Lift Up Your Hearts!

Dr. Mark Gendreau offers some very reasonable advice, mostly about travel, for those who wish to avoid swine flu or any other airborne illness.  A combination of individual, corporate and governmental action could make a great difference.

[H]and hygiene is...the single most significant thing you can do to protect yourself and your family when you are traveling or out in public.  Study after study shows marked reductions in transmission in public spaces when hand hygiene is practiced, and a recent study found nearly undetectable influenza particle levels after hands contaminated with influenza were washed with either soap and water or an over-the-counter gel containing at least 50 percent alcohol.  Sanitize your hands before eating, drinking and after retrieving something from the overhead bin or returning from the restroom, and you have just cut your chances of getting infected by at least 40 percent. One of my disappointments with the airline industry is its lack of providing alcohol-based hand sanitizers to passengers. Such a service would go a long way in eliminating infection spread within aircraft.

Most commercial aircraft in service recirculate 50 percent of the air delivered to the passenger cabin....The recirculated air usually passes through high-efficiency particulate (HEPA) filters before delivery into the cabin.  HEPA filtering of recirculated cabin air to minimize exposure to infectious particles is established within scientific literature, practiced daily in health care facilities and is strongly endorsed by the medical community and cabin health experts.  However...the Federal Aviation Administration, its British counterpart, the Civil Aviation Authority, and Europe's Joint Aviation Authorities do not require the use of these filters on commercial airlines.  Efforts to improve international regulations regarding the certification, inspection and maintenance of aircraft environmental control systems are needed. To minimize the risk of disease spread by aircraft, regulations requiring HEPA filters for any aircraft that uses recirculated air should be seriously considered....In the meantime, you can improve the ventilation at your seat by turning on the overhead air vent to low and positioning the airflow to be slightly in front of your face. This may create enough air turbulence to push a viral particle from landing on your face and mucous membranes.

Use a surgical mask when you are traveling to areas that have reported cases of swine flu and bring an additional one to give to anyone near you who forgot one or appears to be sick and is coughing or sneezing....A recent analysis of public health interventions used during the SARS epidemic suggests that the use of masks by the public was 68 percent effective in decreasing rates of infection, with simple face masks, and 91 percent effective for more sophisticated N95 face masks.

Okay, so it's very uncool to wear a face mask when ill, but it needn't be so.  "Sick masks" are common in Japan, even amongst the coolest high school students, who see them for what they are:  an invitation to sympathy, especially from teachers and pretty girls.

The only way to eliminate any risk of cross-infection in the aircraft cabin—or the rapid worldwide spread of an infectious agent—is to prevent would-be passengers who are either substantially exposed to or carrying transmissible infections from flying....This needs to come from education and promoting individual responsibility, since the systematic screening of passengers for contagious diseases is impractical. Although thermal scanners used in airports may detect travelers with symptoms, they are not effective since people exposed to an infectious disease could travel without any signs or symptoms and yet still be infectious.

May I suggest a change in the way airplane ticket refunds are handled?  When a family is about to embark on a long-planned vacation, and one of the children begins to sniffle or develops a low-grade fever, it's unlikely that any policy change will make them decide to stay home, as brief, inconsequential illnesses happen frequently to children.  However, many people with health issues are deterred from rescheduling their flights because of the financial consequences of cancelling a flight.  If the airlines had a standing policy of rebooking, at no additional charge, all the members of the sick person's party, I suspect we'd see a substantial increase in the number of people who were civic-minded enough to stay home when ill.  In a health emergency, during which flight cancellations could be expected to have a substantial impact on the airlines' financial situation, it would be appropriate for the federal government to bear some of the burden, much in the same way our local government lifts the tolls on major roads during a hurricane evacuation.

(This is a follow-up to previous posts:   Options In Childbirth: A Personal Odyssey; The Trial; The Trial, Part II; and The Trial, Part III.)

• I can't help wondering if Heather and Jon were treated differently because they lived in the city, rather than in a wealthy suburb, where the police might be more likely to find themselves facing a lawsuit for interrogating a cold, naked, hungry, and exhausted woman immediately after a traumatic birth and in the midst of unimaginable grief.
• I learned that if you are accused of a crime the police can take away your computer, no matter how essential it is for your for your daily life and business, and no matter how much personal and irreplaceable data is on it.  Memo to self:  buy an "emergency" computer, make frequent backups of all data, and figure out a search-warrant-proof hiding place.  I'm not planning to get in trouble with the police—but who does?
• The proceedings were dragged out for seven years, prolonging the agony for Heather and Jon, leaving Judy and her family in limbo, and incurring great financial costs to both Judy and Allegheny County.  Why not, since there was little incentive for the powers that be to move it along?  The prosecution got what it wanted in the interim—Judy prohibited from doing her work—so why should they rush to judgement, and risk losing their case, as they did?  Delay increases lawyers' fees, and even ordinary civil servants go to work and go home and get paid, independent of whether any one particular trial takes seven years or seven days.  The only person with any incentive for speedy justice was Judy herself.  And in the cases where the defendent knows himself guilty, even his desire would probably be to delay the verdict.  No wonder our court system is overwhelmed.
• I learned something of how frustrating it is for those who know better to see false evidence enshrined as truth.  In this case, the medical examiner, who exhibited an obvious prejudice against all midwives, testified—and his word was taken as authoritative—that the injuries he found on Isaac were due to Judy's efforts to assist the birth, despite the verifiable fact that all injuries except for one (a small mark on the back of Isaac's head) corresponded exactly to the locations of the various injections, sensors, and other bodily indignities that were part of the attempt to save Isaac during his two-day stay in the hospital.  I wish this testimony had been properly contradicted during the trial, but it was apparently not part of the defense attorney's strategy, so it was left to become "truth" forever. (See Jon's comments after this Daley Ponderings post.)
• Knowing that the judge was also a medical doctor, I wondered at the decision of Judy's attorney to go with a non-jury trial.  There is a strong and often acrimonious division between physicians and midwives, especially traditional midwives who work independent of a doctor's control, but even nurse-midwives feel the sting.  My guess is that he knew the integrity of the judge, whereas juries can be swayed by emotional appeals.  The judge clearly wanted to throw the book at Judy, and, had he had the authority, at Heather.  (What he thinks about Jon he apparently kept to himself, but I doubt it's complimentary.)  However, in an exercise of that increasingly rare commodity, judicial restraint, he ruled according to the law, contenting himself with a tongue-lashing from the bench and imposition of the maximum allowed penalty ($100 fine) for the most minor charge of practicing midwifery without a certificate, a grey area in Pennsylvania's law.  (See the ruling in midwife Diane Goslin's case.)
• While I had been hoping for an enthusiastic endorsement of the rights of Pennsylvanians to be attended in childbirth by the assistants of their choice, and of the value of traditional midwives in retaining critical knowledge that is rapidly being lost in an overly-litigious and highly medicalized society, I consider this case a solid victory for midwives, because a judge with an intense desire to convict Judy ruled that Pennsylvania's law would not allow him to do so.

Tribune-Review article, with Heather interviewed

Post-Gazette article, with Jon interviewed

Let's not do it again.  Back in 1976, panic over swine flu led to a mass-vaccination program in which nearly a quarter of the U.S. population received immunizations at a cost of $137 million—followed by millions more the government paid out in damages to victims of vaccine-related Guillain-Barre syndrome.  Working in a medical facility at the time, I stood in line and received my free shot and thought no more about it.  However, the whole affair is now considered a debacle, a textbook case of governmental over-response to fears of a pandemic, fears that turned out to be unfounded.  Let's not do it again.

Panic and misinformation are spreading online, aided and abetted by the mainstream news media, which I know from local hurricane reports are adept at the art of crying wolf, deliberately creating fear because fear keeps people glued to the news reports, no matter how little real information is imparted.

Should the government be aware, alert, and prepared to act if this becomes a true emergency?  Certainly.  But let the ordinary citizen take reasonable precautions of the kind we should always be taking (handwashing, keeping sick people home), and avoid spreading panic, which is itself a dangerous disease.

(Standard legal disclaimer:  I am an Ordinary Citizen, not a doctor.  If your doctor tells you to panic, don't let me stop you.)

