Sunnyshine day, where I am today, but we cannot go outside, except on one walk.  It'll be a beautiful day...

Vladimir Putin seems to think the Coronavirus is good news for him.  I suspect this is more the message than he’s sending forth, rather than his real thoughts.  I suspect his real thoughts are inscrutable.  But no matter; I suspect also that the Coronavirus will be disastrously handled by Russia, and it will lead to a major fall in his domestic legitimacy.  

Small piece about Dorothy Day, a powerful moral voice against cruelty and injustice in America from the 1920s through 1980s.  The work she did in setting up the Catholic Worker houses—or at least, like Bernard of Clairvaux with Cistercianism, in helping them become something more than what they were on their way to being—is important.  The piece nicely sketches Day’s journey and witness, but avoids mentioning several crucial facts: she had no idea how power works, no conception of social structures, and no idea of how the challenges of modern society were not reducible to the rather shallow but sincere moralism that she so eloquently preached.  

Interesting piece on Toni Morrison’s Catholicism.

This is a cool piece studying just the occurrence of keywords in articles and books on philosophy of history.

“Here’s a telling fact: Countries chronically in fragility and conflict over the past two decades have seen their poverty rates stuck at over 40 percent, while countries that have escaped fragility during this same period have cut their poverty rates by more than half.”

This is interesting to me for a couple different reasons. First of all, it’s more evidence than the language of social policy based around “development “is gaining currency, or maybe consolidating it’s control, over most of the people engaged in international relations and global affairs. That’s interesting, because it seems to be significantly different from a purely econometric language.  Or language of national security.

Second, and this is much more long-term, I wonder if we are developing ourselves out of certain set of capacities which may be necessary to retain in order to deal with those who are not developed out of them yet. This is a kind of argument about the morlocks and the Elois, If you remember them from HG Wells is not the time machine. Given that as communities  develop, they become significantly less warlike, and yet we need war or were making capacities in order to deal with the more truculent among us, Is there a worry that the more people are like let Europe, the less people will be able to handle the people who are not?

Altogether elsewhere, and from a few years ago, a nice small piece on when the buffalo began to roam.  As a scientist notes, “The only other invasion of North America that has had such an ecological and environmental impact has been us.”  Also this image blew me away: “the giant longhorn was about two tons and more than eight feet tall at the shoulders.”

This looks like an op ad by a thoughtful person independently assessing the pros and cons of opening up this market, but in fact it is a long propaganda piece—an advertisement by the head lobbyist Of the higher ed accreditors. I bet it was probably penned by staff for her. 

I spoke about this a while ago, and my thoughts are still the same. Accreditation of higher education should not be understood in terms of a profit making function by private corporations, as this person assumes.  We saw where that gets us with the ratings agencies before the financial crisis. It becomes a race to the bottom, to a credit anybody who will pay you. We need a different system altogether.