Brined Turkey

Brined Turkey

Mark asked for our turkey brining recipe in a comment below, so here it is, from an old Food & Wine article. This is guaranteed to be the most wonderful turkey you ever tasted. Too late for Thanksgiving, but plenty of time for Christmas! It may take a while to find the juniper berries, so you can get started now. We used to pick ours off of the tree of a neighbor, but I'm sure they can be had by mail order.

Brown butter (see below)
2 sticks unsalted butter

Spice mixture:
1-1/2 T fennel seeds
1 large dried red chile
1/2 T whole allspice berries
1/2 T whole black peppercorns

Cured turkey:
1-1/2 cups coarse or kosher salt
1/2 cup plus 2 T sugar
2 bay leaves
1 T thyme
7 whole cloves
1/2 T whole allspice berries, coarsely cracked
1/2 t juniper berries, crushed
One 14-lb turkey
Table salt and fresh ground pepper

Make the brown butter: in a small skillet, toast the fennel seeds, chile, allspice berries, and papppercorns over moderatly high heat, tossing frequently, until fragrant, about 3 minutes. Let cool, then transfer to a spice grinder or mortar and finely grind them. (Can keep at room temperature 2 days.)

Vegetable stuffing:
25 garlic cloves, smashed
3 medium onions, coarsely chopped
1 large celery rib, coarsely chopped plus 1/2 cup coarsely chopped celery leaves
Table salt
4 cups chicken stock

Prepare the cured turkey: In a very large stockpot, combine the coarse salt, sugar, bay leaves, thyme, cloves, and allspice and juniper berries. Add 2 gallons of water and bring to a boil over high heat. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature. Add the turkey to the brine, breast side down, cover, and let stand overnight in a cool place or in the frig or a cooler overnight.

Make the vegetable stuffing: Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. In a large bowl, toss the garlic with the onions, celery, and celery leaves and 1/2 T of the spice mixtures; season with salt.

Season the inside of the turkey with salt and pepper. Spoon all but 2 cups of the stuffing into the chest and neck cavities. Using your fingers, loosen the skin from the breast without tearing it. Evenly spread the softened brown butter under the skin. Close the neck wit toothpicks.

Set the turkey, breast side up, on a rack in a large roasting pan. Sprinkle the remaining spice mixture all over the bird and loosely tie the legs together with kitchen string. Scatter the reserved stuffing round the turkey and pour the stock over the stuffing.

Roast the turkey for 20 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 300 degrees, cover the turkey loosely with foil, and continue roasting for about 4 hours, basting frequently, until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the inner thigh registered 165 to 170 degrees. Add water to the pan during cooking if the juices evaporate. Transfer the turkey to a carving board and let stand at room temperature for 15 to 20 minutes before carving.

Meanwhile, make the gravy. Pass the pan juices through a coarse strainer into the medium saucepan, pressing down on the softened vegetables to work them through the strainer. Skim the fat from the pan gravy.

Set the roasting pan over 2 burners over moderately high heat. Add 1-1/2 cups of water and bring to a boil, scraping up any browned bits. Lower the heat to moderate and boil, stirring constantly, until reduced by half, about 4 minutes. Stir this mixture into the pan gravy in the saucepan and season with salt and pepper . Warm the gravy through, if necessary, then pour into a sauceboat and serve alongside the turkey.

Daring

Daring:

In one of our recent discussions, Ymar asked about the question of whether the 9/11 hijackers demonstrated courage. I answered that courage was a virtue, the virtue of facing danger in a moral way. Facing danger in an unjust or vicious way is not courage, but a sort of rashness.

Here is Aquinas' account of the subject:

Objection 1: It seems that daring is not a sin. For it is written (Job 39:21) concerning the horse, by which according to Gregory (Moral. xxxi) the godly preacher is denoted, that "he goeth forth boldly to meet armed men [*Vulg.: 'he pranceth boldly, he goeth forth to meet armed men']." But no vice redounds to a man's praise. Therefore it is not a sin to be daring.

Objection 2: Further, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. vi, 9), "one should take counsel in thought, and do quickly what has been counseled." But daring helps this quickness in doing. Therefore daring is not sinful but praiseworthy.

Objection 3: Further, daring is a passion caused by hope, as stated above ([3330]FS, Q[45], A[2]) when we were treating of the passions. But hope is accounted not a sin but a virtue. Neither therefore should daring be accounted a sin.

On the contrary, It is written (Ecclus.8:18): "Go not on the way with a bold man, lest he burden thee with his evils." Now no man's fellowship is to be avoided save on account of sin. Therefore daring is a sin.

I answer that, Daring, as stated above ([3331]FS, Q[23], A[1]; Q[55]), is a passion. Now a passion is sometimes moderated according to reason, and sometimes it lacks moderation, either by excess or by deficiency, and on this account the passion is sinful. Again, the names of the passions are sometimes employed in the sense of excess, thus we speak of anger meaning not any but excessive anger, in which case it is sinful, and in the same way daring as implying excess is accounted a sin.

Reply to Objection 1: The daring spoken of there is that which is moderated by reason, for in that sense it belongs to the virtue of fortitude.

Reply to Objection 2: It is praiseworthy to act quickly after taking counsel, which is an act of reason. But to wish to act quickly before taking counsel is not praiseworthy but sinful; for this would be to act rashly, which is a vice contrary to prudence, as stated above ([3332]Q[58], A[3]). Wherefore daring which leads one to act quickly is so far praiseworthy as it is directed by reason.

Reply to Objection 3: Some vices are unnamed, and so also are some virtues, as the Philosopher remarks (Ethic. ii, 7; iv, 4,5,6). Hence the names of certain passions have to be applied to certain vices and virtues: and in order to designate vices we employ especially the names of those passions the object of which is an evil, as in the case of hatred, fear, anger and daring. But hope and love have a good for this object, and so we use them rather to designate virtues.

I would make one correction to Aquinas' account: the daring spoken of in objection one is the daring of the horse.

Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?

Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible.

He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men.

He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword.

The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield.

He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet.

He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.

This is an interesting passage, though: because horses are like that, but only if men make them so. By pure nature, a horse will avoid any danger, and is scared like a grasshoppper -- or of a grasshopper. The Lord's point in speaking to Job, if Job were the kind of man who could understand it, was that this is indeed what men do with horses.

So what do we say about the passage, then? That it was written by someone who didn't know much about horses? Or that it was written with an intent to convey our role in shaping and mastering animals? Is it an irony, among the other passages wherein men are proven to be ignorant and weak? Or does it mean something?

Competition

Competition & Women:

We've got some pretty competitive women around here, one of whom wants to talk about this story. So let's ask two questions about it: First, are women really less competitive than men? Second, if they were, would it be a problem?

