Tag: food

Bananas

I praised them thus last week:

‘Bananas! They are just so wonderful, safe, comfortable, unchallenging – like coming home. Could this be the contented little chimp in us?’

You replied:

Doug Simpkinson: ‘You should be aware that bananas are radioactive, so that special glow you feel isn’t just from the texture.’

Chris Williams: ‘One word. Carbs.‘

Meanwhile . . .

Would you agree with me that left-handed Americans (of whom I am one) use a bit more hot water than right-handed people?

And which do you think weighs more: a pound of $45-a-pound shrimp from the Epicure market or a pound of $7.99-a-pound shrimp from the Publix 500 yards away (and, thank heavens, 400 yards closer to me)?

I discovered an amazing thing about the little shrimp. If you hold two tails together and dip – and then eat – them simultaneously, they’re still not remotely as large as the $45 shrimp, but they’re twice as large as they were, and just as tasty. This is the opposite of pill splitting. Shrimp doubling.

The reason I think we lefties use more hot water, at least marginally, is that hot water taps tend to be on the left, cold on the right, so we are more likely than our right-handed friends to reach for the hot water tap. Then again, a slightly higher proportion of lefties than righties may be concerned with the environment, and so might be more aware of not wasting water – particularly hot water, which also wastes energy. So maybe I’m all wet and we actually use a bit less hot water.

I run through all this as a way of writing something that, by comparison, will make my observations on bananas seem important, and well grounded. (Hey: you never get this stuff from Quicken.)

Tomorrow, or soon: Globalization

Champagne and Chickens

Here’s an interesting thing I just learned: even uncorked, champagne stays fizzy for weeks in the refrigerator. No wonder it costs more than Dr. Pepper! How do they do that? (Like so many great discoveries, this one came entirely by accident. I don’t even like champagne — but I don’t like throwing things out, either, so when we had half a bottle left over from something and no convenient cork, I just put it on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator door and forgot about it. Just now, I needed something to swig down a pill – and the discovery was made. I feel a new chapter coming on. Corking Like a Guy™.)

And here’s a question I have.  We are clearly putting the pedal to the metal, with huge tax cuts and deficit spending to stimulate the economy . . . and magnificently accommodative monetary policy (read: low-low interest rates) to stimulate it further (anybody want a 0% interest-rate credit card for nine months?) . . .

So what happens if it doesn’t work?  Or, to be less gloom-and-doom about it, what happens if it does work long enough to get the administration past the 2004 election, as it well may, but . . . well, what happens then?  Are there any chickens involved here?  Will they come home to roost?

Usually, when you go many hundreds of billions of dollars into debt, there are chickens.  Our budget and trade deficits are both so large, a lot of smart people are betting the dollar will weaken, which makes investors less eager to hold US-dollar-denominated bonds, which makes interest rates rise.  (The higher interest rate is needed to tempt investors into buying bonds issued in currencies they think may depreciate.)  And if long-term interest rates do rise, what does that do to the real estate market, and to all the housing-related industries?  And to the spending power people have been getting from refinancing their homes?  And their general feeling of wealth?

If we were borrowing so massively to make fundamental investments in our infrastructure or our kids, I would be less concerned.  Instead, we’re like a company that’s losing money but borrows to pay its richest shareholders a dividend.  I think there could be chickens.

Praisin’ the Raisin

Wayne Bennion: ‘Is your question about raisin pits serious? Everyone (at least everyone who grew up in Fresno) knows that raisins are dried Thompson Seedless grapes, so of course the raisins are also seedless. (This is ignoring the fact that grapes have seeds, not a pit, which appellation, I believe, is reserved for the single large seed of peaches, apricots and avocados.)’

☞ Well aren’t YOU a whole bunch of know-it-alls. (Especially the one of you who began his e-mail with . . . ‘DUH!’)

But did you know that raisins – the common brownish ones we all eat – come from green grapes? Hah! You did not. Now who’s the man?