I couldn't have told you anything about Mary Ann Glenon before turning to Wikipedia, except for this:  the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican has both principles and courage.  The University of Notre Dame, which has apparently forgotten that it is a Catholic University, is planning to bestow an honorary degree upon President Obama, who will be giving the commencement address. Glenon, who had been scheduled to receive the University's Laetare Medal at the same time, demurred.  To deflect speculation, her letter of refusal was released to the press and published in First Things.  (Hat tip to Patrick Deneen.)

[I am] dismayed by the news that Notre Dame also planned to award the president an honorary degree. This, as you must know, was in disregard of the U.S. bishops’ express request of 2004 that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” and that such persons “should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” That request, which in no way seeks to control or interfere with an institution’s freedom to invite and engage in serious debate with whomever it wishes, seems to me so reasonable that I am at a loss to understand why a Catholic university should disrespect it.

When Notre Dame suggested that her acceptance speech might be good for the President to hear, she correctly reminded the university that graduation is a time for honoring the students, not for political debate.

A commencement, however, is supposed to be a joyous day for the graduates and their families. It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre Dame’s decision—in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops—to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.

This Stone Soup cartoon makes me think, not of our children, who have learned from us and built well upon what they've learned, so that we in our turn have learned from them, but about our society in general, as we (re)discover the virtues of thrift and living within one's means; of childbirth as a natural, personal process; of breastfeeding; of small farms and organically-grown food; of respecting, enjoying, and conserving our natural environment.  We knew all this 40 years ago; how did we fail to pass it on?  Probably in the same way our parents' and grandparents' generations failed to pass their virtues on to us....

I think the U.S. Postal Service is great.  Sure, there are occasional mistakes, like the one that resulted in some of our mail still being delivered to my sister's house five years after a temporary forwarding order expired.  That is an exception, however; for the most part, the USPS does its job exceedingly well, I think.  I'm sure my good feelings are in large measure due to the workers at our local post office, who happen to be an amazingly friendly and helpful crew.  Folks go out of their way to do business at our post office.  It was one of those helpful clerks who told me, after our forwarding debacle, never to forward or even hold mail if at all possible.  The very best vacation plan is still to have a friend check your mailbox for you.

The Swiss Post is a world leader in postal business-model innovation with operations in 16 countries across three continents. Despite its home-country’s population of only seven million, it generates $9 billion in revenue and earns an impressive 10 percent profit. It has aggressively rolled-up, partnered on or internally launched a variety of Internet-ready businesses that offer services such as document imaging, electronic document signature, electronic postage that costs less than paper stamps, and an international shipping network. Its annual report states that it generates 20 percent of its revenues from outside Switzerland. It is still 100 percent government owned, and its profits go to the general fund, but it acts more like a private corporation responsible to shareholders.

That’s not all. The Swiss know that paper mail volumes will continue to decline and that the Internet isn’t going away. So the forward-looking Swiss Post has been the first in Europe to introduce a service to deliver paper-originating postal mail via the Internet, called Swiss Post Box.

Swiss Post Box is powered by technology from Seattle-based Earth Class Mail. The service emails multi-sided color images of incoming envelopes and parcels to their recipients as soon as the mail reaches the first sorting center nearest where it was collected by the post office. While the mail and parcels are held in an automated temporary cache, recipients decide which mail pieces they want to have opened and scanned to PDF inside an ultra-secure scanning center at the Post Office (where confidential documents for Swiss banks are also scanned), and which are to be delivered physically to the address on the envelope, redirected to another address, shredded, recycled or archived for safekeeping. Three-quarters of the mail ends up leaving that first sorting center bound straight for recycling, either after being scanned to PDF or discarded unopened by customer’s choice. The energy savings implications are obvious.

I have no more information yet than is in this Post-Gazette article, but it looks as if the seven-year ordeal is finally over.  If it's not the vindication and ringing endorsement of birthing rights I was hoping for, it's probably the best we could have hoped for from a judge who is also a doctor.  I'm not sure how he managed to convict Judy for not having a license, since Pennsylvania doesn't license Certiied Professional Midwives, but I can't imagine Judy will not pay the $100 fine and move on.  Other midwives have pled guitly to worse in order to stop the torture and expense.

Perhaps the Amish, who rely on non-nurse midwives like Judy, will—if reluctantly—push harder for better midwifery laws in Pennsylvania.

Judith A. Wilson, 53, of Portersville, was found not guilty by Common Pleas Judge Donald E. Machen of the most serious charges [involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment], but found guilty of practicing midwifery without a certificate. She was fined $100.

Life has not stopped for us, no more than for Judy, in these seven years, but it is very good not to have this sword dangling over our necks anymore.

Water supply is an issue in Florida.  We'd probably be a desert, like most places at our latitude, if we weren't embraced by two large bodies of water.  What's more, the water table is generally high, so it's easy to foul the nest with pollutants.  So what do we do about it?

The water is reclaimed and fixed-fee, but still a limited resource, so we use a drip irrigation system for many of our plants.  Our backyard is mostly landscaped with plants that are meant to survive on their own in Florida (i.e. what grows without help from us) and we allow the lawn out front to go dormant during the winter dry season.  When we do water the lawn, it is as much for the fertilizing properties of the reclaimed water as for the water itself.

We have more incentive to conserve potable water, since we pay per gallon, but that's harder to do.  If I were designing a house, and had no financial limitations, there would be wastewater collection systems in parallel with every drain, with an easy-to-use switch, so that relatively clean wastewater, such as shower drainage, would be reused—perhaps for flushing toilets, or for watering plants—while the nastier stuff would go directly to the city's treatment plant.  As it is, however, we must make do with simpler systems. There are a number of reasons I wish Home Depot sold Japanese toilets, one of which is the excellent system in which wastewater from handwashing helps fill the tank for the next flush.  But Home Depot doesn't, and our bathroom sinks are small enough that we haven't yet found a reasonable way (i.e. one we're willing to use on a regular basis) of recovering washing water.

The kitchen sink is another matter.  Ours is a double sink, and a Rubbermaid dishpan fits neatly into one side.  Water that is run while waiting for it to get warm (or cool) we catch in milk jugs and use for everything from watering our worms to rinsing our feet after a barefoot walk.  Handwashing and vegetable rinsing water—anything that doesn't get the water too gloppy—is collected and re-used, generally for rinsing dishes or watering plants.  If for rinsing dishes, it subsequently gets reused another time, for running the waste disposer.  We find this system easy to use, largely because our gardens are just steps away from the kitchen, and it's astonishing how much water can be saved with such a little effort.  I'm not sure how well it would have worked at other stages in our lives, but for now it is great.

Here's a perfect funding opportunity for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundatation, or anyone else who is interested in both technology and education:  Sponsor grants—available to both universities and private video game companies—for the production of really good educational games.

The first thing we'd need to ditch is the idea that entertainment and education are separable, that the one is given as a reward for making one's way through the other.  We want neither 90% entertainment and 10% education, nor the other way around, but 100% education and 100% entertainment.

Consider the possibilities in language learning, for example.  A virtual world that is a total immersion experience, in which one's character must survive by interacting with the native speakers.  Speech recognition technology is good enough that this could be both an oral and a written experience.  One could be learning culture, geography, and more in addition to language by having the virtual world be a real country.

Imagine starting the game and finding yourself in Paris.  You could explore the city, learn to use the metro, convert your dollars to euro, explore the Louvre, enjoy crêpes at a café...all the while picking up French vocabulary and grammar in the most natural way.  I WANT THIS GAME!  Don't tell me it's impossible; I know it can be done.  And I know it can be so much fun the next generation of Americans could actually grow up culturally and linguistically literate—how cool is that?

If our friend's four-year-old son can bowl a 198 in Wii Bowling, the possibilities are mind-blowing.  Yes, I know—Wii Bowling is not real bowling, and Virtual Paris would not be real Paris.  There are some true dangers that our computer models might lead us astry if we don't remember always that they are only models.  But this is too powerful a tool not to be used for good ans well as entertainment.

Tangentially related, here's an article for those like me, who think that video games and computers must be bad for the eyes.  They probably are, under the wrong circumstance, but a University of Rochester study showed they can also be used to improve vision.

People who used a video-game training program saw improvements in their contrast sensitivity, or the ability to notice subtle differences in shades of gray....The training could be beneficial to people who have amblyopia—commonly known as lazy eye—and those who have trouble seeing while driving at night.

