Marijuana edibles claim another victim in Colorado

Lessons: Read the recommended dosages of your marijuana edibles. Don't leave family members suffering from cannabis-induced psychosis alone. Make sure you don't have access to a firearm while you are tripping your face off.

CBS-Denver

"The family of a Tulsa, Oklahoma, man who shot himself Saturday night in Keystone is blaming his suicide on his ingestion of edible marijuana candies.

“It was completely a reaction to the drugs,” Kim Goodman said about her son Luke’s Saturday night suicide.

Luke Goodman’s death is now the third death in Colorado linked to marijuana edibles.

The 23-year-old college graduate was in the midst of a two-week ski and snowboard vacation with family members [!]. Saturday afternoon he and his cousin, Caleb Fowler, took a bus from Keystone to Silverthorne where Fowler says they bought $78 worth of edibles and marijuana.

“He was excited to do them,” Fowler told CBS4.

When the young men got back to Keystone, Fowler said they began ingesting the edible pot. He said his cousin favored some peach tart candies, each piece of candy containing 10 mg of the active ingredient in marijuana, the recommended dose for an adult consuming an edible.

But when Goodman consumed several and experienced no immediate effects he kept gobbling them up.

“Luke popped two simultaneously” after the first two didn’t seem to do anything, said Fowler.

Then he said Goodman took a fifth candy, five times the recommended dose. His mother says her son likely didn’t see the warning on the back of the container which says, “The intoxicating effects of this product may be delayed by two or more hours … the standardized serving size for this product includes no more than 10 mg.”

Several hours later Fowler said his cousin became “jittery” then incoherent and talking nonsensically.

“He would make eye contact with us but didn’t see us, didn’t recognize our presence almost. He had never got close to this point, I had never seen him like this,” Fowler said.

Fowler says Goodman became “pretty weird and relatively incoherent. It was almost like something else was speaking through him.”

When family members left the condo [They left the condo? To do what? Ski?] Goodman refused to join them. After they left he got a handgun that he typically traveled with for protection [from what??], and turned it on himself.

Summit County Coroner Regan Wood says the preliminary cause of death is a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

Spring Break

Spring Break








 

Richard II, Act III, scene 2

 

DUKE OF AUMERLE

Is Bushy, Green, and the Earl of Wiltshire dead?

SIR STEPHEN SCROOP

Ay, all of them at Bristol lost their heads.

DUKE OF AUMERLE

Where is the duke my father with his power?

KING RICHARD II

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart -- Mildred Baily

 

 

I let a song go out of my heart
It was the sweetest melody
I know I lost heaven 'cause you were the song

Since you and I have drifted apart

 

Life doesn't mean a thing to me
Please come back, sweet music, I know I was wrong

Am I too late to make amends'
You know that we were meant to be more than just friends, just friends

I let a song go out of my heart
Believe me, darlin', when I say
I won't know sweet music until you return some day

<instrumental break>

I let a song go out of my heart
Believe me, darlin', when I say
I won't know sweet music until you return some day

 

 

 

 

Mozart improves upon a piece by Salieri: Amadeus (1984)

 

[the Emperor offers the sheet music of Salieri's welcome march to Mozart]
Mozart: Keep it Majesty, if you want. It's already here in my head.
Emperor Joseph II: What? On one hearing only?
Mozart: I think so, Sire, yes.
Emperor Joseph II: Show us.

A Fistful of Dollars: I Don't Think It's Nice, You Laughing.

"I don't think it's nice -- you laughing."

 

[Before gunfight, to the undertaker.] Get three coffins ready.

You see, I understand you men were just playin' around, but the mule, he just doesn't get it. Course, if you were to all apologize... [the men laugh] I don't think it's nice, you laughin'. You see, my mule don't like people laughin'. Gets the crazy idea you're laughin' at him. Now if you apologize like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it...

[After same gunfight, to the undertaker] My mistake: four coffins.

