Non-fiction

Some months ago I posted skeptically about the idea of requiring schoolkids to spend 50% of their time reading bureaucratic white papers of the "Chicken production and transportation issues in Willamette County" variety.  Maggie's Farm linked to an American Thinker article today that does the idea more justice.  Although I have real doubts how the program would be carried out in actual schools, the notion started by David Coleman is to introduce students to evidence-based argument using texts like de Toqueville's Democracy in America.  As he puts it:

It is rare in a working environment that someone says, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."

Not that I'm crazy about the idea of all students aiming for jobs in which they have to churn out market analyses, but the same principle applies to a request for an analysis of any proposal or policy.  Why do you believe this is true?  And come up with something more powerful than the more-or-less grownup equivalent of "all the cool kids think it."  It's the rare corporation or government bureau -- or any other human endeavor -- that couldn't use more of that skill.

The author of the American Thinker article does have a funny approach to categorizing writing as fiction or non-fiction, though.  This is a list of what he describes as the proposed "fiction standards":

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; Thomas Paine's Common Sense; The Declaration of Independence; Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?"; Allen Paulo's Innumeracy:  Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences; Mark Fischetti's Working Knowledge:  Electronic Stability Control; and George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

I'm listening to a series of lectures about Winston Churchill.  He was an indifferent student who hated Greek and classics.  In some dismay and contempt, his father sent him off to a kind of military or administrative professional school, where he was given practical works to study; he loved them and excelled.  Without being at all in the "special snowflake" school of thought, I do believe that the task of education is to develop the different strengths of different students.  Especially as they get older, students should be offered a wide variety of higher-level materials that will challenge whatever their talents happen to be.  There will be some who can be nourished by Working Knowledge:  Electronic Stability Control in a way they never could have been by War and Peace.

Heh:

President Barack Obama was “totally furious” he spent a week of his time posing for a trillion-dollar platinum coin that would never be minted, a White House source confirmed today....

Mr. Obama devoted much of last week to posing for the trillion-dollar coin on the assurances of outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who told Mr. Obama that the coin had “a way better than fifty percent chance” of being minted.

Based on Mr. Geithner’s advice, Mr. Obama carved hours out of his schedule to pose for the ill-fated coin, even cutting short meetings with world leaders such as Afghan President Hamid Karzai....

When Mr. Geithner delivered the news to the President that the coin idea had been scrapped, according to the source, “to say that things got ugly would be a massive understatement.”

That's one of the most perfect satires I've ever read.

Risk

From Maggie's Farm, a link to an interview with Fred deLuca, who started the first Subway sandwich shop in 1965 with a $1,000 loan from a college professor who was also a family friend.  Almost half a century later, they still share the profits 50/50 -- no quarrels, no lawsuits.

DeLuca says he was lucky when he started to be so young that he didn't really understand the danger of failure.  His first intended franchisee had a more typically grown-up attitude:

"When we first began franchising, I knew we needed a first franchisee, and the only person I could think of was [our good friend] Brian.  So I went to him and said, 'I’ve got this opportunity for you.'  He gave a practical response, which was, 'Even though I’m not crazy about [my job], I get paid every week.'  He didn’t feel comfortable taking the risk of quitting. 

"Then one day he showed up for work and his employer had gone bankrupt.  So he called me and said, 'Hey, is that offer still available?'  That’s how we got started.

Walk the Plank

Here's a theory about Republican re-orientation that sounds really exciting: Peggy Noonan says "It's pirate time."

Now is the time to fight and be fearless, to be surprising, to break out of lockstep, to be the one thing Republicans aren't supposed to be, and that is interesting. Now's the time to put a dagger 'tween their teeth, wave a sword, grab a rope and swing aboard the enemy's galleon.

That sounds great. Throw out the rules, grab a blade, and start swinging. And what does she go on to suggest that these wild swashbucklers do?

Endorse gun control, tax increases on the very rich, and "immigration reform."