Both were clerical, but one was titled "Seeking Sports News Assistant." The other was described as more generic office work. In all, nearly 7,000 people replied to one of the two positions. Interested applicants received an e-mail detailing how the job would work. All were told they would have frequent deadlines, and there would be a high value placed on producing timely quality information. Some applicants, though, were told they would be getting a fixed $15 an hour for their work. Others were told the job would pay a base salary plus a bonus. In the second scheme, the new hires would be placed in pairs, and the one whose work was deemed the best would get the additional pay. Still interested? Send in your resume and application, the e-mail said.

For both jobs, more females replied to both job listings than males. Of the applicants to the sports assistant position, 53.5% of those interested were women. The generic job listing was split 80-20 females to male.

Wait, that doesn't sound like women are less competitive at all! It sounds like women are out there trying for a job at greater rates than men, even if it's a job like 'sports news reporter,' which one might expect to be favored by men.

Well, it goes on:

Here's the interesting part: for both jobs, when the element of the bonus was added, males were far more likely to actually send in their application than females. Or worded the other way around, females were more likely to pass on the job once they found out part of their pay would be based on their performance versus a co-worker. In the most competitive salary structure, where the base pay was $12 an hour and the bonus $6, List determined that men were 55.5% more likely to apply for the job than women.

So, once they are informed that the job is going to require them to compete in the long term, from day to day, a lot of the women pass.

So, the answer to the first question might be: it depends on what you mean by "competitive." Are women more likely to go for a job? Sounds like it. Are they more likely to pass on a job that requires them to fight against their co-workers every day? Sounds like it.

I'd say the answer to the second question is, "No," but we can talk about that in the comments.

Legalize

Legalize What?

This story presents a very good opportunity to discuss that field of philosophy called consequentialism.

The research found that child sex crimes fell when child pornography was more easily accessible.

The discovery tallies with similar studies in Denmark and Japan, where child pornography is not illegal, that found incidences of child sex abuse were lower in those countries.

The conclusion of the new study is that ‘artificially-produced’ child pornography should be made available to prevent real children being abused.

I think that by 'artificially produced' they mean something like cartoons and animation. So, the idea is that legalizing cartoons about child rape will reduce the incidence of actual rape of real children.

For the sake of argument, let's say that is true; and furthermore, that the effect is large enough that we're talking about saving a fairly large number of children from being raped.

Does that justify legalizing child porn cartoons? Explain and defend your answer. :)

Science of Lit

A "Science" of Literature:

There was a time when history went through the same argument. In fact, history went so far down this road that some historians claimed that history was a science, not just that it could benefit from some scientific methods.

The importance of the distinction between arts and sciences is a topic I've written about since the earliest days of the Hall. In those days I was especially driven by the damage being done to science by the art of psychology (which even has an -ology name, normally characteristic of sciences). Which, by the way, did you know that one in five Americans suffers from mental illness... according to these 'scientists'? Psychology is the only medical 'science' in which increased funding always seems to lead to an increased incidence of 'disease.'

The problems of psychology are most pernicious because they are used to justify legal restrictions on liberty; but the problems for human understanding are also serious. The fact is that history has benefitted from some scientific methodology: but it has not benefitted from the idea that it is doing 'social science.' In order to keep the science clean and reliable, you have to exclude a huge number of things from history that were of the utmost importance to the people making the decisions you are trying to chronicle. The alternative is to include the important things, and muddy the "science" out of measure. That is at least as true in literature.

Both arts and sciences are noble pursuits, worthy and fine. We benefit from a clean distinction between what is and is not science. It's important to defend that distinction.

A Brief, Splendid Life

A Brief, Splendid Life

The death of a former colleague is very much on my mind this week. At the height of a splendid career, only 47 years old, he died piloting a small plane that was taking him, along with his wife's mother (assistant VP for research services at Texas A&M) and uncle (recently appointed BP head of Gulf Coast recovery operations), to a family Thanksgiving gathering in the Florida panhandle. All perished. His wife's grief is unimaginable to me. He left three sons nearly grown, one a student at Texas A&M.

His name was Greg Coleman. He came to work in the mid-90s for the law firm at which I spent most of my professional life. His unusual career there was a mark of the high regard we all had for him. He took his law degree in 1992 at the age of 29, after a two-year LDS mission in Japan followed by a B.S. and M.B.A., then honored us by succumbing to our recruiting efforts. He delayed his starting date, however, so that he could clerk for renowned conservative Fifth Circuit justice Edith Jones. He then joined us as a litigation associate for one short year, which was long enough for everyone to realize we had something special. Next he made the unusual request to take a leave of absence to clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas for a couple of years. At last we welcomed him back as a associate in 1996, when he was 33 years old. He soon specialized in appellate work and struck his colleagues with his combination of uncommon decency and lucidity of thought. Although he was a strongly principled conservative thinker working among a lot of orthodox liberals, it was obvious he would be made a partner as soon as humanly possible.

He threw another wrench in the works when then-Texas-Attorney-General John Cornyn (now U.S. Senator from Texas) created the new office of Texas Solicitor General in 1999 and asked Greg to serve, at the age of 36. For two years he represented the State of Texas in high-profile appellate cases, then returned to our firm in 2001, swiftly being made not only a partner but head of his own national appellate litigation department. (This in a firm that normally has a 7- or 8-year partner track.) By 2007, when he left the firm, to its intense regret, he already had successfully argued four cases to the United States Supreme Court. He joined a small appellate litigation boutique in Austin, where before long his name was on the masthead. You can read here how deeply he wove himself into the lives of his colleagues there in the three short years that remained of his life, and how many varieties of public service he managed to pack into the time he had on earth. Last year, he successfully argued the case of the "New Haven 20" firefighters in their reverse-discrimination case (Ricci v. DeStephano) before the Supreme Court. The firefighters' website offers a tribute to him today. His New Haven colleague in that case had this informal eulogy to offer:

“Greg had all the right stuff — he was both a brilliant lawyer and a man of impeccable morals in a profession where that is increasingly scarce,” Torre said. “His quiet rectitude provided a needed counterbalance to the anger and bitterness that I felt at having to go so far to vindicate a principle I thought was plain: that every man should be judged on his character and worth, not the color of his skin.

St. Cadoc's

A Surprise at St. Cadoc's:

Why it makes sense to fix the roof of the church once in a while... at least, if your church is six hundred years old.

Epicurus:

A professor of French literature has some advice about eating. Being reasonably good advice, we find that its source is ancient philosophy (and not French literature, which in the post-medieval period hasn't been very good, exceptis excipiendis).

The epidemiologist cannot tell us what the Epicurean wants to know: What should I choose to love without guilt? What is good for me? What keeps me happy? What, in the best sense, keeps me healthy?

In certain European philosophical circles, there has been a recent spike of interest in Epicurus, and not only among Marxists (Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on Epicurus). Like every Greek, Epicurus was obliged to believe in the pantheon of Greek gods who lived on Mount Olympus; but he did so without having to suppose that these gods were even remotely interested in human affairs. As a result, Epicurus needed to find principles for living that were based not on theological but on materialist (or, we might say, scientific) conceptions of the world—those which explained all nature, including mind and spirit, with reference not to the supernatural but to harmonies and atomic processes....

