The Burr in the Burgh: Dinner With History

Pastor Scott Stiegemeyer has a poll up that asks "If you could have dinner with one of the following famous people from history, which would you choose?" And then there is a list of fifteen very different famous people, from Rita Hayworth to Martin Luther, Andy Warhol to George Patton. Fun. (Use the title link to reach his blog, then scroll down the righthand sidebar.)

Update: He is also hosting what has turned into a discussion on the greatest movie Westerns of all time, if that's a genre you know and enjoy.

Balancing democracy, market economy

Columnist Carlos Alberto Mantaner writes that a reason that people in Latin America think the capitalist system is behind most of the woes of the world is because they have had bad experiences with something called capitalism that isn't. For that matter, they also misunderstand democracy, he says. He outlines a way forward.

hat tip: Josue Sierra at Latino Issues blog.

Overcoming addiction, step by step; and a related essay

Ignoring the specialists who claimed that drug addiction is a disease, some folks back in the 1960s set about learning what motivates drug addicts to inch their way toward recovery, using B. F. Skinner's work as a starting place. Since then, researchers have been looking at what works and what doesn't. In 2002, New York City started the modern version of "contingency management" (also called "motivational incentives") programs in seven of the city's addiction clinics. So far, so good, and the program is being extended to more and more clinics, both in New York and beyond, according to "Overcoming addiction, step by step" by Kristine Kelly for The RU Scientist Newsletter, published online by Rockefeller University.

As an aside, I'm glad it's working, but I have to wonder why it has taken so long and so much research and so much jargon to learn how to do what millions of parents and teachers do on a day-to-day basis? That is, notice the small achievements along the way instead of saving all the kudos for reaching grand goals. I think that's more or less what a lot of this seems to boil down to. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Wait. I might know part of the answer to my own question. A wonderful bit of perspective from Jane Jacobs just came to mind. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in the introduction (at least in the edition I read), she noted that much of what was wrong with urban planning was in part due to the fact that earnest and well-meaning planners - good men, you understand, who cared deeply about their cities - had gone to great pains to learn what the sages of urban planning taught about how cities ought to work. The problem was not with the intentions or the lack of professionalism of the planners - it was that the received wisdom they were spending years and years learning wasn't based on how human beings actually interact with each other and their environment. Worse yet, having invested themselves heart and soul into learning this complicated specialty, whenever reality seemed to contradict what they'd learned, the reality usually wound up being shoved aside as a fluke. (Humans will be human, after all.)

Here's my favorite part of the explanation: Jacobs likened urban planning as it stood in her day to the state of medicine in the heyday of bloodletting. No, seriously - and it makes all the sense in the world, as far as I'm concerned, the way she explained it. Bloodletting was based on superstition, but it was bolstered by elaborately learned rituals. People who spent year after year becoming experts in bloodletting, learning just which vein to draw from for which symptoms, among other things, got enmeshed in the handed down fallacies. Bloodletting physicians ridiculed, and sometimes ruined, physicians who dared to point out where draining blood didn't make sense and might even be killing people.

I have a theory, just a hunch, that much of what's wrong with modern culture is that just enough people are invested in some modern variation of bloodletting - truly dangerous stuff - and don't know how to assimilate evidence that contradicts what they've so painstakingly learned about how things ought to work, according to their sages.

We all have blind spots. But those doggone blind spots that we've acquired through earnest effort are especially difficult, I think. At a guess. Yes?

The Times Online guest contributors Opinion : Why I am a greenbelt heretic

Gabriel Rozenberg, economics reporter for The Times, proposes that less government planning might result in better results. Take those green belts around London, Birmingham and other big cities, for starters. They sound good, but are they? What are they like, really? What do they do, really? Are they, perhaps, causing blight?

hat tip: Let's Scrap UK Land Use Planning at the Out of Control blog.

Blogosphere Note: The Out of Control blog has moved. Old url. New url.

Three bears make themselves at home near daycare

Children at a daycare in Volusia County, Florida, have to play inside until three black bears that have made themselves at home in the neighborhood are trapped and relocated. (And I thought we had it bad with cougars straying inside residential areas from time to time. No, wait. We do have it bad with cougars that aren't shy about coming to town. Thank goodness our local bears tend to stay in the woods, though. One type of wild beast that can kill people roaming loose is more than enough, thanks.)

For a sensationalized lead-in to the Florida story, see WKMG TV's 3 Bears Terrorize Central Day Care. Excuse me? Terrorize? The bears were eating in the trash cans on the property, the kids thought they were cute and wanted to go pet them. The grown-ups had enough sense to keep the kids inside. The folks who trap bears in live traps have set up a trap and baited it with spoiled meat and Doritos, the story says, and now everyone is waiting until the too-tame bears manage to trap themselves. This is not terrorizing, at least in my book. It's bad, it's worrisome, it must be dealt with, but... (The video isn't quite so over the top, thank goodness.)

