Busy Weekend

OK, no posts for the weekend. I have strong excuses, however. Friday night, I went with a friend to the Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Wyeth's granddaughter gave a very interesting lecture, lots of personal details about the artist and the background of his work.

Saturday, the weather was raw, temp in upper teens and a fairly strong wind. We still had 20 people turn out for the hike in Spring Grove Cemetery in midtown Cincy, we did about 4.7 miles in 2 hours. Several people on the hike located the graves of their great-grandparents or close family friends. If one criss-crossed all the roads in Spring Grove, it would probably add up to 10 to 12 miles. Cincioutdoors and Tristate Hiking will be returning to Spring Grove often in coming months, I imagine.

Sunday of course was the day of Football Worship. Despite the harsh weather, about 16 people turned out at Chaos Manor for masses of great food, decent football, and mixed commercials. TR brought a Superbowl quiz from her office, 20 questions on Superbowl history and Superbowl commercials. She had garnered a 16 working individually, I only managed an 11 of 20 on phase one, and 5 of 10 on phase two. It was still the best of the group.

Preparations are getting somewhat frantic for my Feb. 13 departure for the Dominican Republic, still some packing, sorting things into storage, etc, but the adventure awaits!

Alaska Nostalgia

This morning, Cincinnati has gotten a massive snowfall, perhaps as much as half an inch. The snow seems to brighten the day considerably, even given the standard grey sky of an Ohio winter, at least until it melts and turns to slush. Thus, it was neat to find an excellent story in the Anchorage Daily News online about dog mushing:
http://www.adn.com/life/lende/story/8606425p-8499083c.html

Author Heather Lende has written an excellent article--

Jim Stanford has the only real sled dog team in Haines. There are a couple of folks with a few semiretired sled dogs who get out occasionally, but none hooks up eight, 10 or 12 huskies to a sled and runs them five days a week the way Jim does. He lives 26 miles out of town, in the Klehini River valley near miles of old logging roads.

They have had more than 25 feet of snow out there this winter, including 10 feet in 10 memorable days. Keeping a trail packed in this weather is a challenge. Jim figures he spends four hours on a snowmachine for every hour on his dog sled.

There are walls of plowed snow in the driveway, higher than our heads. The ground around the staked dogs is surprisingly white. Jim keeps a clean kennel. I imagine that its proximity to the house helps, and Jim's wife, Deb, does work for the public health nurse.

Jim introduces me to the dogs by name. Only Ginger has that traditional Siberian husky face. Mostly they look like rangy, shepherd-husky-mix hounds.

Having a recreational dog team in Haines, where it can rain as much as it snows in any given winter, has a lot to do with living a deliberately rural life and keeping that trail from the past open. It is also elemental. Living with animals makes you a better person. Standing among his leaping, barking buddies, his fleece pants covered in dog hair, Jim says he simply cannot understand why everyone doesn't want a sled dog team.

The runners swish softly on the snow, the harness lines creak a little and the dogs settle into a confident trot. They hardly need Jim's occasional whistle to pick up the pace or the dragging brake to slow them. It is so quiet that Jim and I talk without raising our voices, about our families, the Yukon Quest (I'm going up to watch, so I asked my old friend to teach me about dog sledding), aging well, local politics, state politics and the war.

Jim tells me about his education at Kent State, where he played football before leaving the troubled campus just a day before the students memorialized forever by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as "four dead in Ohio" were killed by National Guard soldiers. He said he almost became an Australian but wound up in Alaska instead, where he and Deb have raised three nice kids and dozens of sled dog puppies.

My mittens stink. My black snowpants are covered with husky fur. My butt is a little sore from that hard sled. But my smile must be almost as big as Jim's.

We climb into the truck, tossing the harnesses behind the seat. "You have to like the smell of dogs" Jim says, and he rolls down the window, laughing at the view behind him of the team with just their heads poking out of the small holes in the dog-box doors, barking like crazy as we drive the quarter-mile to his house. I wondered why we didn't take the sled here in the first place. Mosquito Lake Road is snowpacked, and there's no traffic.

Now I know. "They sure love to ride in the truck, don't they?" Jim hollers over the doggie din. "Just look at them -- don't you love it?"

A major nostalgia hit. Mosquito Lake Campground is where I spent my first night in mainland Alaska after leaving the State Ferry in Haines. A beautiful place. The next morning, driving north towards Haines Junction, we saw both a black bear by the side of the road and a coyote running across the road. Naturally, this lead to overly high expectations of wildlife sightings, it was one of the better days in my 25 years in Alaska.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot???