Neo-Epicureans argue that the entire philosophical tradition since Plato—perhaps philosophy itself—has always rejected materialism and has forever been in love with idealism. Even the so-called materialist philosophies exhibit forms of Platonic idealism; this idealism may be turned on its head, as it were, but its articulations are still in place.

An aside, because it will be of interest to some of you: That was Marx's complaint about them, that materialism wasn't adequately materialist. What does that mean? Briefly, that materialist philosophy was still positing a mind apart from the meat. Subsequent philosophers have tried to rectify that; Sebastian Rödl had a book out just three years ago promising a "true materialist" account of self consciousness, the problem that we (especially Joe and I) have discussed here. (Rödl's account isn't very convincing, if you were about to rush out and order the book; indeed, I'm not sure it qualifies as an account. If you're interested in exploring the question, we can discuss it further.)

But, back to eating. We have now a rather bold assertion from our French literary scholar:

The new, radical Epicureanism, on the other hand, is nonphilosophical.

Really? Go on.

It is a new way of articulating the relation between theory and practice; it is a praxis of thinking about pleasure and its value, in and of itself, as well as from the standpoint of health. Like Nietzsche, the Epicurean does not aspire to negate philosophy, for that would be only another way of affirming it. Philosophy is nothing but the history of its successive negations. Rather, Epicurus teaches us how to look away from the tradition. "Looking up and away shall be my only negation," Nietzsche asserts in The Gay Science. Like Nietzsche, neo-Epicureans start their thinking not with ideas but with what Epicurus insists is the origin of thought, the body.

Broadly put, neo-Epicureans suppose not only that you are what you eat, but that you think what you eat. Take German idealism, says Nietzsche. It has the leaden consistency and gaseous redolence of a diet thick with potatoes. Italian thought, one might add, is marked by the slippery texture and doughy blandness of pasta. Jewish metaphysics has the astringency and smoky intensity of briny pickles and cured fish. The indistinctness of Buddhist thought resembles white rice. Neo-Epicureans aim to discover not just a philosophy of being but a hygiene for living; not a universal system but a way of thinking about good health in terms of the peculiar proclivities of the individual body.

Sorry, boys. That's a philosophy, whether you like it or not. Indeed, you give the game away yourself when you say that it's "not just" a philosophy, but also a hygiene.

Speaking of which, I can think of a precedent for this philosophy in French literature. Perhaps he comes by it honestly, then.

What sort of a philosophy is it? A good one, as far as it follows this form: eat enough, and well enough, to be satisfied; not so little as to be hungry, nor so poorly as to be sick, but also not so much as to suffer digestive malfunction or obesity. That's the hygiene.

Why a philosophy, though? If you go no farther along the road than perfecting the body, you've missed an important point. The body isn't an end in itself, after all; it will eventually sicken and die even if you take perfect care of it. Waylon Jennings and Jerry Reed can tell you that (following Shel Silverstein's poem, as Johnny Cash had followed another in "A Boy Named Sue").



So 'you're getting real healthy, but you're still gonna die.' The human mind has a potential far more vast than the maintenance of the body, for the majority of your life; but the body is doomed in spite of the mind's best efforts, when the time comes. The mind is therefore too great a tool to be aimed at the maintenance of the body for most of our lives; and a tool entirely insufficient for that purpose when we reach our designated time. This should be adequate proof that a philosophy aimed only at the material is insufficient for us.

What's left, then, if not the mind and the ideas it can contain? Some of these ideas may be actualized, as in the case of an engineer who dreams of spacecraft; others may remain ideas, but inspire others, as in a composer who writes symphonies.

The day-to-day health of the body cannot be our end, for we are too much for that; neither can its permanent survival be our end, for we are too little for that. To write, to think, to design, to compose, these things are more fit for us. Of them all, though, the greatest and hardest challenge may simply be to understand.

Currahee!

Currahee!

I took a few hours today to spend with Currahee Mountain.



Here is a short movie of the view from the top.

Cyberwar

Cyberwar

The more I read about the Stuxnet worm the more interesting it gets. This clever weapon was designed to lurk in personal computers until someone, somewhere, incautiously took his work home and returned to the secure, net-isolated Iranian nuclear facility and plugged an infected USB back in. Then it attacked a Siemens Simatic WinCC supervisory control and data acquisition ("SCADA") system designed to manage pipelines, various utility and manufacturing equipment -- and nuclear plants. Specifically, it targeted frequency-converter drives that are used to control the speed of a device, such as a motor or centrifuge. But not just any centrifuge, says Liam O'Murchu, researcher with Symantec Security Response, which published the new information in an updated paper on Friday:

"You would need a process running continuously for more than a month for this code to be able to get the desired effect. Using nuclear enrichment as an example, the centrifuges need to spin at a precise speed for long periods of time in order to extract the pure uranium. If those centrifuges stop to spin at that high speed, then it can disrupt the process of isolating the heavier isotopes in those centrifuges … and the final grade of uranium you would get out would be a lower quality.”

“This is what nation-states build, if their only other option would be to go to war,” Joseph Wouk, an Israeli security expert wrote. The construction of the worm was so advanced, it was “like the arrival of an F-35 into a World War I battlefield,” says Ralph Langner, the computer expert who was among the first to publicize the Stuxnet phenomenon. At Iran's Natanz nuclear facility, the worm operated stealthily for nearly a year and a half, altering the spin speed of the plant's centrifuges in brief erratic bursts, just enough to damage the converter and bearings and to corrupt the uranium fuel in the tubes. Throughout this time, however, Stuxnet hid the changes from the engineers' control panels so that computer checks continued to show all systems operational. This promoted a climate of fear and paranoia that subjected Iranian scientists to suspicion and possible sanctions by their own government.

The worm's designers took skillful measures to hide its tracks even after it was eventually discovered. While it operated, it continually reported back to two servers in Denmark and Malaysia. The moment it was discovered by VirusBlokAda, a Belarusian security company, both of the monitoring servers abruptly disappeared, and the alert sites carrying an emergency notice to global computer security experts were shut down for a full day, during which time all traces of the worm were eliminated.

A commenter at Wired.com asserts that the resulting damage may be even greater than Symantec's report indicates:

Symantic doesn’t understand centrifuges. This intermittent glitch will destroy the rotors. Like shifting into 1st at 80. With resonance. Finding the glitch in a rootkitted PLC will cost rotors for each debug.

More good news: Stuxnet may have been designed to infiltrate the North Korea nuclear program as well.

Vikings

Vikings and the Indian Maiden:

So you're a viking, and you go out to take a look to see what's out west. Naturally, you're going to want to bring back a souvenir.

This actually makes very good sense, as many point to the end of the slave trade as bringing about the end of the Viking Age.

One of the primary sources of profit for the Vikings had been slave-taking. The medieval Church took the position that Christians should not own fellow Christians as slaves, so chattel slavery diminished as a practice throughout northern Europe. This took much of the economic incentive out of raiding, though sporadic slaving activity continued in the 11th century. Eventually, outright slavery was outlawed[.]