Review of Jeffrey Lieberman's Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry

Excerpt from a great review by Gary Greenburg.

Book Forum

"I may be critical of psychiatry, but as a clinician, I would be thrilled if the portrait Lieberman paints of the mental health field bore a closer resemblance to reality. If a scientific medicine of the brain were truly available, I’d be glad to avail myself of it. At the very least, I’d be relieved not to worry that every time I sent a patient to a psychiatrist, she might return with a fistful of prescriptions, little idea of how the drugs work (for no one really knows) or what side effects she may suffer, and no guarantee that she will get better. Lieberman’s apologetics suffer from his cheerleading, from a tendency to gloss over history that would perhaps suggest a less sanguine conclusion than his.

...

But it’s not just the distant past that Lieberman leaves unrecounted. He minimizes or entirely overlooks such unsavory recent chapters as the widespread diagnosis, against the criteria of the DSM, of bipolar disorder in the very young and their subsequent treatment with powerful (and untested in children) antipsychotic drugs—an episode that occasioned Senate hearings and front-page exposés. He never acknowledges that the “serotonin imbalance” that antidepressants supposedly rectify does not exist—or if it does, it has yet to be discovered—and his lock-and-key image belies the much less certain clinical reality, in which antidepressants are routinely prescribed for anxiety disorders, antipsychotics for mood disorders, and anti-anxiety drugs for a wide range of complaints—and all on a trial-and-error basis. He fails to mention that no new psychiatric medications have been discovered in the past quarter century, or that none of the newer ones have proved more effective than the drugs discovered in the 1950s (although some of them do have fewer side effects). And he vastly overestimates the current state of neuroscience, which is only beginning to unravel the mysteries of how the billions of neurons and trillions of connections among them turn into consciousness."

Thomas Szasz, Epicurean psychiatrist?

Mad in America

"The opposition of these two approaches [i.e., shamanism v. medicalism] is well known, and figures in every history of psychiatry. What is less familiar today is that in 4th-century BC Greece, yet another view was on offer—the Epicurean model, which attributed mental abnormality, as inferred from behavioral deviance or self-report, to spiritual anguish. The Epicurean model held that man’s universal fear of death was responsible for his mental anguish, which caused and resulted from his poor choices and failure to understand the relationship between his appetites and his responsibility. The sacred symbol of the Epicurean view is its emblematic treatment, talk therapy or exercise, both mental and physical.

The competition among three different models of mental anguish—the shamanic, the medical, and the Epicurean—is hard to map onto today’s context. In part this is because the Epicurean model runs counter to modern scientific thinking. It interpreted the spirit or mind (psyche, soul), not as something immortal and God-given, but as a purely mortal and material product of natural evolution; so it may seem counterintuitive. Since most people today, and especially non-Christians, believe either that the soul does not really exist, or that the mind is just a function of the brain, they have a hard time understanding this approach. For an atheist to say we have a spirit, and to refer to "spiritual well being" (as Szasz does), may strike you as funny. Most unreligious people today would deny that human beings have a spirit. For them, humans are organic compounds of atoms, molecules, electrochemical processes, and no more. There is no room in this picture for a spirit, a word that smacks of religion, superstition, or supernaturalism. Furthermore, today psychoanalysis (talk therapy) and pharmacophysical treatment (lobotomy, electroshock, drugs) are both subsumed under the name psychiatry; whereas in antiquity, the two were in direct competition. The medical model was the province of the Hippocratic healers, or doctors. The Epicurean model was the province of the philosophers and their students. Each group explained distress differently. The philosophers, like psychoanalysts, thought the patient’s psyche was disturbed; whereas the psychiatrists, like the Hippocratics, thought the brain's chemistry (or humors) were out of balance. (In antiquity, the shamanic model was only believed in by the lower classes and because it is obsolete today, it does not interest us here.)

It is the Epicurean model, I suggest, that Szasz himself hit upon and developed independently—though he was apparently unaware that he was reactivating a view that was not only ancient, but that had once been massively influential on civilized man, and for seven centuries."