I try to pursue a live and let live philosophy, in most respects. So the idea of typical middle-aged guys bowling in the nude has to be OK, at least in general principles. But still, one has to wonder...what in the Wide World of Sports are these guys thinking??

And in Maine, in the winter. I suppose that it was way too cold for the traditional nude softball tournament...

http://bangordailynews.com/news/t/news.aspx?articleid=145743&zoneid=500

What???

The "well spoken" Sen. Joe Biden discusses his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination in a long interview with a reporter from the NY Observer at http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=14092&ic=News+Story+1

Are they going to turn to Hillary Clinton?” Biden asked, lowering his voice to a hush to explain why Mrs. Clinton won’t win the election.

“Everyone in the world knows her,” he said. “Her husband has used every single legitimate tool in his behalf to lock people in, shut people down. Legitimate. And she can’t break out of 30 percent for a choice for Democrats? Where do you want to be? Do you want to be in a place where 100 percent of the Democrats know you? They’ve looked at you for the last three years. And four out of 10 is the max you can get?”

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

But—and the “but” was clearly inevitable—he doubts whether American voters are going to elect “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate,” and added: “I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic.”

(After the interview with Mr. Biden and shortly before press time, Mr. Obama proposed legislation that would require all American combat brigades to be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of March 2008.)

Eagle Lugging Deer Head Causes Power Blackout

This story is reminiscent of the 1984 general election in Alaska, which had a hotly contested ballot initiative on whether to move the capital from Juneau to Willow, north of Anchorage. I voted first thing in the morning, but a huge after-work turnout was anticipated. Then, about 4:00 p.m., there was a regional power outage in Anchorage and the Mat-Su valley, which lasted for about 8 or 10 hours. Voting was much reduced in the area, which was a stronghold of the pro-move forces. Immediately there were mutterings about conspiracy, which were not quelled by reports that it was unlucky ravens who had shorted the main transmission lines from the Beluga power plant.

At least in Juneau, the eagle did not interfere with an election.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070129/ap_on_re_us/eagle_power_outage

JUNEAU, Alaska - About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.


"You have to live in Alaska to have this kind of outage scenario," said Gayle Wood, an Alaska Electric Light & Power spokeswoman. "This is the story of the overly ambitious eagle who evidently found a deer head in the landfill."

The bird, weighed down by the deer head, apparently failed to clear the transmission lines, she said. A repair crew found the eagle dead, the deer head nearby.

The power was out for less than 45 minutes Sunday.

Vanderbilt and John Edwards

I found a great post by Dean Barnett at http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/. Barnett has some wry comments on John Edwards' new 28,000 square foot house in North Carolina, noting that this falls short of the 60,000 square feet of the Vanderbilt estate "The Breakers" at Asheville.

4

) What about the house’s details? The Breakers, according to Wikipedia, had things “like a 50’ by 50’ great hall marked by six doors which are limestone figure groups celebrating humanity's progress in art, science, and industry: Galileo, representing science, Dante, representing literature, Apollo, representing the arts, Mercury, representing speed and commerce, Richard Morris Hunt, representing architecture and Karl Bitter, representing sculpture.” Surely Edwards can’t compete with that.

Well, he’s trying. According to John Carrington of Carolina Online, the humble Edwards abode will have an indoor recreation building that contains a basketball court, a squash court, two stages, a bedroom, kitchen, bathrooms, swimming pool, a four-story tower, and a room designated “John’s Lounge.” The latter is kind of appropriate when you think about it. While the Vanderbilts paid tribute to Dante, Apollo and Mercury, Edwards will pay tribute to himself.

5) What kind of things do you think will happen in “John’s Room?”

I imagine the Lord of the Manor sitting there drinking snifters of ancient Cognac or Brandy bemoaning the plight of America’s underclass to anyone who will listen,

8

) This whole FAQ seems like a cheap shot. Big deal. We’re supposed to believe you’re suddenly against conspicuous consumption?

I’m not. Quite to the contrary, I conspicuously consume as much as my meager means allow me to. Furthermore, conspicuous consumption is good for the economy. The design and construction of the Edwards house is no doubt employing dozens of artisans, craftsmen and day laborers.