Sigh. It's enough of a story by itself, straight up, no embellishments. Why in the world do people feel a need to "punch up" a story like this?

Legion Magazine | History Over Hiroshima

From the August 2005 American Legion magazine, from an article called "History Over Hiroshima" by James V. Carroll, about Enola Gay pilot Col. Paul Tibbets:

Most historians agree that dropping the uranium and plutonium bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortened World War II, thereby avoiding an inevitable Allied invasion of Japan and its predicted carnage to both sides. There are historians and ethicists who hold a dissenting opinion, but Japanese aviator Mitsuo Fuchida is not among them.

Fuchida, Tibbets says, approached him at a military reception sometime after the war and said, “I’m Fuchida. Shall we talk about it?”

Apparently recognizing that the American aviator did not understand what he was talking about, Fuchida told Tibbets that he had led the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

“You sure did surprise us,” Tibbets recalls saying.

“What the hell do you think you did to us?” Fuchida replied.

The two war-hardened aviators and survivors chatted a few minutes when Fuchida confided to Tibbets, “You did the right thing to drop the bombs. Japan would have resisted an invasion using every man, woman and child, using sticks and stones if necessary.”

“That would have been a slaughter,” Tibbets says. “I believed at the time, and I believe now, that President Truman made the right call.”

Full article

One Hand Clapping : The Bomb

Donald Sensing at the One Hand Clapping blog has posted on the World War II atomic bombings in Japan, and what led up to the Japanese surrender (it wasn't the bombings directly, he says).

He also suggests that there are two essential books for understanding what happened - Japan's Longest Day, written eight years after the bombings by Japanese historians, and Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank.

Sensing provides some perspective I hadn't quite grasped before this. He also has a link to the text of the initial BBC announcement of the bombing at Nagasaki. Reach his post here.

Sensing links to Amazon in his post. For the Barnes & Noble information on the books, click on the book covers below.


Japan's Longest Day


Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire

Daily Inklings: Chrenkoff Will be Leaving the Blogosphere

One of the guys who putting blogging on the map is putting his blog behind him.

EUobserver.com: Fashion clothes for millions stranded in harbour stocks

Lisbeth Kirk reports that a WTO textile quota expired at the beginning of the year, so goods shipped from China in response to the free trade option, and then the EU, responding to complaints, imposed fresh quotas on Chinese textiles in June. This has resulted in at least 33 million pieces of clothing being stuck at European and Asian harbors, and has left retailers unable to get their winter collections. EU consumers are being warned clothing prices might go up, and shelves may go empty as early as next month if matters don't get resolved somehow. So now the EU commission in charge of these things is trying to decide whether to ask permission from member states to move some of the 2006 quota forward...

Article

Market Watch: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury

The 1960 Pulitzer fiction award winner Advise and Consent by Allen Drury seems to be dwindling in supply and rising in price at the moment. It's still not what I would call scarce, and there are still a few copies floating around for under ten bucks, but it's definitely shifted compared to the last time I bothered to check, with significantly fewer copies and rather higher prices, even for books in only fair condition. Hmmm. I wonder if this is a fluke or a trend?

Challies Dot Com: The Incremental Nature of Change

Tim Challies recently read Talking About Good and Bad Without Getting Ugly by Paul Chamberlain, and uses the last chapter as the stepping off point for a consideration of the methods used by William Wilberforce to help bring about the abolition of slavery, especially as it compares to common strategies in the current culture wars. (Use title link.)

Embryonic stem cell policy debate round-up

Tony Snow looks at Sen. Frist's stance and says The doctor is out.

Charles Krauthammer thinks Frist is right, but warns Stem cell research without limits is a bad idea.

Tim Chapman at the From the Bleachers blog links to Kansas Senator Sam Brownback's op-ed in which he points out, among other things, that embryonic stem cells haven't led to one promising treatment while adult stem cells have 65 published treatments.

If you missed it before, see also Paul Greenberg's "A Modest Proposal", which discusses how we've been down similar paths before, with, for instance, medical experiments done by the Japanese on prisoners of war "who were going to be worked to death anyway, so why not put them to some scientific use?" Greenberg knows why not. (And I agree with him.)

Ancient Faith Radio: Upcoming author interview - Fr. John David Finley

Ancient Faith Radio, an Orthodox online radio station, will be airing an interview with Fr. John David Finley on August 16, 18, 20, and 22. See the website for times and program notes.

Fr. John's book Sacred Meals talks to the rare art of enjoying meals as a family, and includes "over 140 family recipes - from Southern-style "soul food" and Lenten meals to authentic Mexican cuisine and backyard barbecues."

The New Atlantis - John Paul II and The Ethics of the Body

The New Atlantis asked Eastern Orthodox theologian David B. Hart and Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jensen to comment on the significance of John Paul II's Theology of the Body, with an emphasis on bioethics. Hart's article is The Anti-Theology of the Body. Jenson's article is Reading the Body.