NEVER PAY A $29 LATE FEE AGAIN

Robert Doucette: ‘My bank allows me to schedule payments on a regular basis. So I can automatically send out the monthly checks. I don’t do that, but I have set up automatic payments to my credit cards. I normally pay them off monthly, but last year I got overwhelmed at work, forgot about them and go hit with late fees. So, every month they get two payments, A small automatic check to cover at least the minimum payment and another check for the rest.’

‘If this is class warfare, then my class is winning.’
– Warren Buffett

Free at Last . . .

. . . free at last . . . thank my friend and webmaster, the estimable Marc Fest – all righty! – I am free (of AOL) at last.

Well, okay, I still use it, but this $30 program Marc turned me on to takes three minutes to buy and download and maybe five minutes more to convert my 4,280 AOL 5.0 addresses to an Excel file – complete with the free-form ‘comments’ I have appended to many of my records, some of them quite long. I don’t lose a thing.

The program can also convert from AOL 6.0 and 8.0, and from other e-mail programs, not just AOL. It will convert your address file directly into various e-mail programs – not just into Excel.

Check it out if you’re only staying with your current provider because you feel stuck. For another $5, there’s a program that will port over your ‘favorite places,’ as well.

I like a lot about AOL, and have not yet committed to an alternative or launched into the process of changing my address. But what an amazing feeling that I can export my data from of AOL for use elsewhere. (It is my data after all, painstakingly typed in over all these years.) Like the Iron Curtain coming down.

Wilbur Coghill: ‘Restaurant.com [not to be confused with restaurants.com!] sells and auctions (Via Ebay) restaurant gift certificates. You can buy $25 certificates for $12.50 or bid and try for a better price. In my area there are usually 50 or so running at any one time, but for NY, there are a lot more. I won two $25 deals for $6 and $8, for places that I know are good. There are a few conditions (good for food only, etc.) but still hard to beat.’

Jeff Martin: ‘Here’s an interesting short piece on how state and local taxes are going to eat up the tax cut for most Americans, but not, of course, for the rich.’

☞ An excerpt:

Whether or not your personal budget will end up in the black or at a deficit depends. This year, married filers with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) of more than $1 million will save $91,000, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. If that’s you, increases on the state and local level may seem a drop in the bucket.

Now, let’s say you’re a married couple with an adjusted gross income of $50,000 to $75,000. The Urban-Brookings center estimates that households like yours will save an average of $767 in federal taxes this year.

If you live in Troy, N.Y., the school district’s share of property taxes alone could add $600 to your taxes this year, on average. If you’re planning to send your child to one of the City University of New York schools, you can expect to pay $800 more for in-state tuition.

* * *

‘If this is class warfare, then my class is winning.’
– Warren Buffett

If raisins are dried grapes, then why don’t they have pits?
– Andrew Tobias

Your Mutual Fund: A Raspberry or a Tomato?

SCRABBLE PLAYERS

Do you know the word CWM? It means circus. Is there any other word in English with NO vowels (considering that Y, like ketchup, is both a fruit and a vegetable)?

FOOD ENTHUSIASTS (and Marketing Majors)

There’s a delicious new food on the shelves – dried plums. But don’t eat too many at one time.

SURVIVAL TIP

Every household should have a case or two of peanut butter under the bed. It outlasts any earthquake, hurricane, tornado, flood, or power outage; can be flung with deadly accuracy to stun but not kill an intruder; and provides a life-sustaining 6600 calories per 40-ounce container. It even floats. (Get the extra-chunky kind to have something to do while you’re waiting for the electricity to go back on – you can count the chunks.) For fluid and spice, you would want several cases of V8, which, like CWM, has no vowels but is both a fruit and a vegetable juice.

ACTIVELY MANAGED MUTUAL FUNDS: WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT?

Morningstar reports that in the 20 years ended December 31, 2001 (not up to date because I have been carrying this WSJ clipping around with me for years, and it just out of my pocket along with two 34-cent stamps and a gum wrapper) U.S. stock funds returned an average compounded annual return of 13.8%. (Remember, even though the decline was well under way by then, this particular two-decade stretch was one of the best in history.) The Wilshire 5,000 index was up 14.3% over the same period, which proves for the umpteenth time the obvious: that on average, mutual funds will do worse than average (worse, that is, than the broad market indexes) because, unlike the indexes, their performance is weighted down by fees and expenses.