But I’ve always felt that Edwards is a phony. I don’t call him an empty suit – that’s too generous. I refer to him as a suit filled with anti-matter. It’s a bit hard to believe that someone who is actually obsessed with the plight of America’s downtrodden would devote so much energy and so many resources to building a home fit for a modern Medici. I just don’t buy it.

Procrastinators, let's wait up!

John Tierney, in his science blog at the New York Times site, discusses procrastination--
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/procrastinate-now/

Tierney quotes an interesting paper by Piers Steel, noting

as structure continues to decrease, the opportunity for workers to procrastinate will concomitantly increase. Furthermore, the prevalence and availability of temptation, for example, in the forms of computer gaming or internet messaging, should continue to exacerbate the problem of procrastination. There are simply more activities with desirable features competing for our attention.

There is even an online procrastinator quiz--

http://www.procrastinus.com/

I really need to get around to TAKING that quiz...

A Sad Day for Grad Students

Momufuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen, has died in Japan at the age of 96. I could not possibly estimate the number of servings of instant ramen that I ingested in my college days. Of course, backpackers as well are forever in his debt.

Ando is a classic example of the entrepreneur who succeeds with a seemingly basic, mundane idea, which was only obvious after he came up with it. The Economist has an excellent obituary, at
http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8548461

The cult was global. In 2005, 86 billion servings of instant noodles were eaten around the world. And all this began with a vision, as such things do. One cold night in 1957, walking home from his salt-making factory in Osaka, in Japan, Mr Ando saw white clouds of steam in the street, and a crowd of people gathering. They were waiting for noodles to be cooked to order in vats of boiling water, and were prepared to wait a long time. Why not make it easier? thought Mr Ando. And why not try to do it himself?

His life until then had been a bit of a mess. He had sold dress fabrics, following in the footsteps of the grandparents who had brought him up. He had sold engine-parts, prefabricated houses, magic-lantern projectors, socks. He had presided over a credit association, which had gone bust, and tried to launch a scholarship scheme for poor students, which had landed him in jail for tax evasion. But now the “steadily rising” clouds (or possibly, as in the cartoon on the homepage of his Instant Noodle Museum in Osaka, one fluffy white cloud with a kettle dangling from it) had shown him the Way.

The road was long. It took a year, working night and day in a shed in his back garden, to find the secret of bringing noodles back to life. Mr Ando cooked quantities, but had trouble getting the moisture out and keeping any flavouring in. He sprayed them with chicken soup from a watering can, and festooned the shed with them. The secret, picked up from his wife as she cooked vegetable tempura, was to flash-fry the cooked noodles in palm oil. This made them “magic

”.

I

n 1958 instant noodles went on the market, yellowish wormy bricks in cellophane bags, and were laughed at by fresh-noodle makers all over Japan. They were just a high-tech craze, costing six times as much as the fresh stuff; they would never catch on. By the end of the first year Mr Ando had sold 13m bags and had attracted a dozen competitors. He never looked back. In 1971 came noodles in heat-proof polystyrene cups, so that the hungry did not even need to get their bowls out of the cupboard. The Japanese voted instant noodles their most important 20th-century invention, Sony Walkmans notwithstanding. Mr Ando's firm, Nissin, became a $3 billion global enterprise.

But it was never just a company, and instant-noodlemaking never just an industry. The three sayings of Mr Ando became a philosophy of life:
Peace will come when people have food.
Eating wisely will enhance beauty and health.
The creation of food will serve society.

Mr Ando practised what he preached. He ate Chikin Ramen, his original flavour of noodles, almost every day until he died. Though sceptics pointed out that they were loaded with fat, salt and monosodium glutamate, he looked bonny and spry. Seabeds across Asia were littered with plastic noodle cups; but that was not his

fault.

His TV advertising, meanwhile, showed what instant noodles were really all about. When the world turned to eating them, barriers fell, children laughed and people loved each other. All liberating revolutions sprang from humanity's desire to gulp down steaming Cup Noodles whenever there was a chance. In 2006 a Japanese astronaut, on board the space shuttle Discovery, supped Mr Ando's noodles from a handy vacuum pack. He appeared on the TV ads weightless and smiling, his enlightenment complete.