Of course, we don't have any evidence that she wasn't strong-willed and eager to explore the wild east. Perhaps she was a famous traveler among the skrælingi, and hopped the boat of her own accord.

As documented William H. Babcock in "Certain Pre-Columbian Notices of American Aborigines", the word skræling may have been the name of one of the North American tribes encountered by Norse during initial contact. The story was that Norseman Bjorn the Bonde saved two Skræling siblings from the sea. As was their custom, in gratitude the Skrælings decided to become the Norseman's life-long servants. During this service, the Skrælings indicated that the word skræling was how their peoples' name was pronounced in Norse. Eventually, "The brother and sister killed themselves and threw themselves down the cliffs into the sea when they were prohibited from following along with Bjorn Bonde..." on his return to Iceland.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Babcock's sources, so I can't comment on the likelihood of that.

For those interested in the history, Sir Magnús Magnússon's introduction remains valuable.

The Onion on the President:

The Onion had two pieces skewering the president this week, one in print and one on video.


Obama Outlines Moral, Philosophical Justifications For Turkey Pardon

What interests me is that the two portrayals are almost opposites. Amusingly, the same quality that let nearly everyone see the Obama he wanted to see in 2008 is letting everyone see the one he doesn't like in 2010.

Which one do you think better captures the truth? Truth is the core of humor, after all.

The Prodigal Teen Sailors

The Prodigal Teen Sailors

Perhaps most of you already have caught this wonderful Thanksgiving story on the news or in the local paper, but just in case: three teenaged boys from Tokelau, a collection of atolls north of Samoa that is part of New Zealand's territory, were picked up alive near Fiji after fifty days adrift in a 12-foot aluminum boat. That's 800 miles. They ate coconuts, raw flying fish, and one seabird, and drank rainwater that they managed to collect. Their village of 500 people had already held memorial services for them after the New Zealand Air Force could find no trace.

I hope they'll be set for life once they sell their story. It's not quite Men Against the Sea, which was a 3,600-mile drift commanded by Captain Bligh and 19 men in a 23-foot boat, which ultimately reached safety in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. Another riveting tale of survival in a small open boat is supposed to have inspired Moby Dick. In 1820-21, several Nantucket whalers in the South Pacific survived a sperm whale's destruction of their ship the Essex, then made it to Chile in an open boat after four months at sea and some cannibalism.

Still, 800 miles in a small open boat in the Pacific is quite a feat for anyone, especially such young men.

"For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving:

Happy Thanksgiving.



(Image from DVIDs, photo by Brian Ferguson. Pvt. Carlos Ortiz walks from the serving line at Forward Operating Base Smart, Zabul province, Afghanistan, with his Thanksgiving meal Nov. 25. More than 200 soldiers, airmen and civilians are stationed here. Ortiz is assigned to Provincial Reconstruction Team Zabul here.)

Oh, Yes

Oh, Yes:

It's obvious to me now, and I don't see how I never thought of it before: the turkey needs to be bacon-wrapped this year.

I've already got enough meat for this feast, but next year? The duck/turkey/bacon concept sounds good.

You might as well call it the heartbeat of God and be done with it.

The current widely-held theory of life, the universe, and everything holds that at some point roughly 13.7 billion years ago everything that now is was packed into a tight little package from which sprung the Big Bang, which violently hurled everything into existence. But 13.7 billion years to get to where we are isn’t enough for renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and now he thinks he can prove that things aren’t/weren’t quite so simple. Drawing on evidence he found in the cosmic microwave background, Penrose says the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning, but one in a series of cyclical Big Bangs, each of which spawned its own universe.

The Seven-Day Week

The Seven-Day Week

Over at Brandywine Books [link corrected -- thanks, Lars!] they linked to an article about "the book you've always wanted to find," on a subject you're curious about. Someone in the comments section mentioned the seven-day week, about which I've always been curious myself. It's not obvious why it should be so common worldwide to think of days in sets of sevens. It's roughly a fourth of the lunar cycle, but not quite. It's not based on base 10, 12, or 60, the most usual numerical bunches.

How old is the Genesis story of the six days of creation, followed by the seventh day of rest? Wikipedia cites authorities that date it to the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century B.C. The Babylonians celebrated holidays on every seventh day counting from the new moon, with an odd-lengthed week at the end of each month to straighten things out. The word "Sabbath" may stem from a Sumerian word referring to the second of these monthly seventh-day observances.

Although the seven-day week is widely observed all over the world today, that may be largely an effect of Judeo-Christian cultural dominance. The Romans had been accustomed to an Etruscan eight-day week, but began to switch to the seven-day week under Augustus in the first century A.D., a process that was completed by Constantine in 321 A.D. Non-Judeo-Christian cultures employed a wide variety of weeks. The ancient Basque language, not obviously related to any of the major Indo-European tongues, contains traces of a traditional three-day week. The Igbo of Nigeria use a four-day week, the Javanese a five-day week, the Chinese and Egyptians a ten-day week, and the Aztecs and Mayans both 13-day and 20-day weeks, though the latter is getting so big you might as well call it a month except for its failure to line up with any lunar cycle. My favorite is the ancient Balinese (possibly Hindu) system of a 210-day cycle divided into a wild variety of concurrent cycles of all lengths between one and ten days. The chart that attempts to describe all this has to be seen to be believed.

More recently, both France and the Soviet Union, after their revolutions, tried briefly to institute alternative weeks before relaxing back to the worldwide Western-derived standard.

The names of the days of the week in most Romance and many other European languages are associated with the Sun, the Moon, and the five easily visible planets: Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, although most Romance languages have substituted variations on "the Lord's Day" for Sunday. So Moon-day in Spanish or French is lunes or lundi, Mars-day is martes or mardi, Mercury-day is miércoles or mercredi, Jove-day is jueves or jeudi, Venus-day is viernes or vendredi, and Saturn-day is sábado or samedi. In German and English, some of the days correspond to Teutonic versions of dieties with similar associations: Tyr (Tuesday), Wodan (Wednesday), Thor (Thursday), and Freya (Friday).

I have just finished re-reading, with great pleasure, the third book in C.S. Lewis's planetary trilogy, "That Hideous Strength." Towards the end, the planetary angels associated with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn descend to Earth and exert their various influences on a group of Englishmen:

Suddenly a greater spirit came—one whose influence tempered and almost transformed to his own quality the skill of leaping Mercury, the clearness of Mars, the subtler vibration of Venus, and even the numbing weight of Saturn.... Kingship and power and festal pomp and courtesy shot from him as sparks fly from an anvil. The pealing of bells, the blowing of trumpets, the spreading out of banners, are means used on earth to make a faint symbol of his quality. For this was great Glund-Oyarsa, King of Kings, through whom the joy of creation principally blows across these fields of Arbol, known to men in old times as Jove and under that name, by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, confused with his Maker -- so little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him.