Ah, but this 13.8% was only for the funds in existence at the end of 2001. And mutual fund families have a habit of shutting down or merging their worst performers, never their best. It turns out that if you adjust the numbers for the rotten funds that disappeared along the way, the return was not 13.8%, but 12.7%.

Why the big gap between the 14.3% compounded return of the index and the 12.7% return of the funds? Fees and expenses, which probably did come to something very like the 1.6% annual shortfall. (Add in the tax-disadvantages of actively managed funds, and the upfront sales charges of load funds, and the performance gap gets considerably wider still.)

And just in case you thought a 1.6% performance gap was trivial, two points of reference: First, it seems less important when it’s chipped off of 14.3% than it would if it were chipped off of, say, 6%, leaving you just 4.4%. Second, $10,000 growing at 14.3% (to go back to that dreamy and unrealistic number) for 40 years compounds to $2.1 million. At 12.7%, thanks to the active management you were paying for, and assuming no sales fees or tax disadvantages, to $1.2 million. So except for the dyslexic, this really matters. (At 6% versus 4.4% both numbers are lower, but the difference no less dramatic: $103,000 versus $56,000.)

Tomorrow: Your Thoughtful Santorum Feedback, Complete with Management Tips and the Age of Consent in Albania

Oh, Yum!

CALORIE-FREE

Dana Dlott: ‘It’s not really true the dressing you wrote about has zero calories. The imitation bacon bits have calories. The FDA has some legalistic rules about labeling that allows the company to say zero. I believe you don’t count calories from the spices. However it is close enough to zero for government work. Salad dressing is supposed to be oil, vinegar and spices. Vinegar has few calories and the spices are defined to have zero calories, so the oil which makes it creamy is the problem. This stuff is an example of modern food technology. If you take sugars, starches or oils and turn them into long chain polymers, they become difficult to digest, and if you do it right they can taste good but being indigestible have no calories. In this stuff the creamy texture is provided by a cocktail of ingredients including cellulose gel (cellulose from wood or grass is a starch polymer that is indigestible by people but yummy to cows), other starches that are also modified, and some other polymers such as modified alginate which is extracted from seaweed. I notice they are using sucralose for sweetening, which is a polymer of sucrose (table sugar) that is also indigestible but which tastes more like sugar than most other artificial sweeteners.

‘If you asked 10,000 scientists, only 10 of them would say there is anything to worry about in this stuff. Of course these 10 are in the news all the time. The two main concerns, they say, are eating this indigestible stuff can cause some kinds of stomach distress. Of course eating a lot of fat also does this. Also they say this stuff can stick to various vitamins and carry them out of the body. That is the kind of stupid thing that somebody desperately searching for a reason to not like something might say. So eat up, be happy. If the stuff upsets your stomach don’t eat it any more.’

Dan Critchett: ‘Aw, c’mon Andy, you know why food sellers whose product ISN’T fat-free, calorie-free, or carb-free get away with saying that their product IS: they make their serving size small enough so that it contains fewer calories, fat, or carbs PER SERVING than the FDA requires them to disclose. My favorite is Pam, the cooking spray: it’s 100% oil, 100% fat, but advertised as totally ‘fat free.’ How? Because a serving size is a one-second spray. (Try it some time, see if you can really spray it for only one second. Impossible. What a scam.)’

John Kasley: ‘Here’s a link to a page that answers your question about Walden Farms. (What a great name for food which is totally artificial.)’

I DON’T KNOW – WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING TO YOURS?