Waltzing Matilda

Mark Steyn has a great post discussing some national anthems of former British colonies, and the vapidity of recent compositions, drained of any spirit by the dead hand of political correctness, at his site, steynonline.com
Best of all, Steyn has some good background on "Waltzing Matilda":

As the metropolitan reaction to Steve Irwin’s death reminded us, not all Australians want to be celebrated for the blokey camaraderie of the bush. No doubt it’s very frustrating when Sydney has so many fine Thai restaurants and firebreathing imams to be continually cheered in popular culture for boomerangs and kangaroos and mates and cobbers and larrikins. But, musically, you can’t beat something with nothing, and “Advance Australia Fair” is one big zero. We’ve been frolicking down the “W” end of the folk-song index – “Wallaby Stew”, “Wild Colonial Boy” – and we’ve only just reached the biggest “W” of all:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

The poet Banjo Paterson is traditionally credited with the song in the form we know it today, though some scholars continue to question this. Still, the song we know today began life in January 1895, when Paterson was visiting the Macpherson property at Dagworth Station in Queensland, north-west of Winton. Also visiting, from Victoria, was Christina Macpherson, who'd come home to spend Christmas with her father and brothers after the death of their mother. One day Christina played Paterson a tune she'd heard at the races in western Victoria, and the poet said he thought he could put words to it. The tune is said to have been "Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea", but there was also an 18th century English marching song called “The Bold Fusilier”. Paterson claimed never to have heard the earlier lyric but its pattern is so similar it’s impossible to believe that “Matilda” wasn’t laid out to the scheme of the earlier number:

A gay Fusilier was marching down through Rochester
Bound for the war in the Low Country
And he cried as he tramped through the dear streets of Rochester
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?

Who’ll be a sojer?
Who’ll be a sojer?
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?

Marlborough being the Duke thereof: Winston Churchill’s forebear. “Cried as he tramped”? “Sang as he watched”? Don’t tell me that’s not a conscious evocation. Nonetheless, “Waltzing Matilda” is a splendid improvement on the original. If you're a non-Australian who learned the song as a child, chances are you loved singing it long before you had a clue what the hell was going on. What’s a swagman? What’s a billabong? Why’s it under a coolibah tree? Who cares? It’s one of the most euphonious songs ever written, and the fact that the euphonies are all explicitly Australian and the words recur in no other well known song is all the more reason why “Matilda” should have been upgraded to official anthem status.

And yes, a “swagman” is a hobo, and this one steals a “jumbuck” (sheep), but he ends up drowning, which gives the song a surer moral resolution than most similar material. Yet in a sense that’s over-thinking it. It’s not about the literal meaning of the words, but rather the bigger picture that opens up when they’re set to the notes of that great rollicking melody: the big sky and empty horizon and blessed climate, all the possibilities of an island continent, a literally boundless liberation from the Victorian tenements and laborers’ cottages of cramped little England. Few of us would wish to be an actual swagman with a tucker bag, but the song is itself a kind of musical swagman with a psychological tucker bag, a rowdy vignette that captures the size of the land. One early version of it went “Rovin’ Australia, rovin’ Australia, who’ll come a-rovin’ Australia with me” – which is a lousy lyric, but accurately describes what the song does.

One sign of the song’s muscular quality is the number of variations. Of the rock’n’roll crowd’s monkeying around with it, I think I’ll stick with Bill Haley and the Comets’ goofy “Rockin’ Matilda”. The Pogues-Tom Waits approach – “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, “Tom Traubert’s Blues” – seems to me to glum up the works unnecessarily. To use it for the story of a soldier who loses his legs at Gallipoli is unduly reductive: It’s too good a real marching song to be recast as an ironic marching song. I don’t know whether today’s diggers march to “Matilda” in Afghanistan and Iraq and East Timor but it’s one of the greatest marching songs ever, and today as a century ago it remains the great Australian contribution to the global songbook:

Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.

Happy Australia Day!

Soviet Humor

Law Professor Eugene Volokh, at http://volokh.com relates a classic bit of Soviet humor:

Old Soviet Joke:

The Soviets talked a great deal about "Druzhba Narodov," which is to say "Friendship of the Peoples," though in fact the Peoples weren't really that Friendly to each other.

So the joke, of which I was very recently reminded: What is the Friendship of the Peoples? It's when the Georgian walks hand in hand with the Armenian, and with the Ukrainian, and with the Russian, and they all go to beat up the Jew.