The entire paper is well worth reading.

The Evil Hours, by David J. Morris

So...the big question is...having worked in VA hospitals...would I recommend that a combat veteran friend of mine go seek treatment there for PTSD? Well...no.

Pacific Standard

"Morris served in the Marine Corps in the halcyon 1990s, so he experienced most of his trauma not in uniform but as a reporter in Iraq. When he was embedded during the 2007 surge in Baghdad, an IED buried in a trashpile rocked Morris’ Humvee. For several harrowing minutes, a wheel of the burning vehicle was stuck in the blast crater, and Morris was trapped.

That terrifying ordeal, followed by the turmoil precipitated by his trip to the cinema, led him to the San Diego VA for treatment. There, the young clinicians were caring but didn’t much help. Morris underwent a VA-approved treatment called prolonged exposure, which entails exposing patients to their most feared experience repeatedly over several months, until the situation no longer invokes panic. Morris found PE too anxiety provoking, and quit. (In the largest study of PE in veterans, a modest 55 percent had good outcomes.)

He also underwent cognitive processing therapy, a form of group therapy aimed at clearing up distortions in thinking (i.e., the world is a dangerous place; the war made me unlovable; I need alcohol to cope). Morris found it somewhat helpful but still incomplete, and too focused on the symptoms. A fuller reckoning with trauma, he found, required treating it as more than just a series of near-death nightmares, and instead as the transformative experience it really is. “Never was I invited to think of how my experiences might be converted into a kind of wisdom or moral insight. When I did so, on my own initiative, I was admonished for ‘intellectualizing.’” Many soldiers find war, Morris writes, “to be sublime, and more than a few of them ... were suddenly consumed by a need for answers to life’s greatest questions.”

Fortunately, VA clinicians are increasingly attuned to the existential dimensions of veterans’ needs. However, there are too few seasoned clinicians to go around, and newer mental health professionals—like the ones Morris saw—are assigned to conduct one-size-fits-all, protocol-driven treatments. There is a place for these treatments, but not at the expense of encouraging suffering veterans to see returning from war as a major existential project, a struggle to “make meaning out of chaos.” By “making meaning,” Morris means telling stories, a process with “tremendous healing power” for both the teller and the listener."

Montparnasse -- Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961

There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows

No successful suicides.

A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.

(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)

A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.

(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)

They find a model dead

alone in bed and very dead.

(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)

Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds

and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.

Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.

 

 

Le Dome

 

 

That Lucky Old Sun -- Ray Charles (1963)

Up in the mornin', out on the job
And I work like the devil for my pay

I know that a lucky old sun has nothin' to do
But roll around heaven all day
(Roll around heaven all day)

I fuss with my woman and I toil with my kids
I sweat till I'm wrinkled and gray

I know that a lucky old sun has nothin' to do
But roll around heaven all day

Dear Lord above, don't You see I'm pining
I got tears all in my eyes
Why don't You send down that cloud
With a silver lining, lift me up to paradise
(Lift me up to paradise)

Show me that river, why don't You take me across
And wash all my troubles away

I know that lucky old sun, he's got nothin' to do
And just roll around heaven all day

Good Lord above, can't You know I'm pining
Tears all in my eyes
Send down that cloud with a silver lining
Lift me to paradise
(Lift me up to paradise)

Show me that river and take me across
Wash all my troubles away

And I know that lucky old sun, he's got nothin' to do
Roll around heaven all day, yes, he got nothin' to
Roll around heaven all day, I say, he just roll around heaven all day
Now you say, roll around heaven all day, yes Lord

Songwriters
HAVEN GILLESPIE, BEASLEY SMITH

 

 

 

 

Famous Anterograde Amnesiac H.M.: Iatrogenic Injury?

Neuroskeptic

"According to a new paper, one of neuroscience’s most famous case-studies came about as a result of a serious medical blunder.

