Stossel on Hayek's Road

The Road to Serfdom, that is. One of the necessary books. At Amazon in text, or on the web, illustrated and condensed. John Stossel discussed it for an hour — television hour, that is, about 44 minutes. UK Libertarian has the whole thing, in parts.

A lot of fun for the Tolkeinish nerd

Kate Nevpeu's re-reading of The Lord of the Rings. At the rate of a chapter a week, or fortnight, depending on Kate. I have read this many times, but never discussed it with such focus.

Jack Vance has written a memoir

Steven Hart writes about Vance, and about this book, This Is Me, Jack Vance (Or, More Properly, This Is "I").

Too many favorite Jack Vance stories to name them all.

There is some more discussion here. The Vance Integral Edition has already become a rare item.

Keeping it simple

I've had this book on my "one of these days" list for years, now. Coming across this just moved it a little closer to the top.

Metafilter: What are the simple concepts that have most helped you understand the world?

Via Jaltcoh, via Althouse.

A classic review of a classic: Mary McCarthy on 'Pale Fire'

It's probably 30 years since I've last read Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Seeing this at Kausfiles has greatly increased the likelihood that I'll get around to rereading it sometime before the arrival of the Singularity:

The best book review I've ever read, Mary McCarthy's amazing figuring-out of Pale Fire, is now online at New Republic.

The review (from 1962, when the book was new) clarifies much complexity in (relatively) few words.

Mundus vult decipi

A smart comment by madawaskan at Althouse reminded me of this:
which is the emblem of Dom Manuel, the central figure of "The Biography of the Life of Manuel," a series of novels by James Branch Cabell. The Latin means "The world wants to be deceived."

Or as Joni Mitchell said,

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68,
And he told me: "All romantics meet the same fate someday.
"Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe.
"You laugh," he said, "You think you're immune,
"Go look at your eyes, they're full of moon.
"You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
"All those pretty lies, pretty lies.
"When are you gonna realize they're only pretty lies?
"Only pretty lies, just pretty lies?"

We've elected a sweet-talkin' ladies' man, and have to hope it does not "come down to smoke and ash."

Literary notes: Jurgen, the best-remembered volume of the Biography, is available on line, with illustrations, from the University of Virginia. Figures of Earth, in which Manuel is the protagonist, is available from Project Gutenberg, as is Jurgen, in Gutenberg's usual text-only format. Some more Cabell links at Virginia Commonwealth University.

This post gets an "SF" tag because I don't want to have separate tags for fantasy and science fiction. Cabell is not a science-fiction writer.

Derbyshire on Monkey, Zen, stimulus

Compare my Presidents' Day post on Coolidge with this by John Derbyshire at The Corner:

In his press conference last week the President chided "a set of folks who … just believe that we should do nothing." This got loud protests from various quarters on the right that, no, there are no such folks. We all want the government to do something.

Well, I'm for nothing. Perhaps not quite nothing: If Congress were just to go on a 12-month vacation, that would be a good thing; but even better would be if they were to spend 12 months doing nothing but repeal bad, stupid laws. (Repealing the CPSIA would be a good warm-up exercise.)

Like Monkey, they just can't sit still. This preposterous "stimulus" package is just one particularly big and obnoxious instance of a malign phenomenon — too much government action. Don't just do something, guys, sit there. But that, of course, is the one thing they can't do.

Monkey? What monkey? You'll have to read the whole thing to find out. It's short.

One of Derbyshire's readers responds, with a suggestion for another $150 billion of "stimulus."

I mentioned "Yes, Minister" syndrome a while ago.

We don't burn books, we landfill them. It's different. It's for the children!

Move over, Montag. Don't you realize that burning those books could give off toxic fumes?

From Overlawyered:

[T]he Consumer Product Safety Commission yesterday advised thrift stores and other resellers and distributors of used goods to discard (unless they wished to test for lead or take other typically unpractical steps such as contacting manufacturers) children’s books printed before 1985 and a very wide range of other children’s products, including apparel and playthings.