Pieter Bach: ‘Oh, Andy, WHAT have you been doing to your rhubarb! I hope someone told you the green part at the bottom is POISONOUS (no government program on this one, just trust me, I come from farmers) and that you have to COOK it with a little sugar – brown is actually better than white, here – to get it to taste good. How’s your stomach? Rhubarb was for centuries part of the physicians’ natural remedies lists, and was prescribed as an emetic. ‘Prescribed’ and ’emetic’ are important terms to note. It is high in oxalic acid, and the vitamin and mineral content is released by heat, the same as spinach. It used to be an important part of the spring tonicking, along with castor oil. It is combined with strawberries in pies because the iron content of strawberries (quite high) is made more available by the oxalic acid; you could, of course, combine strawberries and spinach, but I don’t think that would bake up very tasty. Think of rhubarb as a vegetable that is not improved by salt, and class it with shchav, French sorrel, and what we used to call ‘sour grass’ (Argentine oxalis), in terms of minerals. It goes well with goose and duck, because in culinary terms it lightens the fat content of the meat and makes it more digestible.’

☞ Only a man of true dedication to his readers would poison himself with frozen rhubarb chunks and then struggle to his post to tell the tale. (The truth is, I took one taste and tossed it. And as Charles will tell you – he has seen me eat food five years past its expiration – I don’t toss food lightly. Stick with the frozen sour cherries.)

Food for Thought

Well, I can tell you this much: rhubarb is certainly overrated. It tastes nothing like it does in the pie.The bags of sour cherries that you get frozen at the supermarket, on the other hand – and the frozen blackberries and frozen mixed berries – are the perfect Cooking Like a Guy™ snack. Just open and eat with God’s own chopsticks, your index finger and opposable thumb. The trick? The veritable ‘je ne sais quoi’ of the frozen sour cherry snack? Do not defrost. You can let them thaw a little, but beyond that you are making a mistake.

I can also report that “dried plums,” as they are now cleverly being marketed – a plum assignment! handled with such aplomb! – taste an awful lot like prunes.

The really interesting food to discuss for a minute – well, there are radishes, but radishes deserve a whole column (see, for example, November 11, 1999, “Underappreciated Vegetables,” which also lacked room for the radish) – is the Walden Farms Fat-Free Sugar-Free Hot Bacon Salad Dressing. Not only is it fat-free and sugar-free; it is cholesterol-free, carbohydrate-free, and calorie-free. You see what I am driving at? How is this possible? Calorie-free? It is a thick, creamy, flavorful, imitation-bacon-bit salad dressing. What could it be made of? Smog?

I’m expecting answers from you, people.

FIXED LINK

Ron Goldthwaite: “The link in yesterday’s column was mangled. Since it’s an interesting article, it’s worth fixing.”

☞ Oops. Click here for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory report that discusses the effectiveness of plastic sheeting and duct tape in preparing a residential safe room.

AND ONE MORE THING TO WORRY ABOUT

Ed Biebel: “In addition to my regular working life, I am also a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician with my community’s local ambulance service. Hazardous Materials Awareness and Operations has been part of our basic training since I became an EMT 10 years ago. My point in mentioning this is that a lot of the current buzz about chemical attacks sticks in my craw. True Emergency Management is “all hazard, all risk.” That is to say that terrorist attacks are not the only vector for exposing a population to deadly chemicals. Tanker trucks full of lethal chemical agents regularly travel our highways. In our region, we have had accidental chemical releases from nearby plants, derailed freight cars carrying chemicals, natural gas main breaks involving evacuation of numerous city blocks . . . and the list goes on. These are risks that occur every day. Yet the agencies that should be protecting us and reducing our risk are being gutted. State agencies struggle with budget cuts and if there is money trickling down from the Feds to help, I’m not sure where it is going. Sure we want to check to make sure that the driver of a chemical truck isn’t a terrorist. But don’t we also want to make sure that the brakes on the truck work and that the tanker is properly inspected and that the company is observing all of the regulations for transporting deadly chemicals?”

Molly’s Bose Earphones in Lizard Lick, Iraq

TYSON CHICKEN QUESTION

Duane Sheets: ‘So anything that feels pain we shouldn’t eat? There are whackos who think plants feel pain. Why don’t all the humans just die and leave the planet alone?’

☞ That would be one extreme. The opposite extreme would be to say torturing animals is completely acceptable. Is there perhaps a sensible, moral middle ground?