Apparently when Republican Pirates yell "Surrender!" they are to precede the exclamation with "I."

Condolences to FPS Russia

Our condolences to FPS Russia on the apparent murder of their producer. I had not realized that they were close physical neighbors to the Hall, but they are apparently located quite close by (and not at all in Russia, as you might think).

Here is their top five list, in memory of the good work they have done.

Fluidity and locusts

Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons in 1936.  He quoted the First Lord of the Admiralty, who was opposing direct efforts to prevent Germany's remilitarization:

"We are always reviewing the position."  Everything, he assured us, is entirely fluid.  I am sure that that is true.  Anyone can see what the position is.  The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind.  So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.  So we go on preparing more months and years -- precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain -- for the locusts to eat.

Justified

Happiness, a new season. This is a good trailer:

Two on Tolkien

Richard Fernandez writes a review of the new Hobbit movie, which makes me think I might ought to go see it after all. I hated Jackson's treatment of LoTR very much -- well, the first movie, which I hated so badly I didn't see the others. The MTV swinging-cameras and technicality seemed to me to do violence to Tolkien's vision. I can't imagine he wouldn't have hated the movies at least as much as I do.

Still, Fernandez mentions a couple of Jackson's additions to the plot kindly. That's another thing of which I was suspicious. I can't imagine that Jackson's ideas about what the plot should contain are so superior to Tolkien's that the expansion is a great idea. Usually a novel benefits from cutting, not expanding, extra elements.

A man much more after my own heart, Lars Walker, writes the second piece for today on the subject. He looks back at older editions of LoTR that meant a great deal to him. Now this is the kind of thing that Tolkien would have understood!

Lucky Gunner on Brass v. Steel

For those of you interested in arms-related questions, the folks at Lucky Gunner email to draw your attention to their recent tests. They've passed tens of thousands of brass and steel cased ammunition through Bushmaster AR-15s, and have a report on the effects of each on weapon accuracy and reliability. Conditions were pretty rough at times, between rain and sandstorms in the Arizona desert.

Learn more at LuckyGunner.com

Of course, if any of you are inspired by this to go out and buy an AR-15... good luck! As D29 points out, there's little need for gun control on these weapons right now. You couldn't find one to buy if you wanted.

Comfort food

Over at Maggie's Farm, they're featuring a series of old favorites like chicken pot pie. Today's topic is chicken tetrazzini, which inspired me to write about the difference between the turkey tetrazzini I once whipped up using an undistinguished recipe off of the net, and the immensely superior one my husband made up shortly thereafter. It was like a demonstration from a cooking school: how a real cook makes even ordinary dishes something special. His didn't even take longer to make. It left mine in the dust.

This recipe is pretty close to what he did. It starts with a light roux, which is just flour stirred into butter in the saucepan until it thoroughly dissolves. You add equal parts cream, stock, and white wine and cook them down a bit. In the meantime, cook your noodles and hold them to one side. Also, start sauteeing the vegetables, whatever's handy, but a good mixture is celery, onions, carrots, garlic, and mushrooms. Add some salt and pepper as well as some herbs; he used thyme and sage. Grate up some parmesan and get your bread crumbs handy. Then all you have to do is mix up the diced turkey or chicken with the veggies, sauce, 1/3 of the bread crumbs and cheese, and the noodles. Pour the mixture into a casserole dish, then top it with the rest of the bread crumbs and cheese and bake it until golden brown and delicious.