Just a small part of the results of a law called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed as a Congressional overreaction to the toxic toys from China scare last year. I had not even heard of this law until Roland Dobbins sent Jerry Pournelle a link to the Overlawyered piece above. Which shows that I don't read Overlawyered as regularly as I should. There's a whole series there about this misguided, misbegotten, outrageous, foolish law. Letters to Congressmen and Senators are required, though probably will be useless. The Common Room, also with many posts on CPSIA, links to the House committee where bills to modify the CPSIA are under consideration. Since it is the same committee that the bill came out of in the first place, my hopes are not high. This law needs repeal, not amendments.

Speaking of useless, one of those posts deals with the question, "How useful is Snopes.com for figuring out the truth about something?" The answer seems to be that it's about as useful as any other site on the Internet: to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes careless, possibly deliberately deceptive. Oh well, you knew that all the time, anyway. I hope I'm not going to find out that there are mistakes at The Straight Dope, next.

Seriously, that whole series on CPSIA is worth reading. It's not just books, there's much, much more involved. For instance, the law puts Gepetto out of business, closes thrift and consignment shops, and stops kids from buying youth motorbikes or parts for the ones they have.

This is what happens when Congress passes these bloated bills that nobody reads, and the President signs them, and then we start to find out what was in there. Oh dear, what did they just do last week!

Related: The legal system.

Gleanings

The historical origin of "Yes we can."

Found: the lost cities of the Amazon.

Very well then, what was THE MOST TRAGICAL TRAGEDY That ever was Tragedized BY ANY Company of Tragedians? Why, it was Chrononhotonthologos. Naturally. By Henry Carey (c1687-1743) but variously published under the pseudonym Benjamin Bounce, esq., or Robert Carey. Full text at the link! Thanks to commenter Sam Kelly at Making Light.

Help for pale people is on the way: Suntan Drug Greenlighted for Trials. Not a lotion that turns you yellow, but an injection that promotes production of melanin. Now see if the stuffy old FDA will let anyone use it. (via)

This time I am going to link the whole darn Friday Odd Links list from The Corner. Oh—I just did! Dr. Mengele; the far side of the moon; brewer's droop found to be mythical; and more.

Thinking about time travel,

could it be done, could, should, I, you, do it, I see that somehow I have neglected to link to Heinlein's "All You Zombies —" — the time travel story to end all time travel stories. It didn't, actually, end them; but if people would have read it, it would have. See what I mean about time travel? Gets you all mixed up and leads to confusing the tenses. [Which will remind me, in the next paragraph, to link to Tenser, said the Tensor, a sporadic (as I should be the one to say!) but always interesting site whose title is inspired by Alfred Bester. What the Tensor does with the "unanswered questions" from Slate has me LOL.] I plan to stop doing it, sometime soon. Or late, I can't tell any more.

That discussion must have been in someone else's comments. I went on to say something about Alfred Bester and "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which leads to Copenhagen interpretation, many worlds, and that darn cat. (And the Tensor song, from Bester's The Demolished Man.)

Recent reading: Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory. Prose so tasty you want to spread it on a muffin. Got to keep the "Selectra Six-Ten" away from the computer, though.

The Wire

I have a bunch of open tabs to clear up, so here goes:

Mark Bowden, The Atlantic: The Angriest Man in Television.

Reihan Salam, The American Scene, on the Bowden piece: The Bleakness of The Wire.

Matthew Yglesias, The Atlantic, on Salam: David Simon and the Audacity of Despair.

Ross Douthat, The Atlantic, on Yglesias and Salam: The Simon Worldview.

David Simon himself, in Esquire, not responding to any of the above, just telling his story: A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back.

I'm inclined to regard The Wire as a 21st-Century version of a big fat novel. (Of course we still have those.) And a very fine specimen of the breed, one which might well serve as the type to be emulated by auteurs to come.

Well done, David Simon!