More great Soviet-era humor is at http://www.johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm

and at

http://www.balticsworldwide.com/soviet_communist_humor_jokes.htm

How to increase Blog Traffic

A great comment by the tireless "Anonymous" on a funny post by Ken Levine:

And what would the headline read if a divorcing celebrity mom pop singer re-enacted a scene from Apocalyto and stabbed former child star Jerry Mathers?
"Britney Spears Beaver"

The full post is hilarious as well.

http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-hits-just-keep-on-comin.html

Good Sense from Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell has very sensible comments on the issue of "obscenely high CEO" which make great sense, but are rarely heard--

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTFlNDhmODM3MGY3MTY0Nzg3Zjg2MDE3YjZjNGM1NDQ=

Many observers who say that they cannot understand how anyone can be worth $100 million a year do not realize that it is not necessary that they understand it, since it is not their money.

All of us have thousands of things happening around us that we do not understand. We use computers all the time but most of us could not build a computer if our life depended on it — and those few individuals who could probably couldn’t grow orchids or train horses.

In short, we all have grossly inadequate knowledge in other people’s specialties.

The idea that everything must “justify itself before the bar of reason” goes back at least as far as the 18th century. But that just makes it a candidate for the longest-running fallacy in the world.

Given the high degree of specialization in a modern economy, demanding that everything “justify itself before the bar of reason” means demanding that people who know what they are doing must be subject to the veto of people who don’t have a clue about the decisions that they are second-guessing.

It means demanding that ignorance override knowledge.

The ignorant are not just some separate group of people. As Will Rogers said, everybody is ignorant, but just about different things.

Should computer experts tell brain surgeons how to do their job? Or horse trainers tell either of them what to do?

One of the reasons why central planning sounds so good, but has failed so badly that even socialist and Communist governments finally abandoned the idea by the end of the 20th century, is that nobody knows enough to second guess everybody else.

Every time oil prices shoot up, there are cries of “greed” and demands by politicians for an investigation of collusion by Big Oil. There have been more than a dozen investigations of oil companies over the years, and none of them has turned up the collusion that is supposed to be responsible for high gas prices.

Now that oil prices have dropped big time, does that mean that oil companies have lost their “greed”? Or could it all be supply and demand — a cause and effect explanation that seems to be harder for some people to understand than emotions like “greed”?

Legislative wit

A classic bit of political humor at www.volokh.com,

[Former legislator] Steve Durham and I entered a capitol elevator the other day while the Democrat and Republican House legislators were in caucus discussing the long bill.
Durham: "What's the difference between a cactus and a caucus?"
Kopel: "I don't know, what is the difference?"
Durham: "With a cactus, the pricks are on the outside."

Quoted by volokh.com from http://www.jerrykopel.com/c/falling-in-love-with-bills.htm

The image “http://www.mondomostre.it/images/guggenheim/thumbnails/15%20-%20Bonnard.800x600.jpg”
This is a really beautiful Sylvestre Bonnard painting, much-needed colors on a drab Cincinnati morning with the snow rapidly turning to slush.

Christopher Hitchens has an excellent review of Mark Steyn's new book, including some very good suggestions on how to deal with radical Islamists--

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_urbanities-steyn.html

Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime” and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”) is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.

Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument, in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the following:

1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.

2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.

3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.

5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.

6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.

7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.

Bat Masterson and Benjamin Cardozo

The fabled gunfighter and the noted jurist crossed paths in a libel suit in New York, where Masterson ended up as a sports writer. A great story from the Volokh site--
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_01_21-2007_01_27.shtml#1169362299

Cardozo defended the NY Globe from Masterson's libel suit, and his post has some great exchanged between Masterson and Cardozo.

Masterson's last words, found in the paper in the typewriter where he died--

There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way.

One Froggy Evening

An amazing Chuck Jones cartoon, 6:50 of great drawing, a funny but sad story...

Children's Books from 1920s Japan

An interesting site with illustrations from children's books, Japan in the 1920s--
http:/
/www.kodomo.go.jp/gallery/digi/KODOMO_WEB/gallery/g_e001.html




Top Page

Gallery
Children
Kodomo no kuni and It
The Children of Kodomo no kuni
Introduction

Charles Murray on Intelligence and Education

Charles Murray, in a series of 3 articles in opinionjournal.com, makes some great observations about the current state of education in the US. This third article talks about education for the highly intelligent--

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been more true.

All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.

In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.

Art and Entrepreneurship

this is a great story about Bill Strickland, a high school kid going nowhere who found a path to a great life helping others:http://www.fastcompany.com/online/17/genius.html