Researchers studied two groups that played video games for 50 hours during a nine-week course. One group played action games such as "Call of Duty 2" and "Unreal Tournament 2004." Another group played non-action games such as "Sims 2," which doesn't require precise, visually guided aiming actions. People who played the action games showed enhanced contrast sensitivity compared with those in the non-action game group, with improvements ranging from 43 percent to 58 percent, according to the study.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it, and we've seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over."

Researchers suggested that the video game training's effect could last for years and could be a useful complement to other eye-correction techniques such as eyeglasses, contact lenses, or surgery. The study, which was funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research, noted that not all action games have such a benefit to the visually impaired. 

Others, I'm sure will list more exiting benefits of gaining a husband, and I'm certainly not despising companionship, children, and being able to file a joint tax return.  But it's also really, really nice to have someone around who will

• Do any work that involves heights greater than can be reached with a step stool,
• Open the pickle jar, and
• Remove the dead rat from the backyard.

The Internal Revenue Service has released tax statistics for 2006.  You can view them yourself, at the IRS site.  Having neither the time nor the mental energy to sort it all out, however, I'm glad the tax folks at J.K. Lasser have done the job already, and I'm going to take their word for it.  You are welcome to take my word for their word, if you'd like.

How rich—or poor—do you think you are?  Are you paying your fair share of taxes?  What about the other guy?  Forget, for the moment, comparison with the rest of the world—how do you compare with your fellow Americans?  Statistics are slippery things, so take these as you will.  Bear in mind, also, that the percentages given here are based on the number of income tax filers; anyone who did not file an income tax return for the year 2006 is not counted, and neither is any money made in  underground economy.  AGI = Adjusted Gross Income, Line 37 on Form 1040.

A few intereting things to note.  For simplicity, I'm using terms like "income," "taxes," and "population" loosely; remember that the statistics are for AGI, Federal income taxes, and those who file Federal income tax forms.

• Half the tax filers have an AGI of under $32,000.
• The bottom 50% earns less than 13% of the total income, while the top 1% earns 22%.
• Forty percent of all income tax revenues come from the top 1%.
• Half the population (more, when you count non-filers) pays less than 3% of the taxes.

Three diverse takes on China:

Geopolitics is based on geography and politics. Politics is built on two foundations: military and economic. The two interact and support each other but are ultimately distinct. For China, securing its buffer regions generally eliminates military problems. What problems are left for China are long-term issues concerning northeastern Manchuria and the balance of power in the Pacific.

China's geopolitical problem is economic. Its first geopolitical imperative, maintain the unity of Han China, and its third, protect the coast, are both more deeply affected by economic considerations than military ones. Its internal and external political problems flow from economics. The dramatic economic development of the last generation has been ruthlessly geographic. This development has benefited the coast and left the interior—the vast majority of Chinese—behind. It has also left China vulnerable to global economic forces that it cannot control and cannot accommodate. This is not new in Chinese history, but its usual resolution is in regionalism and the weakening of the central government. Deng's gamble is being played out by his successors. He dealt the hand. They have to play it.

The question on the table is whether the economic basis of China is a foundation or a balancing act. If the former, it can last a long time. If the latter, everyone falls down eventually. There appears to be little evidence that it is a foundation. It excludes most of the Chinese from the game, people who are making less than $100 a month. That is a balancing act and it threatens the first geopolitical imperative of China: protecting the unity of the Han Chinese.

A recent Slate article by William Saletan highlights another destabilizing factor in China:  the bitter consequences of the government's one-child policy.  Bizarrely, the author manages to find a postive twist, but he can't change the facts.

Sixteen million girls are missing in China. And now we know what happened to them: They were aborted because they weren't boys.

Worldwide, the number of boys born per 100 girls ranges from 103 to 107. (The numbers later equalize due to higher male mortality.) Among Chinese children born from 1985 to 1989, the number of boys per 100 girls was 108, close to normal. But among those born from 2000 to 2004, the number rose to 124.

[T]he boy-girl ratio escalates radically among children who were born second or third in their respective families.....For third births, the sex ratio rose to over 200 in four provinces.

Two hundred boys for every 100 girls. The number is mind-boggling.

[T]he "one-child" policy [limits] family size but allows exceptions, with variations from province to province, for couples who have only daughters. Essentially, the exceptions give you a second or, in some cases, a third chance to have a son. That's why, as couples approach the family size limit or the exception allotment, the boy-girl ratio goes up. You get the ultrasound, and if the fetus is a girl, you abort it and try again for a son.

The government...has openly expressed concerns about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for societal stability and security....The old problem was too many children. The new problem is too few girls. Without enough girls, the boys become unruly.

Finally, for a less depressing look at China, visit the Virtual Forbidden City.  I haven't downloaded it myself yet, but include it here because I hope to get to it, eventually—and because I know there are those of my readers who will immediately pull out their virtual passports.

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time is a partnership between IBM and the Palace Museum in Beijing, China....[It] is the world's first online virtual world dedicated to a country's cultural heritage. This is presented as a three-dimensional replica of the square-kilometer palace grounds called The Virtual Forbidden City. The project partners' goal was to create an experience that is as authentic as possible by being true to important Chinese principles of balance and harmony.

Rather than being an isolating virtual experience, the Virtual Forbidden City allows visitors to see and interact with each other and with a wide range of volunteers, staff, and automated characters. To welcome the broadest range of visitors, a simple, easy to use interface guides interactions with the Virtual Forbidden City. As they explore the Virtual Forbidden City, visitors can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of the Qing dynasty, or even take guided tours that uncover new insights into the stories of the Forbidden City.

The Orlando Opera Company has announced that it will be no more as of May 1.  We join with the Orlando arts community in mourning the loss, but I retain hope.  We lived through the demise, many years ago, of the Florida Symphony Orchestra, and now we have the great Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra in its place.  True, it was a long comeback, and we lost several fine musicians when the FSO closed its doors, but good music is too important to stay down for the count.

Banks are changing, newspapers are changing, and so is the nonprofit arts community....There is an audience for opera in Central Florida. We need to figure out how to serve that audience. It’s an art form that has survived for hundreds of years, and we know it will survive now.

—  Margot Knight, president and CEO of United Arts of Central Florida

Around here, we try to reuse sheets of paper that still have one good, blank side, which sometimes results in amusing or confusing combinations, as one wonders, "Is the back side of this page important?"  Or even, "Which is the operative side here?"  Yesterday I was browsing through my book of recipes—okay, my random collection of pages of all sizes and shapes stuck haphazardly in a notebook—when I came upon the recipe for "Nancy's Great Cookies."  On the back was a list of words, probably though not definitely in Heather's handwriting, which would make it quite an old list.  Although the words seemed random, I immediately realized that they were not.

I awoke this morning to e-mails from two family members, each containing a link to a video.  They seemed as unrelated as can be...until I realized that each is a powerful statement of how we underestimate the abilities of ordinary human beings—from frumpy housewives to scruffy street children.

I'll admit it:  I did not get through Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent performance dry-eyed, her triumph over the sneering judges being overlaid on some pretty deep emotional memories associated with that song.

I'm sure you're all waiting on the edges of your chairs for news about our worm farm.  I'm getting more and more excited, as they are finally beginning to make garbage disappear.  I made the mistake of thinking of this as an out-of-the-box working system:  having taken the plunge and bought the Can-o-Worms, I could no longer bear to throw away kitchen garbage.  However, this was like buying a brood of newborn chicks and expecting free-range eggs for breakfast the next morning.  After filling up and freezing two large bags of scraps, which I labelled "worm food," I gritted my teeth and returned to former disposal habits. The worms are settling in, eating their plenteous coir fiber introductory bedding, and growing.  For now, they are teenagers without teenage appetites.  A fully mature system should be able to handle five to eight pounds of waste per week, but for now I must be patient.

Is anyone else as frustrated as I am with Word's so-called Title Case (called "Capitalize Each Word" in Word 2007)?  I haven't actually found any use for that option; in general, only the more important words of a title should begin with uppercase letters.

But ta-da!  The Internet comes to the rescue, again.  Allen Wyatt's WordTips has a macro that will do what is needed.  Here it is, modified slightly—I added "an" and "and" to the list of words that should not be capitalized, and removed "is"; I was taught that all verbs, even small ones, are important enough to be capitalized.  It's easy to change the list to suit your needs, and I may modify it further through time.  If the excluded words occur at the beginning of the title, they are left in uppercase.

