If rulers can ignore the Constitution, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them.
Month: September 2014
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Quote of the Day
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Missing the point
Common Core Will Make Schools in U.S. More Like China and That’s Not a Good Thing. The New York Times recently published a fascinating interview with Yong Zhao, a professor of education at the University of Oregon. Zhao was born in China; unlike many American intellectuals, he does not think U.S. schools should try to emulate China.
[…]
Chinese schools stamp out individuality and make kids spend all their time preparing for exams that are focused on “narrow intelligence.” This produces fewer creative and entrepreneurial people, which is precisely what the authoritarian national government of China wants, according to Zhao. [Hit & Run]
The problem is that stamping out individuality is also precisely what the US government and many American intellectuals want.
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Quote of the Day
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptable. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
Frank Herbert
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Aperture replacement
When looking at Adobe Lightroom as a possible replacement for Aperture, I quickly discovered that it wasn’t suitable. Lightroom just can’t handle the very large files produced by scanning large-format negatives, and I have a number of such files in my photo library. Fortunately, a bit of searching turned up an alternative. Years ago I had used a product called iView Media Pro to manage my photo library, but it was bought and promptly killed by Microsoft–which led to my using Aperture.
It turns out that at some point it was rescued from Microsoft by Phase One, a company best known for digital medium format cameras, and is now available once again. That made it an easy choice to go back to Media Pro as my Aperture replacement.