Meat

Meat

Happy Birthday to the NPH. Part of his birthday present was the encyclopedic River Cottage Meat Book, which we've both been enjoying this morning. The improbably named author, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, raises livestock on a 60-acre farm in Dorset, England. Reviewers variously describe the book's tone as "droll," "a bit rainy," "earthy," and "fervent."

We don't raise our own meat here, but we're getting better acquainted with a local farmer who supplies us with chicken and pork. It's time I became a more informed and hands-on carnivore. Chickens don't disturb me, as I can barely tell one from another and discern little personality in them. Cows, nearly the same. Pigs are a different matter: they threaten to assume almost as personal a relationship as dogs. I try to remember that I'd prefer to ensure that chickens, cows, and pigs all live a tolerable life before they're slaughtered, rather than the kind of sustained nightmare that constitutes the last 2/3 or so of the life of cattle at a concentrated animal feedlot organization (CAFO). If that means dealing with my discomfort at getting to know them before I kill them, or have them killed on my behalf, it seems no more than should be expected of me.

Wow!

What a Great Idea:

A new amendment to increase Federalism is coming before the new Congress. It's one of the better ideas I've heard lately.

Flexibility

Flexibility:

Unlike some of the Woodstock veterans, some people never rethink their college-day assumptions.

For help understanding the foreign policy headlines of the past week, let's return, briefly, to the spring of 1983, when Barack Obama was a student at Columbia University. What were the burning international issues of that time?

Turns out, everything has changed since 1983... except the mind of one man. That fact seems to explain this strange new unity in the Middle East.

UPDATE: Jimbo is talking about this today, too.

Barry O is stuck in grad school dude, not just the 80’s. You see he and his buddies used to wear cool-ass hats and stay up all night smoking weed, drinking white wine and solving all of the world’s problems. Their actual problem was they would wake up the next day, hung over like dogs and nobody could remember how their plan to use the hunger pangs of swollen-bellied African kids to create electrical power was supposed to work.

Obama has spent his entire adult life safe in the embrace of an ideology and collection of fellow travelers that is too weak to even bear the name of Socialism. They don’t have the stones to implement anything as harsh and fierce as Socialism, they could call theirs Stonerism. You gather a bunch of know-it-all smarty-pantses, put them in a situation where they are not responsible to actually do anything. And then let them self-reinforce their ridiculously, experience-free musings and treat them as serious. We shouldn’t, and yet Obama runs the country as if it were a meeting of the Big Thinkers on Campus Club to eliminate all forms of harshness on Earth.

It's not very often that Jim and I are in the same place, but when it happens, it's always worth the price of admission.

Dartmouth:

Fire in the hole:

In 2006, The Dartmouth, the student newspaper of Dartmouth College, a liberal arts college in New Hampshire, published a cartoon showing Nietzsche conversing with a male student. The student was with a very drunk girl after a night of boozing and schmoozing and was wondering whether or not he should have sex with her. ‘Will to power’, Nietzsche tells him. The cartoonist said it was intended as a pisstake of Nietzsche, and more broadly of his rehabilitation in liberal academic circles, but some Dartmouth students saw things differently – in their eyes the cartoon was effectively okaying date rape. So they did what any well-educated, privileged students at a liberal arts college would do – gathered outside the offices of The Dartmouth and publicly burned copies of the offending newspaper. Like fascists.

On the upside, a Dartmouth education provides you with a sterling appreciation of the musical contributions of The Who:



And, after all, The Who were at Woodstock.



So, you know, the true culture of Western Civilization is preserved. We all know that Western Civilization started in 1969.

UPDATE:

"The problems of the world can't be solved in meters. They can only be solved the way we made them: inch by inch."



Another artist who was there present at Woodstock.



Could be there's hope even for the hippies. And their children. Aye, their children, most of all.

UPDATE:

Since we're on the subject of folk singers who changed their minds about some things, this one is from 1971. Western Civilization had existed for two whole years.



...and here's the version from 1988, long about the second Reagan administration.



Natural law at work.

Will Quote

Will Quote:

Here:

The average American has regular contact with the federal government at three points - the IRS, the post office and the TSA. Start with that fact if you are formulating a unified field theory to explain the public's current political mood.

I have had reasonably good results out of the post office.

DbD

Day By Day:

I've added Day By Day to the sidebar. I realized tonight I've missed a week of it, because I always read it on Cassandra's blog.

This is only the first recognition of the loss we've suffered; and the one easiest to remedy.

Conspiracy

Conspiracy:

You know who's conspiring to wreck the country? Those darn Republicans:

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?

You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You'd also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You'd no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.

You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You'd also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default.

You might want to cover your tracks a bit, and say you have an economic plan that would help -- a tax policy that's already been tried -- but you'd do so knowing that such a plan has already proven not to work.

Does any of this sound familiar?

(H/t: Dennis the Peasant, who replies: 'Coming from you, Steve, any thought is an experiment.')

Well, yes it does: except that I normally hear this line of thought from Ymar, and pointed in the other direction.

Note that both sets of plans strike a large number of people as likely to destroy the country. All we're disagreeing about is which side's ideas will ensure destruction.

Here's a more frightening idea than the possibility of a conspiracy: What if we're both right?

NJ Gov

Courtesy:

...in which the Governor of New Jersey has a polite conversation with the head of the state teachers' union.



"I don't know! I never saw anything like that before."

Talk like a Yankee

(Don't) Talk Like a Yankee:

To go with T99's post about Dixie language from yesterday, this article on New Yorkers who are trying to unlearn their native accent.

The accent was rarely an asset but has become more of a handicap in an era of globalization, when people and jobs are more mobile and a more generic identity can be seen as an advantage (think Michael R. Bloomberg shedding his Boston twang).

“A New York accent makes you sound ignorant,” said Lynn Singer, a speech therapist who works with Miss LoGiudice. “People listen to the accent, but not to what you’re saying.”

I am sure I've mentioned that training in public speaking was part of my education, in a public high school in rural Georgia. The Southern accent, which can be melodious and beautiful, is nevertheless subject to the same reception to those from outside the culture. The money behind the success of Atlanta has always come from the Northeast -- chiefly, until lately, from New York -- so it was important that a Southerner be able to walk away from his accent when he walked into a corporate environment.

It's interesting to realize that the New Yorker has the same problem, now that globalization has produced a New York whose money is coming from the world.

A Good Point

A Good Point about Public Virtue:

Here:

he cultural problem that we have today is something that Machiavelli identified over 500 years ago. He grasped that the strength of a body politic is determined by the extent to which it was infused by public spirit. As far as Machiavelli was concerned, a real public spirit accounted for the strength of the Roman Empire – the Roman republic specifically – and also the incredible things that were going on in Florence, Sienna and so on during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And Machiavelli made the point that public spirit presupposes a set of virtues, forms of behaviour that you expect people to have as part and parcel of everyday life. These virtues would include devotion, courage, patriotic conviction, risk-taking and so on. (That all this seems so terribly old-fashioned now is part of the problem.)