Sub TitleCase()
    Dim lclist As String
    Dim wrd As Integer
    Dim sTest As String

    ' list of lowercase words, surrounded by spaces
    lclist = " a an as and at but by for from in into nor of or the this to with "

    Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord

    For wrd = 2 To Selection.Range.Words.Count
        sTest = Trim(Selection.Range.Words(wrd))
        sTest = " " & LCase(sTest) & " "
        If InStr(lclist, sTest) Then
            Selection.Range.Words(wrd).Case = wdLowerCase
        End If
    Next wrd
End Sub

I'm no Word macro expert, but found this easy to install in Word 2007.   On the View tab, click the arrow under Macros.  Choose View Macros, then change the macro name to "TitleCase" (without the quotes) and click Create.  Visual Basic opens up with your macros, including one at the end for TitleCase.  Replace the rather empty text there—from "Sub Titlecase ()" through "End Sub"—with the macro above.  I added a button for the TitleCase macro to my Quick Access Toolbar, and now it's ready whenever I want it.

SFSignal asked of several present-day science fiction writers, "What non-sf/fantasy books would you recommend to someone whose reading was predominantly in sf/fantasy?"  I found the responses notable for two reasons:

One of the respondents was John Kessel, whom I remember from the Science Fiction Society of the University of Rochester.  (I remember him as Jack, rather than John, but that could be either a no-longer-used nickname, or my own faulty memory.  In any case I'm sure it's the same person.)  Although an avid SF fan for much of my early life, I've been away from the genre for a long time and have read none of Kessel's books, but it was a pleasure to see that he succeeded in turning an avocation into a vocation.

[I]t is a common experience to come across readers, especially readers of the generation after mine, who have read science fiction and fantasy so exclusively that they do not know what it is that they are reading. For them, the book is taken out of context, and is not part of that great conversation where the books of one generation speak to the books of another. The reading of the science-fiction-only reader becomes insular, and he does not recognize what he is reading. This kind of reader is the kind who thinks the trite ideas of Kurt Vonnegut are profound, merely because he has not come across them before in mainstream books, and (more to the point) has never come across the rebuttals. With fantasy the insularity is even worse: the fantasy reader who has not read the original ancient epic poems of which modern fantasy is merely a variation or imitation runs the risk of being unduly impressed with a watered-down and modernized version of a rich and ancient literary tradition.

1. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. These are the seminal works of which all successive Western literature merely forms a footnote. The fantastic elements, gods and monsters, curses and destinies and princes in disguise, the fall of mighty cities in the ruin of war, and all which form the backbone of modern fantasy, are present in their original forms here. These elements here serve a strong literary purpose usually absent from a tale of wonder.
2. The Aeneid of Virgil. The Roman poet and magician Virgil had a sense of history absent from blind Homer: his hero served a fate that would shape the world. It would be difficult to read about Conan of Cimmeria, Gandalf the White, Jommy Cross, Michael Valentine Smith, Paul Atriedes , or Ender Wiggins without an appreciation of the archetypical tale of a hero's journey, from the destruction of Troy, across cursed and monster-haunted seas, to the underworld and back again, through Punic love and Palatine wars.
3. Various Greek tragedies: Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound; Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone; Euripides: Hippolytus, Bacchae. These are the mighty and majestic writings of which modern fantastic literature is at best a variation on a theme, or, at worst, merely a pale imitation. One could make the argument that all science fiction follows in the footsteps of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (indeed, this is the gist of the argument made by Brian Aldiss). Frankenstein, also known as Prometheus Unbound, is a riff or reversal of Prometheus Bound. With apologies to classical scholars, I will not recommend any Greek Comedies: their influence on successive generations have been minimal.
4. The Biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Chronicles, Kings, Psalms, Job. A reader would be grossly uninformed not recognize the overwhelming impact the Biblical writings have had, not merely on the religion of Europe, but upon the literature. The basic difference between Greek and Biblical epics can be seen in the contrast between Oedipus and Jacob, or between King David and Prince Orestes. The ancient Greek cannot escape his fate; the ancient Jew can repent and choose again. No Greek hero would have spared King Saul when finding him asleep in a cave, as David did, for example.
5. The Peloponnesian War of Thucydides. There is no point in reading or writing military SF if you do not have an idea of why battles are fought. No writer has ever been clearer on the causes of war. Merely reading Starship Troopers is not going to tell you what the military is all about.
6. Paradise Lost of Milton. The Puritan poet pre-empts the entire field of English epic poetry in this work, and he suborns the motifs and tropes of Homer and Virgil, reversing the role of heroics to display the difference between Christian and Pagan themes. The modern world view which you, dear reader, have absorbed with your mother's milk, has been influenced, like it or not, by these themes, so you might as well know whence they come.
7. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. The Modern SF tale is a variation of the traveler's tales of old, a genre that Swift expropriates for his own didactic and satiric purposes. Merely reading Stranger in a Strange Land is not going to tell you what satire is all about.
8. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This is the original for Asimov's Foundation, and is one of the books that founded the literature of history. At the same time, I might also recommend some of the historical novels of Alfred Duggan, such as Knight with Armor or Little Emporers. I have read far too many fantasy novels by writers whose knowledge of the Middle Ages comes from playing Dungeons and Dragons, and a little bit of realism comes in handy.
9. Plato's Timaeus and Critias. The origin of the Atlantis story. Also, the first attempt to use fiction as a vehicle for presenting a political theory.
10. Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia. All Utopian and Dystopian SF springs from this fountain. It makes for interesting reading, since what is being described is a Puritan, and not a Communist, communism.
11. Plutarch's Lives, especially : "Caesar," "Cato the Younger," "Antony," "Brutus."
12. Dante's Divine Comedy. This is what Niven and Pournelle were copying in their Inferno.
13. Tolstoy's War and Peace. Obviously.
14. Mallory's Le Mort d'Arthur. Modern fantasy should know its roots.
15. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Again, modern fantasy should know its roots.
16. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is good practice learning how to read and to write a good book. Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is the germ from which endless SFF stories of time travel, first contact, and high-tech meets low-tech derive.
17. Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar and various Sonnets. If you have not read the Bard, you are a Philistine.

I cannot end the list without giving honorable mention to Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, and Napoleon of Notting Hill by the same author. These are not science fiction, but they pass close enough that our watchmen on the boundaries can see them plain without a spyglass. Napoleon of Notting Hill, by no coincidence, takes place in the year 1984. In both these books we see some of the conventions and assumptions common to science fiction turned on their head to comical, and even philosophical, effect. (For example, the opening line of Notting Hill contains what could be a warning for science fiction writers: The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at one of the games called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.)

The reason why it is important to have a grounding in these great books, whose fame will never pass away...is that perspective matters....The modern reader who reads modern books by authors who only read modern books runs the risk of merely accepting the assumptions of the modern age without examining or questioning them. Since we live in an age particularly addicted to narrative propaganda fastidiously divorced from reality or reason, this danger is not harmless.

An unexamined idea is not worth having! (This is an idea of mine I have always accepted without question.)

Like the Internet itself, YouTube reveals the secrets you thought you'd left far behind you.  Even when they're not secrets.

Looking back at my Lenten disciplines for 2009, I find it was a surprising exercise.  While I can't say I was perfect in keeping them, two worked so well I intend to continue the practices.

The computer goes off at 9:00 every night.   When I stick to a 10 p.m. bedtime, my life goes much better, but that's not always easy, especially when I'm in the middle of a project and "just one more thing" can lead to midnight or beyond.  Not only are most of my projects computer-oriented, but for some reason computing is one of those areas where I blink and two hours have passed. If I get nothing else from this discipline, at least I'll be better rested.

I'll spend between a half hour and an hour reading each day.  Preferably the longer time, though I haven't managed it yet.  I know; that's hardly a sacrifice.  But I've noticed that over the last several years my reading has become even more fractured and fragmented than it was when I had small children at home, if that were possible.  I read blogs, articles, and news stories online; I listen to audio books in the car as I run errands, I skim magazines.  I read books in five-minute gulps as I can throughout the day—on visits to the "reading room," while eating, while falling asleep at night.  What I'm missing is concentrated time on a single, book-length topic, and I have a very large stack of quality books—many recently purchased and one overdue at the library—on which the derivative of my progress is negative.  I'm hoping that a short, but consistent, dedicated time will reverse the trend.