Henry Molaison (1926 – 2008), better known as HM, was an American man who developed a dramatic form of amnesia after receiving surgery that removed part of the temporal lobes of his brain. The 1953 operation was intended to treat HM’s epilepsy, but it had the side effect of leaving him unable to form new memories.

The consequences of HM’s surgery are well known – his amnesia was the subject of dozens of scientific papers. But what’s been less discussed is why HM was given such a drastic operation.

According to Francois Mauguière and Suzanne Corkin, the authors of the new paper, the whole thing was a mistake. They argue that HM had a form of epilepsy that can’t be treated by any kind of surgery – and his doctors should have known this, even back in 1953. (Corkin worked with HM for many years and recently published a book about his life, Permanent Present Tense.)

Regarding HM’s diagnosis, Mauguière and Corkin argue that HM almost certainly suffered from idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). A defining feature of IGE is that the seizures do not start from any particular place in the brain. In other forms of epilepsy, there is a focus. The focus is often (although not always) found in the temporal lobe. Surgical removal of such a focus can be an effective treatment. But in IGE, there is no focus.

If Mauguière and Corkin are right, the tissue that was removed from HM’s temporal lobes was perfectly healthy. A sobering thought. What’s more, the authors say that HM’s doctors at the time knew that he probably had no epileptic focus. So why did they cut up his brain?

It appears that the answer lies in a dubious theory that William B. Scoville, the neurosurgeon who proposed the operation, held. Scoville believed that cutting certain brain pathways could ‘raise the seizure threshold’ in the brain, and hence treat any kind of epilepsy, whether or not there was a focus.

Indeed, shortly after operating on HM, Scoville published a brief paper in which he suggested that in the future, surgery might render anti-epileptic drugs obsolete:

Who knows if neurosurgeons may even carry out selective rhinencephalic ablations in order to raise the threshold for all convulsions, and thus dispense with pharmaceutical anticonvulsants?

It’s not clear where Scoville got this idea from, although Mauguière and Corkin suggest that it ultimately derives from the world of psychosurgery – the neurosurgical treatment of mental illness. Psychosurgery was based around the idea that particular surgical lesions could ‘re-balance’ the whole brain (and mind). Scoville was himself an active psychosurgeon.

Overall, Mauguière and Corkin conclude that HM’s surgery was a mistake, even by the standards of the time, and they say that

H.M.’s case will remain as a historical monument in the quest for knowledge about human memory and human epilepsy. The past is past, but we should never see another case H.M."

Mauguière F, & Corkin S (2015). H.M. never again! An analysis of H.M.’s epilepsy and treatment. Revue neurologique PMID: 25726355

Tenured Professor Fired for Blogging

"Oh, and in response to your last statement, the one that questions my own beliefs...STFU."

Inside Higher Ed

"A controversial professor on Wednesday revealed that Marquette University is trying to revoke his tenure and fire him for statements he made about a graduate instructor, with her name, on his blog.

The university says his behavior was unprofessional and that he misled the public about what happened in a dispute between the graduate instructor and an undergraduate student. The professor, John McAdams, says he is being punished for his free speech. He also maintains that Marquette shouldn't be attacking him, given that he is defending an undergraduate's views against gay marriage that are consistent with Roman Catholic teachings. (Marquette is a Jesuit university.)

...

In November, McAdams, an associate professor of political science, wrote a blog post accusing a teaching assistant in philosophy of shutting down a classroom conversation on gay marriage based on her own political beliefs. His account was based on a recording secretly made by a disgruntled student who wished that the instructor, Cheryl Abbate, had spent more time in class one day on the topic of gay marriage, which the student opposed. McAdams said Abbate, in not allowing a prolonged conversation about gay marriage, was “using a tactic typical among liberals,” in which opinions they disagree with “are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”"

I don't buy the "he shouldn't have given the name of the grad student instructor on his blog" charge. She was the sole instructor of an undergraduate section. What's the point of calling someone out on their behavior unless you actually use their name?