PLACES, EVERYONE

Dan Albro: ‘I always liked “Lizard Lick, NC.”

BOSE HEADPHONES (again)

Joshua Stevens: ‘I fly over 100,000 miles per year and I swear by Bose. I’ve been one of the first to invest in their noise-canceling headphones about four years ago. The sound is both quiet and excellent. Their customer service is also outstanding. Twice I’ve had an issue involving the foam around the ear pieces coming unglued, each time I returned to the local Bose store and they simply exchanged the phones for a brand new pair!

‘Recently, I invested another $350 in my other ultimate travel gadget, the Nomad Jukebox 3 MP3 player from Creative Labs. It features a 40GB hard drive that will hold over 15,000 songs! (Memory chip based MP3 players are so passé.) I am now 75% through the process of ripping the 750 CDs in my collection into MP3 format (2-3 minutes per CD with a Pentium 4 and a 48x CD-ROM drive). The Nomad 3 is the exact same size as a portable CD Player Walkman, weighing in at 11 ounces and has rechargeable batteries good for 22 hours of play time. It also fits perfectly in the Bose headphone case. More importantly, when I finish my CD-ripping project, I will have a perfect digital copy of my entire music collection on my hard drive. Upon completion, I plan to sell the original CDs (probably to the local used CD store) for $3-4 each. This should raise $2,500… more than enough to pay for the Bose headphones, the MP3 player and my Pentium 4 computer! If I had invested my $350 in risky stocks 4 years ago it might be worth only $100 today.’ [Well, maybe, but selling CD’s once you’ve copied them and kept the copies is illegal.]

ATTACK IRAQ?

Michael Axelrod: ‘For a carefully reasoned case for invading Iraq, see The Threatening Storm by Kenneth Pollack. After considering a number of options, the author reluctantly concludes that the least dangerous course of action is to invade Iraq without further delay. Pollack was a CIA analyst specializing in Iraq. He explains why ‘containment’ won’t work. Adlai E. Stevenson III presents more or less the standard left-of-center case for not invading Iraq. Some of his assertions are just flat-out wrong, such as: ‘Even top officials at the Central Intelligence Agency have acknowledged that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction are only a threat if Iraq is attacked.’ Pollack discusses this very point at length, and in depth. It’s a very dangerous assumption.’

MOLLY ON BEATING TAXES

She writes (in part): ‘What is it with rich people that 60 percent of a $100 million is not enough? What kind of sickness is that? You make $100 million on stock options, do you honestly think you earned it? Did you work 10,000 times harder than a guy who gets $10,000 a year for digging ditches? Even a thousand times harder? A hundred? Ten? It is no secret that the ultimate goal of the conservative movement in this country is to get rid of the IRS and the progressive income tax entirely. The right-wing foundations have been talking about it for years. It is genuinely difficult to understand the level of greed and venality that would make someone think everyone else should pay taxes on what they make, but that he doesn’t have to . . . ‘

☞ It is a grand time to be rich and powerful in America.

The State of the Chicken

Jim: ‘I say my tax-deferred interest income is not like money coming into my budget; my wife says it is part of my income. We don’t receive it as cash; it compounds. Should this be included as part of my income to budget with?’

☞ I prefer your approach because it’s more conservative. Ideally, your investments would occupy a separate place in your brain for growing, not spending – augmented each year by the surplus from your budget – until the time come to buy a house or pay for college or, eventually, supplement Social Security during your retirement.

I goofed with the link to Gary Halbert’s letter yesterday. It’s fixed.

My wide-eyed optimism was obviously misplaced a couple of weeks ago when I hazarded that Amram Mitzna would replace Ariel Sharon in yesterday’s election. It was presented more as a wishful hunch than a prediction (what do I know from Israeli politics?), but either way, I was not even close.

I have so many thoughts on the State of the Union (the least of them being that it’s pronounced NOO-klee-er) that I’m not even going to try. Suffice it to say that on the Iraq part – especially if Russia comes around, as seems to be happening – I think the administration may have it about right, awful as the situation is. (Well, about right other than that the timing of the war debate was incredibly cynical, and the approach should have been multilateral from the start.) I don’t think we should proceed unless we can persuade a lot of our friends that it is the right thing to do. But I think we will persuade them. And who knows – maybe Russia will be able to persuade Saddam that the jig is up.