Finding concentrated reading time during the day was more difficult than I had hoped, but turning off the computer an hour before bedtime led naturally to reading afterwards.  It was especially enjoyable because Porter often joined me.  I finished G. K. Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils (oops, not reviewed yet) and made good headway on Thomas Dubay's Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer.  I'm almost halfway through that one, and without the Discipline I quite likely would have set it aside, as it is more difficult and less inspiring than I had hoped.

It was Discipline 2 that was most revealing.

I'm giving up reading and/or working puzzles while I eat.  Most of you will find this odd, but it is a real sacrifice for me.  I agree wholeheartedly with C. S. Lewis, who said, "Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably." There's no reason not to combine them; I'm doing this because it's a great pleasure I can dispense with for 40 days as an exercise in self-denial, without troubling anyone else or falling terribly behind in my work.  Exception:  Porter and I sometimes do puzzles together during meals; for obvious reasons I'm not abstaining from them.

This was unbelievably hard, and the strength with which I resisited it tells me I've hit an area in my life that needs work.  Whenever I had food or drink in front of me, I cried out, body and soul, for a book or a puzzle—as an addict must cry out for drugs.  It's amazing how many ways I devised to cheat:  working on the computer I justified if I didn't let myself read articles, blogs, or e-mails; going through my Penzeys catalogue needed to be done so I could place an order, even though it involved reading the spice descriptions; we watched movies during dinner; I would clean the refrigerator while eating, organize the cupboards while eating...anything but sit-down-and-eat-and-nothing-else.  Such a waste of time to do nothing else!  Once I even caught myself adding words to my crossword puzzle between bites, because, after all, I wasn't actually eating when I put pencil to paper.  It was easier when I had someone else to eat with; alone, I was miserable, until I finally discovered I could diminish the craving by taking my meal onto the back porch and enjoying the lovely spring weather.  Even then I couldn't stop Li'l Writer Guy from working—that's going to require an intense course in meditation techniques, I suspect.  I lived for Sundays:  On the Sabbaths I released myself from this Discipline—though I usually continued the others.

I could probably lose 30 pounds by forcing myself to do nothing but eat when I am eating.  I'm thinking of marketing the Full Attention Diet.  ("Fad diets are not the answer to your weight problems—FAD is!")  The rules are simple.

• Eat whatever you want, whenever you want.
• While you are eating, do nothing else.  No reading, no watching TV, no working, no walking around—just eating.  The only exception is for mealtime conversation, with which nothing should be allowed to interfere.  You may eat while listening attentively to what other people have to say.  (It goes without saying that you don't eat when you are the one talking.)
• Don't eat mechanically; take time to enjoy the flavors and textures of your food. This should be easy, since you'll have nothing else to do.
• Give yourself time between meals to enjoy the other pleasures that you normally associate with eating, so you won't be tempted to view mealtime as the only time you have for them...and to keep eating so you can keep reading....
• Brush your teeth after every time you eat.  The reason for this last rule is to minimize the read-between-bites syndrome.  Trust me; if there's a loophole, I'll make use of it.

Free-Range Kids.  I've only begun to explore Lenore Skenazy's site, but I like the premise, and it goes well with this cartoon.  Skenazy found herself plunged into controversy after whe wrote a column for The New York Sun entitled, Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.

I started this site for anyone who thinks that kids need a little more freedom and would like to connect to people who feel the same way.  We are not daredevils. We believe in life jackets and bike helmets and air bags. But we also believe in independence.  Children, like chickens, deserve a life outside the cage. The overprotected life is stunting and stifling, not to mention boring for all concerned.  So here’s to Free Range Kids, raised by Free Range Parents willing to take some heat. I hope this web site encourages us all to think outside the house.

George F. Will's What Fear of Liability Has Wrought has unfortunately not gone out of date.

Called to a Florida school that could not cope, police led the disorderly student away in handcuffs, all 40 pounds of her 5-year-old self....No official at the...school would put a restraining arm around the misbehaving child lest he or she be sued, as a young member of Teach for America was...because the teacher put a hand on the back of a turbulent seventh-grader to direct him to leave the classroom.

In Indiana, a boy did what boys [and girls, I might add] do: He went down a slide head first—and broke his femur. The school district was sued for inadequate supervision.

A volunteer for a Catholic charity in Milwaukee ran a red light and seriously injured another person. Because the volunteer did not have deep pockets, the injured person sued the archdiocese—successfully, for $17 million.

The warning label on a five-inch fishing lure with a three-pronged hook says, "Harmful if swallowed"; the label on a letter opener says, "Safety goggles recommended."

The thread connecting such lunacies is a fear permeating American life. It is, alas, a sensible fear arising from America's increasingly perverse legal culture that is the subject of what surely will be 2009's most needed book on public affairs—[attorney Philip] Howard's Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law.

Time was, rights were defensive. They were to prevent government from doing things to you. Today, rights increasingly are offensive weapons wielded to inflict demands on other people, using state power for private aggrandizement. The multiplication of rights, each lacking limiting principles, multiplies nonnegotiable conflicts.

But in such a society, dazed by what Howard calls "rule stupor" and victimized by litigious "victims," the incentives are for intensified complaining. Read Howard's book, and weep for the death of common sense.

Babies Know:  A Little Dirt Is Good for You, from Jane E. Brody in The New York Times.  Handwashing is a good thing, especially after using the bathroom, before preparing food, and during the time in our church service between the Peace, in which we've shaken hands with anyone and everyone we can reach, and the Eucharist, in which the bread is placed in those same hands and tranferred directly to our mouths.  Nonetheless, I agree that the germ-free life, like the risk-free life decried above, is unheathy, especially for our children.

In studies of what is called the hygiene hypothesis, researchers are concluding that organisms like the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with “dirt” spur the development of a healthy immune system. Several continuing studies suggest that worms may help to redirect an immune system that has gone awry and resulted in autoimmune disorders, allergies and asthma.

“What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment,” Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, “Why Dirt Is Good” (Kaplan). “Not only does this allow for ‘practice’ of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.”

“Children raised in an ultraclean environment,” [said Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston], “are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.”

Studies he has conducted with Dr. David Elliott, a gastroenterologist and immunologist at the University of Iowa, indicate that intestinal worms, which have been all but eliminated in developed countries, are “likely to be the biggest player” in regulating the immune system to respond appropriately, Dr. Elliott said in an interview. He added that bacterial and viral infections seem to influence the immune system in the same way, but not as forcefully.

Most worms are harmless, especially in well-nourished people, Dr. Weinstock said.

Dr. Ruebush deplores the current fetish for the hundreds of antibacterial products that convey a false sense of security and may actually foster the development of antibiotic-resistant, disease-causing bacteria. Plain soap and water are all that are needed to become clean, she noted.

“I certainly recommend washing your hands after using the bathroom, before eating, after changing a diaper, before and after handling food,” and whenever they’re visibly soiled, she wrote. When no running water is available and cleaning hands is essential, she suggests an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Dr. Weinstock goes even further. “Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat,” he said. He and Dr. Elliott pointed out that children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Also helpful, he said, is to “let kids have two dogs and a cat,” which will expose them to intestinal worms that can promote a healthy immune system.

Thanks to Percival Blakeney Academy for publicising Southern Utah University communicatio major Jeffrey Wilbur's direct and pithy denunciation of restrictive "free speech zones."  (Brilliant, even if he did exclude Alaska and Hawaii.)

In light of SUU officials [sic] plan to designate "Free Speech Zones" on campus, I thought I'd offer my assistance. Grab a map. OK, ready?

All right, you see that big area between Canada and Mexico, surrounded by lots of blue ink on the East and West? You see it?

There's your bloody Free Speech Zone.

Once again I wonder why people can't make their points without resorting to offensive language, but as a great deal of blood was spilled to put the First Amendment into effect, perhaps it's appropriate.

(I'll be including some links in this post, but follow them with care if you think there's a chance you'll want to watch the movies, as they contain spoilers.)

Our church periodically holds "communication" classes, mostly designed for couples, although the tools and techniques we discuss are applicable for all relationships, so I wish it was more widely advertised.  Be that as it may, most of us find ourselves signing up again and again, not so much for the content as for an excuse and a framework for spending time together.