I would argue that almost every single virtue that makes for public spirit is stigmatised by our society. Having recently been listening to people’s recollections at the inquiry into the 7/7 bombings about what happened that terrible day in London in 2005, what really struck me was that you had stories of people wanting to do things for the hurt and injured but who were being told by fire officers that for health and safety reasons they could not go anywhere near these people.

He goes on to talk about how this has infected even intra-family relationships.

Suicide

Suicide:

We must take a moment to mark the passing of CDR Dennis Rocheford, chaplain, Catholic priest, and a man whom you will understand lived a very good life. I gather, from the gentle phrasing, that he was a suicide: and that is a great problem.

As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i, 21), "not even Samson is to be excused that he crushed himself together with his enemies under the ruins of the house, except the Holy Ghost, Who had wrought many wonders through him, had secretly commanded him to do this."

One of you, who knew him, wrote to suggest the topic. Honestly, I have nothing useful to say. I did not know the man, and cannot speak -- as his companion does, so eloquently -- of his fine qualities, his friendship, or his love.

As to suicide itself, I am afraid of no man but myself: and for that reason, I find in suicide a true fear. I have never known what to say about it, when it has come to command my attention. It is right that we should face our fears, though, and I would be setting a poor example -- and doing little to practice the virtue of courage -- if I did not.

What I might say, either of comfort or of sense, is less clear. I hope, and shall pray, for the soul of Father Rocheford.

Some Good Ideas

Some Good Ideas:

...and a very few bad ones. Let's try to sort out which are which.

We're speaking of Alasdair MacIntyre, whose thoughts on virtue, ethics and morals are largely wise and well-considered:

He has lambasted the heirs to the principal western ethical schools: John Locke’s social contract, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Yet his is not a lone voice in the wilderness. He can claim connections with a trio of 20th-century intellectual heavyweights: the late Elizabeth Anscombe, her surviving husband, Peter Geach, and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, winner in 2007 of the Templeton prize. What all four have in common is their Catholic faith, enthusiasm for Aristotle’s telos (life goals), and promotion of Thomism, the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas who married Christianity and Aristotle.

So wise and well-considered are his ideas that they manage to come up with something good even when they are rooted in Marx.

MacIntyre begins his Cambridge talk by asserting that the 2008 economic crisis was not due to a failure of business ethics. The opener is not a red herring. Ever since he published his key text After Virtue in 1981, he has argued that moral behaviour begins with the good practice of a profession, trade, or art: playing the violin, cutting hair, brick-laying, teaching philosophy. Through these everyday social practices, he maintains, people develop the appropriate virtues. In other words, the virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life....

There are skills, he argues, like being a good burglar, that are inimical to the virtues. Those engaged in finance—particularly money trading—are, in MacIntyre’s view, like good burglars. Teaching ethics to traders is as pointless as reading Aristotle to your dog. The better the trader, the more morally despicable.

At this point, MacIntyre appeals to the classical golden mean: “The courageous human being,” he cites Aristotle as saying, “strikes a mean between rashness and cowardice… and if things go wrong she or he will be among those who lose out.” But skilful money-men, MacIntyre argues, want to transfer as much risk as possible to others without informing them of its nature. This leads to a failure to “distinguish adequately between rashness, cowardice and courage.” Successful money-men do not—and cannot—take into account the human victims of the collateral damage resulting from market crises. Hence the financial sector is in essence an environment of “bad character” despite the fact that it appears to many a benevolent engine of growth.

"Wait!" one might say -- and particular one like me, who has traveled in the third world. We're not talking merely of 'growth,' some vague thing that might be a chimera. We're talking about massive and sustained improvements in the quality of life, education, and liberty of people who have suffered tremendously. Taking on board that part of anti-colonialism that is valuable, we can still say that the people of (say) China are massively better off now than at any point in the past; certainly better off than under Maoism.

That is not too far a stretch for the gentleman.

MacIntyre argues that those committed to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of the common good must begin again. This involves “capturing the double aspect of the globalising economy and its financial sector, so that we understand it both as an engine of growth and as such a source of benefits, but equally as a perpetrator of great harms and continuing injustices.” Apologists for globalisation, he argues, treat it as a source of benefits, and only accidentally and incidentally a source of harms. Hence, the view that “to be for or against globalisation is in some ways like being for or against the weather.”

MacIntyre maintains, however, that the system must be understood in terms of its vices—in particular debt.

Here we find that he is addressing what is really the central moral and political issue of our time. The challenges posed by war, by terrorism, by torture, all these pale in scale and ramifications to the moral and political challenge of debt. That may be hard to see at once, but I think it is right. The war in Iraq has involved, directly, perhaps one percent of Americans; if you want to speak of taxes paid, it's a small percentage of what you are paying. The debt issue envelops all living generations, and those yet born; and overwhelms, in terms of cost. While there is a depth to the moral problem of violence that seems to have no bottom, too, there is that same depth to the questions we face with debt: questions which come down to leaving people to die, and choosing which people. They are questions of honor and fealty, because others have promised in our name; and to break that bond is to break all bonds.

For example, we recently received as an assertion from the Congress figure one of this report. I don't think they're adequately accounting for Federal pensions there, which are another set of massive transfer payments owed to the retiring: but that just makes the point worse. The wealth of the nation has already been spent -- and to avoid collapse, there is little choice but to repudiate some of the debts. To put it simplistically, if we eliminated Medicare and Medicaid, and refused to pay on Federal pensions, we would be fiscally fine forever: but only by breaking our promises to older Americans who no longer have a long time to plan their way out of the problem.

On the other hand, to the degree that we don't break these promises, we're destroying the lives of the younger generation -- the one that is currently trying to raise families, who are poorer on average than the older generation, and who have had less opportunity to build and save wealth. They will pay punishing taxes and watch their nation bankrupted. Whose fault is that? The Congress', for making promises while spending the cash they were supposed to set aside -- that is, for taking on debt. But also those older Americans', whose job as citizens was to stop them.

That leaves aside, as we should not, the way in which the politicians and big business (including big labor) have become a wealth-extracting machine; as Ymar and Eric rightly point out, that's the real story behind this TSA mess. Why are Americans being subjected to these radical humiliations, when (as BillT points out) there is no legitimate security purpose at work? For the same reason that the crash of 2008 can bankrupt and destroy you and me, but not the big banks! Not General Motors! They must be saved -- with our cash.

It also leaves aside, as we should not, the way in which Congress encouraged and enabled -- and, failing that, required -- the lending of money to people more likely to be destroyed by it. The moral hazard of that is something Cassandra often wrote about; perhaps she will speak to it in the comments here.

Or the same reason that QE is destroying our purchasing power in order to avoid 'inflation' -- at a time when gas and food prices are already higher than a year ago, and heading higher yet. Who is that helping? Not you and me; but it is helping the big banks.