I was heartened by the additional $2 billion a year to combat AIDS in Africa and by the boost for hydrogen-powered cars. I don’t know enough about the latter to know how real it is, but it does at least seem more hopeful than the original Bush push to cut the budget for alternative energy research in half.

The colossally misguided tax proposals? The Social Security proposal? The prescription drug plan? Well, it’s a great time to be rich and powerful in America. But I don’t think that going into debt in order to lop $327,000 off Dick Cheney’s tax bill is going to produce jobs.

Finally, you may recall my November 14 column about cruelty to animals (I was for it!), titled, I Don’t Want to See the Factory – Please Pass the Salt. Now from my friend Dan Mathews at PETA, who once dressed up as a carrot to protest something – it wasn’t cruelty to carrots, I remember that much – was it cruelty to rabbits? I think that may have been it – now comes this e-mail. I was contrasting various compensation levels (you knit, you play tennis, I contrast compensation levels), and I thought to compare the pay of Tyson chicken chief John Tyson, who made $7.3 million plus options and perks last year, with the pay of PETA President Ingrid Newkirk, who made $26,000. I e-mailed Dan just to make sure I remembered correctly that PETA was down on Tyson. This is not to say Tyson is wrong and PETA is right – the more efficiently Tyson can produce chicken, the less it costs consumers – but read Dan’s response and you decide. Do Not Read This Before Lunch:

Tyson is among the key culprits in making sure birds are exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act. As one of the world’s largest poultry producers, Tyson confines billions of chickens to filthy, poorly ventilated sheds where they spend their entire lives living in their own waste. To increase profits, they genetically manipulate birds to grow so large, so fast that their legs cannot withstand their own weight, leading to deformities, chronic leg pain, crippling arthritis and an inability to get to food and water. Overcrowding is so severe that suffocation, heart attacks from stress, and disease transmittal are all too common while it is often impossible for the birds to make even the most basic movements, such as spreading their wings. During transport, birds are crammed into cages on trucks for hours without food or water and many are trampled to death by their frightened cage-mates. At the slaughterhouse, they are dropped fully conscious into boiling water to defeather them. Hungry yet?

Coming: I Still Owe You Dissenting Views on the Copyright Issue

Of Peruvian Chickens and Referees Plus: Putting Neville Back in His Place?

Mark Kennet: ‘A couple of thoughts from down here in darkest Peru. First, let me say that I have been a vegetarian for over twenty years, and that I am one for purely philosophical reasons. However, my philosophical reasons are not just the ones you note, although I certainly believe in minimizing harm to other sentient beings to the extent reason permits. I simply believe that it is wrong to devote resources to feeding cows, pigs, and chickens when there are people who could eat basically the same food and thus be prevented from starving. The old adage that it takes about ten pounds of grain to put one pound on a pig, and ten pounds of pig to put one pound on a man, is approximately correct: If the grain goes directly to the person, only ten pounds are required to put the pound on, but if it has to go through the animal first, then 100 pounds of grain are required. Obviously, this argument is not 100% valid when you consider that in the case of free-range animals, much of the food consumed by the animals is matter that would otherwise go to waste: the animals graze on land that is not suitable for cultivation. Similarly, few would argue that fish caught in the wild are diverting resources that would otherwise be used by humans. Nevertheless, (a) at least in the US, relatively few animals – particularly chickens – are raised as free-range; and (b) even if the ratio needs to be changed to reflect those animals that are free-range, it is still less efficient in terms of the calories and protein to feed people meat than grains and legumes. Given that in many parts of the world there is still hunger, I believe that there is an ethical argument to be made against consuming meat.’