This is a forgiving dish, but it will be better if only read food goes into it. That means actual butter, actual parmesan, stock you made yourself, crumbs made from actual bread, and dry wine you wouldn't object to drinking on its own. On the other hand, most of these ingredients are leftovers. We make stock whenever the pile of chicken carcasses and leftover chicken bones, innards, and necks gets too big in the freezer, and stock freezes just fine in conveniently-sized containers until you're ready to use it. While it takes several hours, it's not like you have to be doing anything to it while you wait. It would be a fine thing to leave bubbling away in a crockpot while you're away or busy. It's nice to add vegetables or herbs to the stock while it's cooking, but you'll get a fine stock even if you dump in nothing but the chicken parts. When the chicken is cooked to pieces, strain it and reserve the liquid. Our dogs love to eat the mush that I pull off the bones. With the chicken bits in the dogs and the stock in the freezer, all that's left of many chicken carcasses is a tiny pile of bones.

As for the wine, it's a great way to use up any wine that's sat out overnight; this year we used the tag-end of a bottle of Champagne that sat out in the back yard overnight after New Year's Eve losing its fizz. It goes without saying that the bits of fowl are leftovers, and the veggies can be anything you have handy: peas or whatever. For bread crumbs, we keep a bag of heels from loaves of bread in the freezer and periodically pulverize them.

When this "leftover" dish is finished, you'll wish you had more.

This Is What I Want To Do For Vacation:

About five minutes into this video and the wife veto'd the idea, but I think I can talk her into it.

Some of you may recognize the road.

The 15-Hour Workweek

An economist writing in Aeon has an article on the rise of a leisure-based society, long predicted by Keynes and others. He asks, "Are we ready for it?" It's kind of an interesting reading for a notion of where the Left thinks we are.

The social democratic welfare state, supported by Keynesian macroeconomic management, had already smoothed many of the sharp edges of economic life. The ever-present threat that we might be reduced to poverty by unemployment, illness or old age had disappeared from the lives of most people in developed countries. It wasn’t even a memory for the young....

[F]or the first time in history, our productive capacity is such that no one need be poor. In fact, more people are rich, by any reasonable historical standard, than are poor....

If work was distributed more equally, both between households and over time, we could all be better off. But it seems impossible to achieve this without a substantial reduction in the centrality of market work to the achievement of a good life, and without a substantial reduction in the total hours of work. The first step would be to go back to the social democratic agenda associated with postwar Keynesianism. Although that agenda has largely been on hold during the decades of market-liberal dominance, the key institutions of the welfare state have remained both popular and resilient, as shown by the wave of popular resistance to cuts imposed in the name of austerity....

In a post-scarcity society, everyone would be guaranteed an income that yielded a standard of living significantly better than poverty, and this guarantee would be unconditional.

What is most interesting to me about this is that it is unmoored from any discussion of means-to-ends. The assumption is that the means are already in place: the problem is that the market distributes those means to the wrong people. What looks to me like a "Kill the Golden Goose" issue looks to them like an opportunity for golden eggs for everyone, whether they work or not.

In any case, the 15-hour workweek seems to be on its way. Obamacare brutally punishes businesses that have more than 50 full-time workers, where "full-time" is defined as 30 hours a week or more. Whole industries are now pushing low-wage workers onto 15-29 hour schedules, which means that they will be going on food stamps (if they aren't there already). Many of these jobs are no longer paid minimum wage, using the 'seasonal' or 'temporary' loopholes.

You'll have lots of time, I guess, to sit around and worry about how poor you've become. But of course there's a solution for that: the new 'guaranteed income' will ensure that no one is poor. (How will we pay for that when we can't pay for Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or already-promised pensions? And we, the richest nation on earth?).

That's the Spirit!

A review of Scottish fencing.

Re-think that bicycle

And maybe the modern trend toward excessive personal grooming is not such a hot idea either, not to mention zippers.

Avalanche

“If you swim out in the ocean, the ocean’s always alive,” Saugstad said. “You can feel it. But the mountains feel like they’re asleep.”

This New York Times article about an avalanche is a virtuoso piece of multimedia presentation, combining a riveting story with fantastic links and video.

We watched "The Pink Panther" the other night, which came out when I was eight years old.  I believe that was the last time I had seen it.  My husband objects to the gratuitous insertion of musical numbers into movies from this era, but the jazzy/samba lounge-singer scene in the ski lodge is the only bit I remembered from childhood, apart from the theme song and the tiny pink flaw in the great diamond.