Why did I like the movie?  First of all, it must be admitted, because it wasn't as bad as I had expected.  I've seen my share of church-produced films and low-budget, Sunday school fare, and most of them are so poorly made they're embarrassing.  As the film progressed, however, I grudgingly moved from "not so bad" to "riveting, gripping, and amazing."  No, it's not perfect, and neither is Facing the Giants, and there are one or two awkwardly-done "preachy" moments.  But overall, both are believable, delightful stories.  It's true that events and changes happen more quickly and easily than in real life, but this is a common dramatic device and requires no more of a willing suspension of disbelief than most movie and television fare.  And unlike most movie and television fare, the characters are recognizable, more like people I know than the characters I usually see on the screen.

Movie critics, and no doubt many veteran movie-watchers, will fault these films for their positive attitudes.  "Unrealistic," they would say.  This pervasive, modern viewpoint was described (and decried) well enough over 50 years ago by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters; here one tempter is explaining to another how to use it to his advantage:

The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are "real," while the spiritual elements are "subjective"; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist.  Thus in birth the blood and pain are "real," the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death "really means."  The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"—in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association.  Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments….Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.

What is truly unbelievable is how these movies were made.  Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who between the two of them cover the writer, producer, director, and some of the actor positions, are pastors at a Baptist Church in Georgia.  The instrumental scores were written by the church's music director.  While there were a few professionals involved, nearly all the work—including most of the acting roles—was done by church volunteers.  The budget for Facing the Giants (2006) was only $100,000, and for Fireproof (2008) $500,000.  For comparison, The Chronicles of Narnia:  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had a U.S. budget of $180 million, Star Wars Episode III:  Revenge of the Sith (2005) $113 million, Gone with the Wind (1939) 3.9 million. Granted, Facing the Giants is nowhere near Revenge of the Sith in quality, nor does it pretend to be—but on the other hand the latter is nowhere near 1000 times better.  I'm not knocking the value of professionals, but I am blown away by what can be accomplished by volunteers.  It was that good.

A brilliant student, Marcus sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Marcus puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Marcus suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Marcus (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

My own conclusion is that children who meet no challenge in their early schoolwork miss the opportunity to struggle early in life, when they are best able to learn from the experience. Eventually, even the most intelligent person will encounter a problem that does not admit of easy solution.  An average student will learn while still very young that answers aren't handed to him, but must be wrested from the universe with much study and effort.  The gifted student may not encounter this harsh reality until college or graduate school, when his approach to learning and problem-solving is already well established and may be difficult or impossible to change.  Hence my frustration with the American educational system, which in the main deprives young, smart children of the opportunities they need to develop one of life's most essential skills:  perseverence in the face of difficulty.

The article suggests another dimension to the problem, and what's better, an approach to counteracting it.  "Helpless" students have a fixed mind-set about intelligence, viewing it as something inborn and generally unchangeable.  "Mastery-oriented" students believe intelligence is malleable, and have what the authors call a growth mind-set.  Unfortunately, telling our children that they are smart, and allowing them to be labelled as "gifted and talented," encourages the former view.  We would do well, instead, to praise them for hard work and persistence, and emphasize to them that the brain, like a muscle, grows with exercise.

[M]ore than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

[C]hildren...who coast through the early grades [in school] under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted....hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

The students with a stagnant view of intelligence were presumably unwilling to admit to their deficit and thus passed up the opportunity to correct it.

Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of personal relationships as well, through people’s willingness—or unwillingness—to deal with difficulties. Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their relationships and to try to solve them....After all, if you think that human personality traits are more or less fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile. Individuals who believe people can change and grow, however, are more confident that confronting concerns in their relationships will lead to resolutions.

How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about math geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up a child by telling him  or her how brilliant and talented he or she is, our research suggests that this is misguided.

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, [we] gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their effort: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.”  We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.

[Some colleagues and I] recently designed an eight-session workshop for 91 students whose math grades were declining in their first year of junior high. Forty-eight of the students received instruction in study skills only, whereas the others attended a combination of study skills sessions and classes in which they learned about the growth mind-set and how to apply it to schoolwork.

In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”

As the semester progressed, the math grades of the kids who learned only study skills continued to decline, whereas those of the students given the growth-mind-set training stopped falling and began to bounce back to their former levels.

Teaching children such information is not just a ploy to get them to study. People do differ in intelligence, talent and ability. And yet research is converging on the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what we call genius, is typically the result of years of passion and dedication and not something that flows naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort.

There is a place for what used to be called salty language in our discourse.  As a seasoning, however, it is more like Dave's Insanity Sauce, and the extent to which it is poured out today only proves that our societal tastebuds have been destroyed.  Why can't people—especially intelligent, articulate people—communicate without being offensive?

I do not share Kunstler's distain of suburbia.  I approve of yards (back and front) where children can play without constant supervision and where families can grow their own fruits, vegetables, and flowers (and even, in the right neighborhoods, their own chickens); of quiet streets where neighbors walk and chat after dinner while their children organize kickball games; of tiny wild places where birds and small animals can prosper.  If this is not everyone's view of suburbia, it is the suburbia in which I grew up, and I will not have it tarred with the brush of scorn.

Also I wonder about his approval of stores built to the sidewalk's edge.  When we moved from Florida to Massachusetts I remember feeling quite claustrophobic for just that reason, as if the buildings were crowding and jostling me more than my fellow pedestrians.  With that exception, I can see the appeal of his approach to urban planning, especially in contrast to the sterility of blank walls and parking lots.

Green is as green does.

[Quoting Desperate (Green) Housewives] The greenest people are totally unhip and unlikely to be photographed for the Times or a glossy magazine. They’re still wearing their clothes from twenty years ago. They aren’t keeping their home spa-worthy clean. No need to worry about polluting the air with chemicals, if you aren’t dusting every five minutes. They aren’t constantly renovating their kitchens and bathrooms, all of which uses enormous amounts of energy and resources; they are still living with the Formica numbers from the 70s. They aren’t jetting off to Europe to browse the Paris markets; they go bowling in the next town over. They aren’t constantly shopping for new things and tossing out the old things.

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Did anyone else grow up with that phrase hanging around their living environment—as counsel, as a warning, as a reprimand? I did. We sure didn’t live it as well as we might have, but still, I heard it recited often enough, from my parents and grandparents and church leaders and others, to accept it as the Gospel truth, long before I read any of the philosophy or politics or economics that persuaded me of its correctness on their own. Basically, the message is that the way to prosperity and happiness—at least insofar as the material world is concerned—is to live conservatively and renounce extravagance and stick with what you have and know.

[R]eal environmentalism begins with “tending to” our environment, rather than upgrading it or ourselves in the name of continual betterment, and supporting those moral causes and political campaigns that are actually trying to make tending to our families and jobs and neighborhoods more possible, rather than selling us on constantly retraining and retrofitting ourselves and our world.

Sons of Liberty, 2009

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting of Kansas secessionists. The participants were rowdy, complaining of economic gigantism squashing them flat and bureaucratic thugs hounding their every move. They were all sick and tired of worker-ant existence in the hive-mind of American groupthink and they wanted out....Kansas patriots fomenting disunion? No, though there are a few of those kicking around these parts. These were local farmers organizing a farmer’s market....[T]he Spirit of ‘76 showed up in force. Damned were the federal busy-bodies who tell local farmers what they can and can’t sell; condemned were the centralized agents of agri-business who want ID chips implanted in livestock; mocked were the credentialed witch-doctors from the department of agriculture who own the brand “organic.”

All that was left undone was a patriotic march to the local Enormo-Mart to dump the limp and faded out-of-season tomatoes imported from South America into the local pond (which isn’t quite Boston Harbor, but it would have served). And while there was no Declaration, it was clear that these small growers wanted out–out of forced participation in the economic union of cheap mass production, central planning, credit money, and the ignorant consumerism they despised.

[Author Michael] Pollan issues this simple dictate: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The harping of a food-scold?  Perhaps. But Pollan fleshes his commandment out well, especially the first third. By “eat food” Pollan actually has in mind something quite revolutionary, because you can’t buy “food” most places. Walk into your local Mega-lo-Mart and what you see is not food—it’s processed corn syrup and assorted chemicals and “nutrients” packaged in plastic and shot so full of preservatives it will never rot.

Food rots. If it doesn’t rot, it’s not food. That’s a good principle to live by.

