CARROLL MOORE MAKEMSON

https://www.2bcliberty.org/our-blog/carroll-moore-makemson

Once upon a time, in Roanoke, Virginia, under the light of the Mill Mountain Star, Mary Carroll Moore was born to proud parents William and Mary. Carroll’s aunt and long-time fellow do-gooder and mischief-maker, Frances Eddy (Aunt Boo) attended Carroll’s birth, cementing their soul connection from the start. Carroll’s early childhood was spent in Pennsylvania, where her father attended Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Carroll encountered school for the first time. She never left education after that. 

AI Written, AI Read

https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

In Celebration of and in Thanksgiving for the Life of President James Carter - 1.9.25

Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats

Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths? If you ponder this question long enough, you become enlightened about the nature of the administrative state.

If you don’t, you end up like Ramaswamy, who seems to think that halving the number of bureaucrats will halve the number of forms that need to be filled out. I think in his worldview, the FDA will think “Now that we have fewer bureaucrats, it would take forever to complete our current process, so let’s simplify the process.”

Maybe he is working off a thesis where red tape expands to consume the resources available to it (as measured in bureaucrats). But my impression is that the amount of red tape is determined more by things like:

— How likely is it that their decision will get challenged in court?

The day my bullies apologized: Race, the South and a reconciliation decades in the making

https://www.salon.com/2015/04/25/the_day_my_bullies_apologized_race_the_south_and_a_reconciliation_decades_in_the_making/

It all came back in vivid detail as Greg sat in his Subaru opening the mail, hundreds of miles and decades away from Georgia. There were other letters after David’s. One came from South Carolina, from Celia Harvey, whom Greg remembered as a cute, shy girl who had assiduously avoided him at school. “I’m writing this letter today to ask for your forgiveness,” she wrote. Another envelope came from Alabama, from Joseph Logan, who had been cocaptain of the Americus High football team. He had enclosed a four-hundred-word sketch about an assault on Greg that he had witnessed during their senior year. “I hope your reading it does not cause unpleasant memories about AHS,” he said in an accompanying note, “but I am sure it will.” The most anguished letter, postmarked in Florida, was from Deanie Dudley, one of the most popular girls in the senior class, the homecoming queen. Greg smiled at the thought of Deanie; he had nursed a secret crush on her in high school, something she’d have been mortified to know about at the time. Her apology was couched in religious terms and suggested a keen sense of guilt. “I will never again say, ‘How could the Holocaust have happened—how could all those Christian people in Poland and Germany have stood by and allowed it to happen?’ I was present with you over a long period of time, and I never once did one thing to comfort you or reach out to you. It was cruelty.”

u/Schattenspringer: Need a fake kid to piss off my wife

https://www.reddit.com/r/BORUpdates/comments/1hxajz9/need_a_fake_kid_to_piss_off_my_wife_short/

I can't decide what amused her more... the effort I put into the ruse or the fact that I ended up proving her right in the process.

Here a couple gems from wife after I told her the truth.

"Where the hell did you find that guy?" "I'm glad your son wasn't a serial killer." "I might have been mad if he came here looking for money." "Next time you can save $100 and just assume you're wrong." "You know I'm going to get you back, right?"

Smells Like American Spirit

https://slate.com/life/2024/12/work-jobs-sales-telemarketing-america.html

But in a very real sense, salesmen built the American economy and, by extension, America itself. In his book, Friedman notes that in the mid-19th century, more than half the U.S. population lived on a farm. Consumer markets were nonexistent. Salesmen went out and made them from scratch, a sale at a time, and not simply by bringing quality goods to eager buyers; they took them by their lapels and didn’t let go until they signed on the dotted line. Fortune magazine observed, in the mid-20th century, “Mass production would be a shadow of what it is today if it had waited for the consumer to make up his mind.”

The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

https://cmsthomas.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-did-me-dirty

One of the reasons I have found so much success with The Odyssey, aside from the monsters and murder, is that the emerging generation of translators, including Dr. Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headley have been transparent about their processes of bringing new life to canonical treasures like The Odyssey and Beowulf. In one lecture, Wilson explains that historically, translators would often intentionally foreignize their language to establish gravity and reverence for these works as products of “alien cultures,” a tradition the new generation of translators are choosing to break from because of the exclusionary effect it has on readers. Contemporary translators have shifted their mindset from one of preserving tradition, to one of illuminating narrative and purpose. Homer wanted his audiences to be both entertained and shepherded into the culture. Wilson seems to want that too, and so she gives us a deeply relatable, heartbreakingly honest, and eminently readable translation of The Odyssey. In allowing her understanding of the story to expand with time, she remains true to the story’s original purpose and relevant to a new generation of readers.

The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite

https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-the-american-tech-elite/

The upshot of all this is that books have an inordinate impact on the Silicon Valley mindspace. Often these books are stilted academic titles, works which at first glance have no obvious connection to software. “It’s interesting how Seeing Like A State has made it into the vague tech canon,” Jasmine Sun comments, “despite being from a random anarchist anthropologist who specialized in Southeast Asian agrarian societies.”

“Vague tech canon” is a clever phrase. Siloed off on so many little mountains, I could not speak of a common DC canon, vague or otherwise. But for Silicon Valley the term is just—there are no formal canonizers in Silicon Valley, and thus no formal canon. But a “vague” canon, the sort that ties together any historical community of requisite intelligence and literacy, certainly exists. I challenged my followers on Twitter to try and define it.

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public

Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.

Some principles of this system: government management of the economy, under the wise infallible leadership of Alan-Greenspan-style boffins who could prevent recessions and resist "animal spirits". Government sponsorship of science, under the wise infallible leadership of Einstein-style geniuses who could journey to the Platonic Realm and bring back new insights for the rest of us to gawk at. Government management of society, in the form of Wars on Poverty and Wars on Drugs and exciting new centralized forms of public education that would make every child an above-average student. Homelessness getting cleared away by a wave of the city planner's pen, replaced by scientifically-designed heavily optimized efficient public housing like Cabrini-Green.

Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.

Robert Carter III

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carter_III

Robert Carter III (February 28, 1728 – March 10, 1804) was an American planter and politician from the Northern Neck of Virginia. During the colonial period, he sat on the Virginia Governor's Council for roughly two decades. After the American Revolutionary War saw the Thirteen Colonies gain independence from the British Empire as the United States, Carter, influenced by his belief in Baptism, began the largest manumission in the history of the United States prior to the American Civil War.

Despite strong opposition from family members and neighbors, Carter began emancipating the hundreds of slaves he owned via a deed of gift filed with the Northumberland County, Virginia authorities on September 5, 1791, seventy years before the Civil War. Over the following years, Carter gradually emancipated over 500 of his slaves by filing documents with the Northumberland County, Virginia authorities, and settled many freedmen on land he gave them. Carter died in Baltimore, Maryland in 1804.^[1]