So let's read the rest, and talk about the ideas. It's an interesting mix of influences. We've got some time this week, with the holiday: I'd like to talk this through with you. What do you think?

Soap Operas of the Tudors

"You Know Whom I Hate? That Anne Boleyn."

Apparently she was not popular with the ladies of late-Tudor England.

Many years of happy marriage to Henry followed, more than he would enjoy with any of his subsequent wives. But Catherine failed to give Henry the healthy son he wanted. Contrary to myth, the king had male heirs (his nephews). As Anne Boleyn's biographer Eric Ives once observed to me, with Henry the desire for a son was all about his codpiece, and what lay behind it, rather than the Tudor succession and national stability. A male heir from his own loins was a symbol of his manhood, and when Catherine passed childbearing age without giving him one, he was determined to have their marriage annulled. He insisted that he had broken a biblical injunction in marrying his brother's wife, and that the papal dispensation was invalid. Henry did not approve of divorce and would never do so.

Tremlett's account of the subsequent battle of wills between the spouses is gripping. Catherine emerges as an extraordinary character, well deserving of a full-length biography. There is something fascinating and chilling in the detail that even as Henry humiliated Catherine and moved to have their daughter made a bastard, she was always seen smiling and was exquisitely polite to Henry. They would dine together, and at times he even visited her private rooms. With formidable discipline she continued to show him the comfortable familiarity of the affectionate partnership they had once enjoyed, while absolutely refusing to give him the annulment he wanted. In this she had public support.

Henry's mistress Anne Boleyn was the Camilla Parker Bowles to Catherine's People's Princess. Women in particular were vociferous in their hatred....

That seems reasonable, doesn't it? The pair must have seemed the very emblem of a husband discarding a long-time faithful wife for a younger woman. Since expressing disgust with the King was treason... well, that really left one option.

How Dixie Are You?

How Dixie Are You?

Test time. My sister and I are 76% and 77% Dixie; my husband is 67%.

I don't think of myself as having a very strong Southern accent. I have cousins in South Carolina with the sound that Vivien Leigh probably thought she was achieving as Scarlett O'Hara. I have cousins in North Carolina who could pass for Jed Clampett. My own accent is sort of washed-out suburban TV, but my word usage is strictly Dixie. A Yankee colleague once was surprised to hear me say, "I'm not either," which seemed perfectly ordinary to me. He'd have said, "No, I'm not."

Some other Dixiefied locutions I never realized were so regional:

• catty-corner
• conniption fit, also, tizzy fit
• coochie coo
• everybody -- instead of everyone
• gone -- He's gone and poured syrup all over his dinner!
• pester
• pistol -- that little William sure is a pistol!
• ruckus -- last night I heard quite a ruckus in the parking lot
• squall -- as in a baby crying at the top of his lungs gracious or gracious me
• have to -- instead of must

Don't X-Ray My Junk

Don't X-Ray My Junk

I seem to have been born without any modesty to speak of, so I don't have strong feelings about being peeked at by x-ray in an airport. I'm less thrilled about physical contact from strangers; the number of people in the world I'll willingly hug is surprisingly small, and I don't encourage casual physical contact as a rule. Add to that my visceral aversion to any governmental agent's casual demand for an intrusion, and I start to get positively rebellious. Still, if I think there's a good reason for an inspection, I'll stand with the inspectors as against the eelbrains who'd like to bring down a commercial jet.

I draw the line when I see the intrusions imposed by people with the same mindset that brings us zero-tolerance policies in public schools. We could do with fewer policies designed to trade one risk for another without thinking through either of them. Anti-CO2 policies are a good example: only a paralysis of the critical faculties permits climate alarmists to conclude that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere pose a greater risk than the probable results of their proposed solutions. Another good example is the use of backscatter x-rays at airports.

Setting aside for a moment the more intangible risks of letting TSA officials condition American travelers to act like sheep, there's the question of whether the increased chance of preventing an air disaster is even worth the excess radiation from the backscatter x-ray machine. Yes, the x-ray dose is extremely small -- but so are the doses from medical diagnostic x-rays, and we're pretty stingy about those. An ordinary x-ray of the chest or teeth might expose you to something like 8-10 mrem. A dose of 1,250 mrem probably increases your risk of cancer by 1 in a 1,000 (the background risk being about 200 in 1,000). The dose from an airport backscatter x-ray machine is so small that you'd have to be scanned about 200 times a year to get an annual dose of 1 mrem.

That's pretty small. But how does it compare to the risk of dying in a terrorist attack on a commercial jet? This site puts it at 1 in 10,400,000, which may be roughly comparable to the risk of a single mrem of x-ray exposure (using the over-simplistic method of multiplying 1 in 1,000 by 1 in 1,250). Not that the figure of 1 in 10,400,000 means much, since probability estimates based on largely unknown future mechanisms are mostly hot air. The point is that it's not possible to make life risk-free, and it's not often even that easy to compare the risks of forbearance against those of vigorous intervention. The whole approach strikes me as wrong-headed, anyway. Why is it OK to intrude more and more into the physical privacy of airline passengers with every passing year, but we still can't profile for fear of arousing resentment in exactly the sociodemographic groups we're most threatened by? Israel's experience with ElAl shows how effective a rational approach to passenger screening can be if it relies on social clues and behavioral patterns rather than the equivalent of universal cavity searches.

I confess I'd like to see Americans stand up for themselves. Ceding to the federal government the right to do anything it takes in order to push perceived risks to an unattainable zero level is risky in itself. I'm not ready to advocate a total boycott of the airlines or even mass civil disobedience in the scanner lines. Ridicule may be a more appropriate first level of resistance. I'd like to see passengers carry extra one-dollar bills, and tuck them into the belts of the TSA employees after the physical and/or electronic groping sessions are completed.

Cowboys are universal.



Ninjas. Damn.

And I do not ever remember seeing this combination before:



I guess that's literally universal with that last one.

Get a Gun

Annie...

A highly sensible suggestion from... Salon magazine??

I have decided that I will never tell my new beau about the physical abuse I suffered in the past. It is too shameful, plus I'm sure it wouldn't accomplish anything productive. I disclosed the tip of the iceberg about the verbal and emotional abuse, just to explain why I avoid confrontation. My boyfriend was upset, naturally, and said that if he ever met my ex he would tell him off. I replied that I would do everything in my power to make sure that they never met, because my ex is a big, crazy dude. My boyfriend asked if my ex could "take him" and I answered honestly that yes, he could. Plus, he has guns....

OK, so can of worms here. My boyfriend now is constantly nervous that he's going to walk out of my house on some random morning and come face-to-face with my crazy ex and a shotgun....

In my heart, I agree that I am not worth the trouble.... What can I do? I guess I should have kept my mouth shut.

Dear Damaged,

Well, no, I don't think you should have kept your mouth shut. Wife beaters and woman-batterers of all kinds would love to see their victims keep their mouths shut. They would love it if all the women they abused were to live in fear the rest of their lives. It would probably turn them on to know that you're having to sneak around having a boyfriend in secret. What a great power trip it would be for him to know that long after you've ended the relationship you still fear him.