The dancing looks like fun, even for poor hapless Peter Sellars, the comic cuckold.  The people in these conventional American thrillers and comedies from the early 60s were so sophisticated and at ease in their society.  There was nothing sullen or dreary about their rebellion.

The fellow presenting the movie remarked that David Niven expected his jewel-thief-Don-Juan character to become a successful franchise.  No one guessed that Inspector Clouseau would steal the show.

How to talk to a moderate voter

In a comment thread below, Tom linked to a fine article by Kevin D. Williamson at the National Review Online, which I thought should be highlighted here.  Williamson cites three areas where conservatives fail to engage the middle-of-the-road voter:  (1) the best way to address risk, (2) the real value and dangers of economic inequality, and (3) how to rely on growth instead of on redistribution of a finite pie.  On the first point, he reminds us that segments of the population who historically were systematically excluded from the formal economic system will be hard sells on the notion that accepting economic risk is the best path to prosperity; we'll have to acknowledge their legitimate suspicion of the game.

Regarding inequality, he cautions against arguing that "merit and merit alone accounts for the diverging prospects of the very well off and the rest."  A free market doesn't ensure that merit will triumph, only that individuals' preferences will have more clout than those of bureaucrats.  A conservative's desire to favor individuals over bureaucrats doesn't rest on a conviction that all individuals are better judges than any bureaucrat.  It rests in part on a philosophical preference for individual autonomy, and in part on an empirical conviction that, although masses of individuals can make appalling choices, their inevitable failures pale before the even more appalling choices of bureaucrats.

On the subject of growth vs. redistribution, Williamson points out that the "people as useless mouths to feed" cant of Malthusian liberals sometimes raises its ugly head equally in the hearts of conservatives who back trade barriers and oppose immigration.  He recommends a focus on people as the engines of future growth and prosperity, and on the education and healthcare policies most likely to make that possible.

He closes with an encouraging look at recent conservative reforms in Sweden, all achieved without outraging the compassionate or liberal instincts of most voters in that very collectivized state.

"You Can't Cut Your Way to Prosperity."

I'm really impressed with this new line from the President. It's so perfect. It's obviously wrong, in fact the very opposite of true, but it sounds so good. It's a masterpiece of the genre.

If you have income of X and expenses of X+Y, cutting is an excellent way to prosperity. It may be the only road to prosperity. This is so obvious that I feel a little odd even saying it: the line from the White House is so obviously out of order with reality that it makes you feel as if you must be missing something to challenge it.

Nor is it clear whose prosperity is meant in any case. The line is being deployed in service of proposed additional tax hikes, which means that we can't be talking about the prosperity of individual families. We must be talking about some sort of collective prosperity. But the government has never had, and will never have, enough to ensure that everyone is prosperous. This was the entire lesson of the Cold War. Only a robust market can ensure widespread prosperity, and while the market needs some regulations to function smoothly, a heavy tax burden is harmful to it.

Of course, not everything coming out of Washington is so carefully scripted as this masterpiece from the White House. Sometimes plain honest sentiments do make their way into the discourse.

Thomas Sowell Against Republicans

It's an interesting piece that begins with a cheerful invocation of the nearness of death, but I suppose I can understand the sentiment.

The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future.

Near the end he asks us to consider what the country would look like if we'd had Judge Bork on the Supreme Court all these years, instead of Justice Kennedy. Of course one doesn't know for sure, but it's hard to imagine that the substitution would have been harmful.

I Feel A Little Less Eccentric Now:

The Red Book is an immense illuminated manuscript, which [Carl] Jung indited on cream vellum in the private scriptorium of his study over a period of about sixteen years, copiously illustrated with elaborate, vivid, and occasionally ghastly painted panels, and bound in red leather.