Plant Breeding

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/15/6982053/selective-breeding-farming-evolution-corn-watermelon-peaches

Mead on Obama's Ability to Understand Other's Ideologies

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/05/25/obama-anti-semitism-and-iran/

Kasparov

Notable & Quotable: Garry Kasparov, The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2015

“It is no coincidence that these founding American values created the greatest democracy in the world and also the greatest economy in the world.’

From the commencement address given by Garry Kasparov, the Russian opposition figure and former world chess champion, at Saint Louis University, May 16:

Every day we make choices large or small: individuals, companies, entire nations. Are those choices guided by the values we treasure? Are we loyal to the principles of individual freedom, of faith, of excellence, of compassion, of the value of human life? Or do we trade them away, bit by bit, for material goods, for a quiet life, and to pass the problems of today on to the next generation?

These moral values are also the values of innovation and the free market, by the way. It is no coincidence that these founding American values created the greatest democracy in the world and also the greatest economy in the world. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urged his believers to be a “City on a Hill,” a shining example to the world, a phrase used to describe America by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. I saw that America from the other side of the Iron Curtain and I can tell you that it mattered. And it matters still.

If America is to continue as a “light of the world” it will be up to you and to your generation to hold fast to these values and not to trade them away for a safe and stagnant status quo. Risk is not only for entrepreneurs. Risk is for anyone who will fight for these values in their lives and in the world every day.

Maitland on Locke and Mill

Quotation of the Day…

by DON BOUDREAUX on MAY 15, 2015

… is from pages 137-138 of the 2000 Liberty Fund edition of Frederic William Maitland’s 1875 dissertation at Trinity College, Cambridge, A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality:

The great difference between Mill’s Essay on Liberty and earlier writings on the same subject is, that Mill resists the presumption that uniformity of action is desirable.  As long as the influence of Locke was dominant, so long the convenient psychological assumption that men are by nature very much alike, ran through our political philosophy.  Now if the characters of men be alike, then when men are placed in the same circumstances they ought to do the same things; this is the fundamental assumption of all moral philosophers.  If men be very much alike, then uniformity of conduct is desirable; there is a presumption that two men placed in the same external circumstances ought to act in the same way.  This presumption fails if, as modern science teaches us, we are not endowed with equal faculties at starting.  Mill broke away from the eighteenth-century tradition; self-development “in its richest variety” was not an ideal for the followers of Locke, for there was a presumption against variety.  The resistance of this presumption gave new force to the argument that laws will probably be bad.  Law can only deal with externals, it can scarcely concern itself with character and the more reason there is for insisting on the character of the agent as a necessary element in our consideration of the rightness of the action, the less reason is there for thinking external uniformity of action was desirable.

Janet Daley on the British Election

Janet Daley, "Phew.  My Faith in the British people was entirely justified," The Telegraph, May 8, 2015

The pollsters got the election result so wrong because the Left has browbeaten ordinary voters into being reluctant to share their real views.

. . . But what remains of the Great Prediction Mistake of 2015 is a proper analysis of how it could have come to this: all that expertise, all those hours spent questioning and analyzing enormous piles of data which was designed to the most foolproof standards – and it was all wrong. It is very important to examine how this terrible error came about because the reason is not methodological, it is political. And the political reason is fundamental to an understanding of what is going wrong with our public discourse.

On Friday, Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, one of the most highly regarded of those hapless polling organizations, uttered these immortal words by way of explanation: “What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and [then] they did something else in the ballot box.” You don’t say. Mr Kellner sounded as if he had been taken utterly by surprise by the possibility that voters might be sentient beings rather than mathematical entities, and thus capable of deliberate deception or evasion.

But the question that demands an answer is: why did so many voters feel compelled to avoid telling Mr Kellner and his friends their real intentions? Because that is certainly what happened. I am as sure of this as I was of the eventual election result: the four in 10 poll respondents who said they had not yet made up their minds who to vote for (a figure that remained remarkably consistent right to the end) did not, as one Labour spokesman claimed, suddenly decide “when they had the pencils in their hands” that they were going to support the Tories. Most of them knew all along that they were going to do that – but they were not willing to say so.

Somehow we have arrived at a point where the conscientiously held beliefs and values of the majority of the population have become a matter for secret shame. The desire to do as well as you can in life, to develop your potential and expect to be rewarded for it, to provide your family with the greatest possible opportunity for self-improvement and to do that on your own without being dependent on the state – these are the assumptions that seem to have become so unacceptable that identifying with them is beyond the pale, or at least so socially outrageous that it is not worth the ignominy of admitting to them.

The Left has so dominated the conversation and so noisily traduced the “petit bourgeois” values that guide the lives of what used to be called the “respectable working class” that, ironically, it is only the most socially confident who can openly embrace them. The very people whom Labour needs to attract (and which it did attract when it had re-invented itself as New Labour) are once again being bullied into hiding their true attitudes and opinions.

So they prevaricate and evade when asked how they will vote because they are intimidated by the condemnation of the Left-wing mob, or else they just are not self-assured enough to make the moral case (even in their own minds) for their choice. But when they reach the sacred solitude of the voting booth, they do what they know must be done for the sake of their own futures, and that of their families, and even of those the Left insists are being disadvantaged – because they genuinely believe that dependency is a bad thing and that self-determination is a social good.

In the end, what does the Left (and its army of media friends) accomplish by all this activist pressure on public opinion? In a circle of mutually congratulatory agreement, the liberal establishment may demonize the social attitudes of the majority until they are blue in the face. They may succeed – as indeed they obviously have – in making ordinary people afraid to utter their real views. But there is a dreadful price to be paid: if you browbeat people into withdrawing from the debate, then you will never know how robust their convictions are – until it is too late and you have catastrophically lost an election, or staked your professional credibility on unsound predictions.

This is the danger of the activist trap. As I said last week, if you are surrounded by a crowd of people whose opinions are identical to yours then together you can make a great deal of noise. But what you don’t hear is the silence of those outside the crowd. If parties of the Left are ever to become electable again, they will have to stop shouting and listen. . . .