So no, I don't think you should have kept your mouth shut.

I think you should get a shotgun.

Wouldn't you rather be the one with the shotgun?

There's more, including some hedging. Still, that's pretty sharp advice if you ask me.

Elvis is Everywhere

Songs about Girls:

In deference to T99, a song that the ever-charming (and rarely understandable) Pandora sent me about a girl who likes machetes.



Well, and who doesn't like a good machete? Or girls who like them?

As to why they thought I'd like the song, that's another question entirely.

UPDATE: I'm probably not being fair to Pandora. I find that if I answer its questions about what I like and what I don't from what it plays, in a week or so any new station is playing nothing but Johnny Cash tunes. I do like Johnny Cash! So the system works, sort of.

However, what I wanted to explore was utterly different types of music. Pandora has, for example, a good selection of early music, but it doesn't know how to differentiate it so that you don't end up with Johnny Cash. For that reason, I tend to plug in something and not adjust the station much; and so I get odd results. It's not their fault, though.

UPDATE: Oh, and Elvis. I never really listened to Elvis before Pandora; but she's right. I do like Elvis.



Of course, Elvis is everywhere. What I really wanted to listen to when I created that station, though, was songs about motorcycles.

Yard Signs

Yard Signs

Apropos of Grim's story about the burglar.

Tin-Cup Urbanism

Tin-Cup Urbanism

Two articles today about the looming municipal bankruptcy problem: Steve Malanga at Real Clear Politics, and yesterday's Washington Examiner OpEd. Malanga reports:

A recent study of the 77 largest municipal pension systems by finance professors Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University's Kellogg School and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester estimates that total unfunded liabilities of America's municipal pension systems is well north of half a trillion dollars. On a per capita basis, the professors estimated that each household in the 50 largest cities and counties they studied owes an average of $14,165 for future retiree liabilities. . . .
The city with the highest per household unfunded liability in the nation is Chicago, $41,966 per household, or $45 billion in total obligations. Illinois, meanwhile, is the state with among the most troubled pension systems, with about $285 billion in unfunded liabilities. "Even if all other spending was shut down, the city of Chicago would need to allocate about eight years of dedicated tax revenues to cover pension promises it has already made," the study by Rauh and Novy-Marx estimates. Meanwhile, Illinois' pension obligations amount to seven times annual state tax collections.

California is in particularly bad shape. San Francisco and Los Angeles are among the places with the greatest liabilities among cities, amounting to $34,940 and $18,643 per household, respectively. Their combined pension debt of $33 billion is in addition to some $600 billion in Golden State unfunded liabilities. Also on the watch list from California are a host of other cities and counties, including Contra Costa County, Santa Barbara County and the city of San Jose. Los Angeles County, which runs many municipal functions in addition to those of the city of Los Angeles, has its own woes with a staggering $27 billion in unfunded liabilities. . . .

The cost of funding retirement benefits for New York City employees . . . has increased from $1.5 billion in 2000 to some $7 billion today, out of a city-funded budget of $44 billion.

The Examiner editorial blames the problem on cities' addiction to the federal teat:

Growing dependency on federal solutions to local problems has almost always stifled innovation. "Tin-cup urbanism," as it came to be known, removed the ability of citizens to control the fates of their own communities, leading to ineffective governance and increased crime.

Sometimes the only solution to excessive debt is for the people with money to stop lending. Nationally and individually, maybe we should quit investing in munis despite the tax breaks that are specifically designed to keep that funding pipeline wide open. At the very least, it would be a sign of sanity if investors quit buying munis issued by insanely over-leveraged cities like San Francisco and New York. Locally, residents of cities will have to elect public servants who are committed to living within the means that their local taxpayers are able and willing to pay. Cities are going to have to cut up their credit cards.

Black Keys

Black Keys

I need cheering up today, so it's piano fun. This is Lang Lang fooling around in his rehearsal room with Chopin's "Black Keys" Etude.

Here's the more traditional rendition:

And here's the Chico Marx routine that no doubt inspired Lang Lang:

And this is for BillT:

History & Philosophy

History & Philosophy:

The first has normally been thought the proper education of princes; the latter, the road to the greatest possible human understanding. Modern educators seem to doubt the use of history:

Is history as good as finished? Our school system seems to think so. Often it seems that the teaching of history is treated by the educational establishment as the rough equivalent of the teaching of dead languages: an unnecessary luxury of a bygone age, and something the modern world no longer requires. In the most recent debates about the national curriculum, history has been granted the status of an "inessential subject."

Even philosophers sometimes question the role of philosophy:

The philosophical use has stumbled from one intellectual catastrophe to another. It’s never recovered since the days of Descartes, Locke and Kant.

I'd have to go along with that: back to the medievals and the ancients! Well, what about science, then?

"The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that if there’s a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all. That seems to me altogether wrong...."

One of his larger criticisms of contemporary neuroscience concerns the way it characterises the activities of the brain. Dualists about the mind and brain – those who hold that there are thinking substances like souls in the world as well as all the ordinary physical stuff – say that the mind sees and thinks and wants and calculates. Contemporary neuroscience dismisses this as crude, but Hacker argues that it just ends up swapping the mind with the brain, saying that the brain sees and thinks and wants and calculates. He says, “Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems. On the current neuroscientist’s view, it’s the brain that thinks and reasons and calculates and believes and fears and hopes. In fact, it’s human beings who do all these things, not their brains and not their minds. I don’t think it makes any sense to talk about the brain engaging in psychological or mental operations.”

...

“The fact is that if you look from one domain of cognitive neuroscience to another you will find that the operations of the brain thus conceived are being advanced as explanations for human behaviour, for our thinking, believing, seeing, hoping and fearing. That’s wrong, because it’s no explanation. If someone wants to know why poor old Snodgrass, as the result of some lesion, can’t do something that normal people can do, and you say that his brain can’t do it, you haven’t advanced any explanation at all. One cannot explain why someone cannot see by saying that his brain cannot see. One cannot explain why someone behaves in a certain way by suggesting that his brain tells him to. Cognitive defects can indeed sometimes be explained by reference to damage to the brain – but not by reference to cognitive deficiencies of the brain, since the brain has no cognitive powers at all. There is no such thing as a brain’s thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing.”

I suppose there's always poetry.

Refudiate

"Please Refudiate."

Apparently the New Oxford American Dictionary really liked that turn of phrase. Congratulations, Mrs. Palin! Not everyone invents a word that makes it into the dictionary. It's more of a contribution to English than most will make; that would be an irony, if the common slanders pointed at the lady were true. Instead, it's just a pleasure to see.

Idoru.

Boom

A Question of Theory and Practice:

What's the difference between this:



And this:



Acceptable answers include, "There's no difference at all"; but you have to defend your answer, whatever it is.

Let's Go Fly A Kite:

What? There's not a lot of wind today.