (77)

Home

Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.
-Kathryn Stockett. The Help: A Novel. (528)