[S]elf-provisioning is dirty work done by sun hardened men who obtain...membership in the rarefied league of freemen who can pretty much tell anyone and everyone, as circumstances may require, to go to hell without concern for the consequences (taxman excepted). That’s the feed store definition of freedom in Jefferson County, Kansas, though it’s not taught much in social studies textbooks. Only such men—rich or poor, barber or builder, clodhopper or shopkeeper—know true equality, for they know and honor the true measure of the other....[T]he food problem in this country described and catalogued so aptly by Pollan is ultimately a symptom of the much more disturbing problem: that the league of freemen has dwindled to near extinction.  The important questions start not with what we eat but with who we are.

Where does Stephanie find these things?  I'm four days late but have to share this anyway.  If their country is no longer quite as pristine as when I visited 40 years ago, it's not the fault of these intrepid and dedicated Swiss!

I know—the last thing you need is another blog to read!  And the one I’m about to recommend had several authors and consequently great risk of overwhelming your feed reader.  Especially since nearly all the posts are thought-provoking and well-written.

The Front Porch Republic is new—the first posts were on March 2 of this year—but has already produced so many shareable articles that it deserves its own post.  Treat yourself and subscribe to the Front Porch Republic; they have a Comments RSS feed as well, though I can’t usually keep up with it.  A mark of the quality of this blog (and its readers) is that the comments are so far above the “Your a &%$#& moron!” level seen all too often on websites without benefit of sufficient editorial oversight.

Knowing that most of you would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of meaty reading available there, however, I will continue my practice of sharing excerpts.  Here are a few by way of introduction:

Architecture matters.  I knew I missed our front porch; now I know why.  It’s a much easier way to interact with the neighbors than cleaning up after a hurricane.

[In his essay, “From Porch to Patio,” Richard Thomas] explores the social implications of the architectural practice of building porches on the front of homes and its eventual abandonment in favor of patios behind the house…. As with any central feature in our built environment, this is more than merely a passing fashion trend or a meaningless design change:  the transition from porch to patio was one of the clearest and significant manifestations the physical change from a society concerned with the relationship of private and public things—in the Latin, res publica—to one of increasing privacy.  The porch, as a physical bridge between the private realm of the house and the public domain of the street and sidewalk, was the literal intermediate space between two worlds that have been increasingly separated in our time, and hence increasingly ungoverned in both forms.

Why entrepreneurs, the self-employed, family farms, small businesses, and craftsmen are the bellwethers of liberty.

In 1913…Hilaire Belloc looked forward and anticipated our moment. He argued that what we today call corporate capitalism was fundamentally unstable and would eventually cease to exist.

The instability would be caused by the slow but inexorable concentration of property into fewer and fewer hands. As property became concentrated, power also would become concentrated, and concentrated power is a threat to the state unless, of course, it is co-opted by the state. Furthermore, as property became concentrated, the security of individuals would be threatened. People would find themselves in the precarious situation of living paycheck-to-paycheck. Because they possess no capital, they would not be able to provide for themselves in the way that a small farmer or craftsman could. They would be completely dependent upon their wages, and when economic crisis struck and wages were threatened, the insecurity of their situation would become acute. In such a time, it is not hard to image the people clamoring for a solution, rejoicing over a new kind of leader who promises change, if only he is empowered. Yes we can.

According to Belloc, the most obvious solution to this economic instability, the path of least resistance, is the acquisition by the state of the major economic interests, e.g. collectivization. This is sometimes called socialism, and, according to Belloc, it is the most natural course. But socialism is not benign or even honest, for the collectivization of property under the authority of the state results not in a more just society but one characterized by glaring inequalities and the loss of freedom for most. As Belloc puts it, “in the very act of collectivism, what results is not collectivism at all, but the servitude of the many, and the confirmation in their present privilege of the few; that is, the servile state.”

The unlikely alternative is what Belloc calls the “distributist state.” It is characterized by widely distributed private property so that the general character of the society is shaped by individual property owners. By “property” Belloc means “capital.” That is, property that can be used to make a living. When a critical mass of citizens possesses capital and are therefore economically independent, a stable situation exists. According to Belloc, private property is the only means of achieving security with freedom. Collectivization does, in fact, provide security. The price, though, is freedom.

The choices are stark. The Obama administration likely will continue to seek ways to nationalize the economy unless and until the American people rise up and demand a different direction. Do we even remember this better way? Can we imagine a world of free men and women who own real property and do not look to the state for happiness or economic security?

From a related post:

Here we can see the curious state of affairs in our waning republic: Democrats tend to be suspicious of big business but they trust big government to rein in abuses; Republicans express suspicion of big government but no fear of economic centralization. Both are half right but half blind. Here is a principle that we would do well to grasp: concentrations of power in any form are a threat to liberty. It may be too late for this generation to see this vital truth, or if seeing, to do anything about it. But nothing is inevitable, and there are hopeful signs that people are beginning to think seriously about the importance of localism, human scale, limits, and stewardship, the very things woefully lacking in the current spending orgy. While a return to these ideals is still only in its infancy, change is afoot. This represents a glimmer of sanity in a world succumbing to the apparent security promised by centralization.

Tobacco farming and community life.  My antipathy towards tobacco products is well-known, and I thought Barbara Kingsolver inexplicably inconsistent when in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle she decried our unhealthy farming practices yet bemoaned the loss of small tobacco farms.  I still can’t rationalize subsidizing such an unhealthy crop, but here’s another side to the story.

[E]very community must be bound together by something it shares—and for the ties to bind strongly there need to be several somethings.  Here in Henry County, when everyone used to raise tobacco, everyone had the crop’s seasons and its demands in common.

My state is one of the few that still has a good number of small farms, and for years here tobacco was the mortgage crop.  It made keeping those small farms possible for many families, and it was a vital part of a farmer’s mixed use of his land.  The federal tobacco program and the Burley Tobacco Growers’ Co-op acted as a brake for the small farmer on the pitilessness of the international market….Today farmers here and in the several burley-growing states are free from any buttressing power between the small growers and the supranational tobacco companies that buy their crop.  They are free to contract with the companies directly (and typically do, as otherwise there is no guarantee their crop will sell), and in one of those rhetorical equalities that is so unequal in fact, the companies are likewise free to set the price and limit the production, in a world market in which it is cheaper, of course, to grow tobacco in Brazil.

But my point is not only that farmers in my area have lost a good source of revenue.  We’ve also lost a shared experience intimately tied to this place in which we live.  Tobacco gave us something in common…tobacco was our common language…. [I]f the weather for curing was wet, everyone waited.  If blue mold hit the county, everyone compared their losses.  And everyone had a near-disaster story from working high in the rafters of the barn, to be retold every fall.

[W]ith the end of the program, most of us took the buyout and quit.  The relative few farmers who still grow tobacco grow significantly larger crops now, which is a different sort of operation.  People were growing something like two to twelve acres; now farmers often grow forty, or eighty, or even more.  This is factory farming, and there is no way a family can manage it alone.  There is too much to cut all at once, and hang all at once; it requires jobbed-in crews of migrant labor.  Raising a few acres of tobacco was good and satisfying work….Toiling under the pressure of eighty must be something else.

So it is that here in Henry County we have lost the bond that tobacco gave, and one important part of our shared history is only history.  And at times of real disagreement….we find we have fewer acres of common ground.

(My personal favorite tobacco farm is not in Kentucky, but Virginia.  The Claude Moore Colonial Farm lives in a time warp—1771—and raises tobacco along with other heirloom crops and livestock.)

The Front Porch Republic—I’m reserving a rocking chair, as I plan to be a frequent visitor.

Observant readers may have noted a new category of post, which I’ve labelled “Conservationist Living.”  When considering a title for this particular type of post, my first thought was “Green Living,” but that’s too trendy and not really what I mean.

I was born and raised a conservationist.  I’m not sure what people might mean by that label today, but in my family it meant someone who loved the world of nature, cared for it, and used it prudently and wisely.  Conservationists loved hiking, mountain climbing, camping, and picnics.  They never threw litter on the ground and didn’t waste water.  They knew the rules of the wilderness: how to build a safe fire, pitch a tent on dry ground, keep food out of the reach of bears, dig a latrine that would not pollute the water supply, and leave.  At a conservationist’s home one was likely to find a lovingly-tended garden, with bright flowers and the best-tasting vegetables in the world—and a compost pile.