Missoulian: Residents had harrowing night among flames

Rob Chaney of the Missoulian newspaper reports on the wildfires (plural) that attacked the little Montana town of Alberton from three sides this week, during a rash of wildfires that closed down a long stretch of Interstate 90 west of Missoulia. See Residents had harrowing night among flames and Day after, Alberton takes stock.

See also Blazes near Interstate 90 still dangerous, officials warn, by Tristan Scott.

First lines

Sherry at the Semicolon blog has a list of ten great first lines from novels (try to guess before you look at the comments for answers), and she links to other sites that are collecting nominations for great first lines.

I just did a quick look at some of my favorite books on the shelves near my desk, and find that most of the novels I've kept lean toward good first paragraphs or pages, but the first lines themselves aren't anything to stand up and be noticed.

So far the only one that stands out is from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling (there's no sense asking people to guess that title, even if it is by Kipling). It has both stories and poems. There's a poem and then the first story begins:

The children were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as much as they could remember of Midsummer Night's Dream. Their father had made them a small play out of the big Shakespeare one, and they had rehearsed it with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart...

I don't know why, but I like that very much, especially when you combine it with the rest of the first paragraph, which is rich in detail. I have the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics trade paperback edition (ISBN 0140183531), which has helpful end notes that tie the text to history and fable and compare The Strand versions against various other published versions.

Here's an online version, which has the first story all part of the same chapter as the first poem.

National Center for Home Food Preservation

We just got a used freezer yesterday (very big, very cheap; so what if it's not fashionable or pristine?), and I'm on a quest to figure out how to properly freeze just all sorts of things (as well as pointers on what foods just don't freeze well, no matter what you do). The National Center for Home Food Preservation website has tips on that - plus how-tos on canning, curing and smoking, drying, fermenting, pickling, and making jams and jelly.

Here's a counter-intuitive tip from their section on freezing animal products:

Cured meats such as ham and bacon can only be frozen for a short period of time (1 to 3 months) because the salt in them hastens rancidity.

I thought the salt was a preservative? Hmmm. This calls for further research, I think.

I almost never freeze fresh veggies because commercially frozen vegatables are so cheap and, for that matter, are usually better quality than the fresh veggies at our local grocery store. But, for those of you who want to try it, the discouraging information is that:

Blanching (scalding vegetables in boiling water or steam for a short time) is a must for almost all vegetables to be frozen. It stops enzyme actions which can cause loss of flavor, color and texture.

[snip]

Blanching time is crucial and varies with the vegetable and size. Underblanching stimulates the activity of enzymes and is worse than no blanching. Overblanching causes loss of flavor, color, vitamins and minerals. Follow recommended blanching times...

I wish I knew who started the myth that homemaking is unskilled labor...

Mommy Life: Favorite reads: a child's point of view

Barbara Curtis at the Mommy Life blog is looking for good fiction for grown-ups that is written from a child's point of view. Does anybody have recommendations? (Use title link.)

Collected Miscellany - What's the Best Book of 2005?

Phil at the Collected Miscellany blog wants to know what you think are the best books this year, fiction and nonfiction both.

hat tip: Sherry at Semicolon

Day is Done: Hall of Fame Jockey Announces Retirement - bloodhorse.com

Pat Day is shifting focus. Leslie Deckard reports (posted August 4, updated August 5):

As the Churchill Downs bugler played "My Old Kentucky Home," an emotional Pat Day officially hung up his saddle today during a press conference at the Louisville, Ky. track, where he is the all-time leading rider with 2,481 wins, including 155 stakes wins.

[snip]

Day retires with 8,803 career victories, which ranks him fourth behind all-time leader Laffit Pincay, Jr.'s career total of 9,530. Day is the all-time leader in career earnings by a jockey as his mounts earned $297,912,019.

Day won the Kentucky Derby (gr. I) in 1992 with W.C. Partee's Lil E Tee. His Triple Crown resume includes a record five Preakness Stakes (gr. I) and three wins in the Belmont Stakes (gr. I). He rode in a record 21 consecutive Kentucky Derbys, a streak that ended when hip surgery forced him to miss this year's renewal.

[snip]

The Colorado native said he would immediately focus his energy on his work with the Racetrack Chaplaincy of America, a national organization of chaplains from U.S. racetracks that serves the spiritual, physical, emotional, and social/educational needs of the workforce at those tracks.

In addition to speaking at chaplaincy fund-raising events, Day said, he wants to spend time walking through the backstretch with Racetrack Chaplaincy of America's 58 sanctioned chaplains and then giving a message of eternal hope to groups of backstretch workers....

Full article

Via A man worthy of our esteem - and a superb witness by Miss O'Hara.

Pat Day famously had drug and alcohol problems before he became a born-again Christian in the early '80s. It's more common for men to become heroes and then go to ruin, but with Day it was the other way around. He went from being a bad example to being a caring, winning guy. For more, see Wikipedia/Pat_Day.

See also Pat Day’s “What a Difference a Day Makes Tour” at RTCA.