☞ I had heard seven pounds, not ten, for beef and three for chicken. But whatever the ratios, the real comeback to this compelling line of thought (at least for those of us living in the U.S.) is presumably: Yes, but how does our feeding grain to pigs lessen the amount of grain available to starving people? Even with all our meat-eating, we can produce far more grain than we can sell. What’s needed are the networks to distribute it to the starving and, where those exist, someone willing to pay the bill. The really immoral (and stupid) thing is that we don’t devote more than one-tenth of one percent of our GDP to programs to help modernize the Third World. If we did, they could afford to buy our grain and perhaps even our tractors, and that would be a pretty great win-win.

Mark continues: ‘As for your other recent topic, playing football with and without rules, I think my Peruvian experience backs up your point, but only somewhat. Walking the streets of Lima (or biking, as I do daily) leaves one longing for an ARMY of referees, if only to stop people from making right turns from the far left lane without signaling. Similarly, it would be nice to know that when one boards a taxi or bus that a referee has recently checked to make sure the tires, brakes, and other safety features are functional; and many people would be willing to pay a referee to ensure that the food they eat was safe (one of my colleagues is on medical leave because he contracted hepatitis from a restaurant) or that the buildings they enter conform to fire safety standards (the daughter of friends of ours was tragically killed in a discotheque fire a few months ago).

‘On the other hand, it depends on the rules. Rules against off-sides or fouls obviously make a lot of sense (and I suppose you would argue that the Republicans want to eliminate those rules, and that’s why they’re wrong). But what about rules that force a kicker to sign a permission slip before he is allowed to kick the ball? Or rules that force one team to give points to the other every time they get ‘too far’ ahead? And what do you do about the problem of corruption, where even when rules make sense, payment to the right person prevents their enforcement?’

☞ As with most things, no extreme works well. Balance and judgment are needed. And it depends on the context. In 1920, we needn’t have worried much about motor vehicle fuel efficiency or pollution, let alone dependence on foreign oil. Today we do. So today, increased fuel efficiency standards make sense. But should they be sudden, radical or unreasonable? No. (Is it pathetic that the fuel efficiency of our fleet is lower today than it was 15 years ago? Yes.)

One great, quick read for anyone who doubts the lunacy of some of our regulations (could there be even one doubter left?) is Philip Howard’s The Death of Common Sense. But it would be a mistake to brand all regulation bad or unnecessary. Indeed, as we become ever more crowded on this planet (6.1 billion of us now, up from 2.5 billion when I was born), and as life becomes ever more complex (automobile traffic, air traffic, airwave traffic), it takes generally more collective management, not less, to minimize the collisions and the road rage – and to keep from fouling our collective nest too terribly.

WHERE IT ALL COMES TOGETHER: REGULATING CHICKENS

Don’t miss Molly Ivins.

#

Maybe Neville Chamberlain Wasn’t So Smart, After All

Alex: ‘I strongly disagree with Mr. Bonham’s defense of Neville Chamberlain yesterday. The Czechs had an excellent army that was thrown away at Munich and the Germans used the Czech industry to produce armored vehicles to overrun Europe two years later. The Allies were stronger relative to the Germans at the time of Munich than in September 1939 or May 1940. And a whole lot fewer innocents would have died in the concentration camps had the West been willing to fight earlier.’

David Smith: ‘Mr. Bonham’s comment is historic revisionism at its finest. France had the largest standing army in the world at the time Chamberlain et al signed over Czechoslovakia. Germany was viewed largely as dangerous but manageable due to their past economic troubles and the restrictions on their military imposed by the Treaty of Versailles (which, interestingly enough in light of current events in Iraq, Germany repeatedly violated as France and England watched and ignored). The unveiling of the Blitzkrieg concept to the rest of the world was still more than a year away when Czechoslovakia was abandoned by its allies. In addition, German insiders warned the allies repeatedly of Hitler’s intentions. France would not commit to Czechoslovakia’s defense unless Chamberlain did as well. They both backed down to Hitler rather than risk war. That’s appeasement. General Keitel admitted at the Nuremburg Trials that Germany would not have carved up Czechoslovakia had England and France backed Prague. In fact, despite being informed of a plot by German generals to arrest Hitler and his principal associates should he try to attack Czechoslovakia in defiance of France and England, appeasement won.’