The conservationist label was broad and inclusive.  If I dared curse hunters—because the coming of hunting season meant we couldn’t hike during some of the most beautiful weather of the year, and anyway how could they kill those darling deer—I was quickly reminded that the hunters and fishermen were some of the most ardent protectors of nature because they had a personal interest in the survival and health of wilderness areas, and anyway the deer they killed provided their dinners, just as cattle were killed to supply my Saturday-night hamburgers.  When I grumbled that the rest of the state was controlled by voters in New York City whose concerns were far different from ours, I was informed that it was the votes of those city dwellers against the interests of Upstate developers that had protected our beloved Adirondack Mountains.  Conservationism had a common-sense, “we’re all in this together” feeling about it.

Not so the environmentalism that superseded it.  Environmentalism’s strident tone and us-against-them attitude was possibly the impetus needed to accomplish quickly what conservationism was achieving slowly—perhaps too slowly.  But it also opened the door to backlash, to the polarization that had some people celebrating the recent Earth Hour by turning off their lights and other electrical devices, and others marking the occasion by consuming as much power as possible.  While conservationism easily crossed the Liberal/Conservative divide, environmentalism widened the gap to a chasm.

Hence my wish to return to what I see as a friendlier, more inclusive and constructive label.  We are all in this together.  What I post in this category will include conservationist suggestions gleaned from elsewhere as well as our own very modest attempts to live and promote that common-sense conservationism of my childhood.  There will be no preaching—at least none intended as such—because we all can’t do everything, certainly not in all stages of our lives.  But we can all do something, and encourage each other along the way.

I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. — Edward Everett Hale

Today at the grocery store I bought sugar.  This is not a confession; I refuse to feel guilty for the purchase.  After all, displayed prominently on the package was this warm-and-fuzzy logo:

Keep Meadows, Not Lawns.  That's the title of a Front Porch Republic post (more on the FPR later), the sole content of which is this 16-minute video:

I have nothing against lawns, per se.  We had a large yard when I was growing up, and its lawn was the perfect surface for our volleyball, croquet, and touch football games, for whiffle-ball hitting contests, picnics, tumbling runs, tag, and running through the sprinkler on a hot summer afternoon.  We didn't baby our lawn, though:  aside from mowing in the summer and clearing of leaves in the autumn it received minimal attention, but it grew tough and we grew up thinking dandelions were a positive addition to the landscape.  That said, we do need to rethink our use of the land, and the resources it costs to keep the now-common sterile, pristine, perfect lawn. Let's not overlook the fact that meadows don't require mowing, except for use as baseball fields—and for that even a teenage boy might crank up the lawnmower without being asked.

Declining by Degrees:  Higher Education at Risk premiered on PBS in 2005; I watched it for the first time this week, intrigued by this Netflix summary.

Debunking commonly held notions about the rite of passage known as the college experience, this PBS documentary follows 30 students and their teachers along the path of higher education, from admission to graduation, and exposes the disappointment, disorientation and deflation many students feel—in both public and private schools. This revealing study also addresses the quality and readiness of America's future work force.

"Disappointment, disorientation, and deflation" fairly describes how I felt watching the show.  Here's what I learned:

• A college degree is absolutely necessary for anyone to get into and stay in the American middle class.
• Administrators, and consequently professors, are under great pressure to retain students; it is very difficult to fail.
• Grade inflation is rampant; only an extraordinarily terrible performance will get you a C.
• Many classes are huge, and often taught by graduate students or part-time faculty.
• Professors are rewarded for research and publication, not teaching.
• Whether because they need their time for research or for working several part-time positions, professors resort to true/false and multiple-choice exams, and assign few papers, essays, or anything else that requires much time to grade.
• Students have discovered that they can "sleepwalk" through college, doing just enough to get by, and still receive the degree that is the reason their parents sent them to college.
• Hence they have plenty of time for the real reason they're in college:  to party.  To get drunk, to get high, to indulge in as many fleshly temptations as possible.  "I don't want to be 40 or 50 years old," one student proclaimed, "and saying, 'I wish I had partied then, because I can't now.'"
• Other students are holding down full time jobs while attempting to attend school full time.  Like the partiers, they are ruining their health while gaining little from their classes.
• There is an unspoken agreement between professors and students, each to help the other "get by":  You don't expect much of me, and I won't expect much of you.
• Students whose lives have been bounded by home and high school quickly become lost in a world of little oversight, no restrictions, no rules, great freedom, and low expectations.
• Professors are demoralized by students who come to college without the needed skills and habits, who can't think, don't work, don't pay attention, don't respond, don't show up, don't care.
• Employers, who control the jobs for which most students are purchasing their degrees, are increasingly complaining to the colleges that the graduates come to them ill-prepared and under-educated.
• The cost of a college education has risen out of sight, and most students—or their parents—come out of the ordeal with a massive debt load.
• This is the sad situation with respect to our state schools.  The small minority of fortunate students who can afford $40,000/year attend private schools where classes are small and interesting, professors care about and work individually with their students, and their fellow-students are bright and devoted to intellectual pursuits.  [I do hope no one was drinking a hot beverage while reading that last point; I'm only reporting what I learned from the show.]
• When Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill providing educational benefits to WWII servicemen, the United States entered into a social contract to provide all its citizens with a college education.
• Beginning in the 1980's, we have reneged on that contract by not providing enough state and federal scholarship money.
• Merit-based scholarships are bad, because they "help those whom God has already helped."

In summary:

• College is where high school graduates go to ruin their physical, mental, and spiritual health, waste their time and their talents, and emerge four years later unfit for employment, let alone a responsible, mature place in society.
• Therefore we should make this experience available to everyone at no cost.

I could confirm several of the points made by Declining by Degrees, and refute others, but I'll content myself with standing in awe of its logic. 

I grew up on orange juice reconstituted from frozen concentrate, but I have since forgiven my parents.  It was convenient and inexpensive, and oranges did not grow on our New York State trees.  It tasted fine to me, because I didn't know any better.  Why I was so ignorant I'm not certain, since every two years we visited relatives in Florida—and this was in the days before a cooling cycle in the weather teamed with developers to destroy most of Central Florida's citrus groves.  Perhaps orange juice from concentrate simply tasted better to me because that's what I was accustomed to, much as many children who grow up with Aunt Jemima often prefer the imitation to real maple syrup.  Or maybe I simply didn't care enough, but ate what was set before me without giving it much thought.

With maturity came discrimination.  When "not-from-concentrate" orange juice appeared in the grocery stores I winced at the price, but never looked back, as it made the frozen concentrate taste like so much flavored sugar water.  (Later, when I read John McPhee's marvelous Oranges, I learned that flavored sugar water is a fairly accurate description of the product.)  It would be another 20 years before I discovered orange juice that was orders of magnitude better than the best not-from-concentrate available in the grocery stores.

My ignorance was annihilated when a friend married into a citrus grove and juice-producing facility.  There I learned that "orange juice" is not a single product with a single flavor, but varies from month to month as different varieties of orange reach their peak season.  There I discovered more varieties of orange and other citrus fruit than I could imagine, and tasted the delights of many.  Who knew kumquats are best eaten whole: rind, seeds, and all?

Real orange juice has not one but many incomparable flavors.  And real orange juice is not pasteurized.  Our friends were certified by the State of Florida to sell juice just as it came from the fruit, making the hour-plus trip to their grove worth the drive.  Alas, the forces of development overcame that grove, and I have yet to find a substitute.

No substitute grove, that is.  There are a couple of stores in the area where I can usually find unpasteurized orange and grapefruit juice, and our recent visit to the Winter Park Farmer's Market yielded delightful, unpasteurized tangerine juice.  Lately, however, I've been closing the circle, putting our citrus juicer to full use and making our juice directly from the fruit.  There is not as much variety of citrus in our grocery stores as I would like, but there is some—and I can make blends.  Valencia and red grapefruit, tangelo with a hint of lemon, navel and tangerine....  Sure, it's more work, especially since I can't bear to thrown the rinds out but bury them under our backyard grapefruit tree.  But 100% worthwhile!

Now if only making my own cider were so easy.  The same lessons I learned at our friend's grove I re-learned on a visit to a New Hampshire apple orchard:  apples come in many wonderful varieties that you will never see in the grocery store, and unpasteurized cider is incomparably better than the treated kind.  Growing up in New York meant that what I lacked in good orange juice I made up for in flavorful cider.  Unfortunately, even New Yorkers have a hard time finding good cider these days—and cider is a lot harder to make than orange juice.

We must take our victories where we can find them, however, and good citrus juice is within your reach even if you live far from the groves.  Invest in a citrus juicer and teach yourself and your children that orange juice does not grow in cardboard cartons!