The way this went down seems to be this: Ethics professor uses gay marriage as an example in class. A (failing) conservative student meets with her during office hours and he records their conversation. He asks her why she didn't discuss gay marriage more in class. At some point, she seems to equate taking a stance in opposition to the legalization of gay marriage to "homophobia," which will not be tolerated in her classroom.

Was the student a jerk? Seems likely. Was the tenured professor who "outed" the grad student on his blog also a jerk? Yeah.

Do many professors hold views such that, were a student to express a contrary view, would lead the professors to think that the student is racist, sexist, fascist, or homophobic, and therefore wrong? Yes.

Does this have a chilling effect in American universities? Yup.

Homeopathy not effective for treating any condition, Australian report finds

Of course homeopathy is just placebo -- they are selling you a bottle of distilled water, for goodness sakes. But why do people go to homeopaths? (And why does the National Health Service of Great Britain pay for it?) Well, unlike actual physicians, a homeopath will actually sit down with you and listen to you talk about your symptoms. In other words, they will pay attention to you and treat you like a human being. Maybe if physicians tried that, they wouldn't have so much competition from quacks.

Guardian

"Homeopathy is based on the belief that “like cures like” and that the dilution of a medicine – homeopaths call the process “potentiation” – renders it not weaker but stronger. As both of these assumptions fly in the face of science, critical thinkers have always insisted that few things could be more implausible than homeopathy.

But plausibility is not everything. In Exeter, we conducted trials, surveys and reviews of homeopathy in the faint hope that we might discover something important. What we did find was sobering

 

• Our trials failed to show that homeopathy is more than a placebo.
• Our reviews demonstrated that the most reliable of the 230 or so trials of homeopathy ever published are also not positive.
• Studies with animals confirmed the results obtained on humans.
• Surveys and case reports suggested that homeopathy can be dangerous.
• The claims made by homeopaths to cure conditions like cancer, asthma or even Ebola were bogus.
• The promotion of homeopathy is not ethical.

                                             

....The Australians then considered this evidence carefully and have now published their final report. It arrived at the same conclusion as the previous document. If anything, it went one step further by pointing out that “people who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness”. Personally, I would go another step further and remind pharmacists who sell homeopathic remedies to the unsuspecting public that it is unethical to pretend they are more than placebos."

 

 

 

Hey, Let's Try Free Universal Preschool!

Great article on changing living standards from the 1930s to today. The author first notes the improvements, and then...

"Which is not to say that everything has gotten better in every way, all the time. There are areas in which things have gotten broadly worse, though some of those seem to be improving lately: 

A college degree is increasingly the entry price to a stable career, and perhaps because of that, its cost has soared over the last few decades. Crime spiked up in the middle of the 20^th century, and is still well above where it was in the 1930s. Substance abuse, and the police response to it, has devastated both urban and rural communities. 

Divorce broke up millions of families, and while the college educated class seems to have found a new equilibrium of stable and happy later marriages, marriage is collapsing among the majority who do not have a college degree, leaving millions of children in unstable family situations where fathers are often absent from the home, and their attention and financial resources are divided between multiple children with multiple women. 

Communities are much less cohesive than they used to be, and while the educated elite may have found substitutes online, the rest of the country is “bowling alone” more and more often—which is not merely lonely, but also means they have fewer social supports when they find themselves in trouble.

A weekly wage packet may buy more than it did sixty years ago, but the stability of manufacturing jobs is increasingly being replaced by contingent and unreliable shift work that is made doubly and triply difficult by the instability of the families that tend to do these jobs. The inability to plan your life or work in turn makes it hard to form a family, and stressful to keep one together.

Mass incarceration rips millions of men out of the workforce and away from already fragile families, destroys their employment prospects, and of course, inflicts considerable misery on the men themselves.

Widespread credit has democratized large purchases like furniture and cars. It has also enabled many people, particularly financially marginal people, to get into serious trouble.  Debt magnifies your life experience: when things are going relatively well, it gives you more options, but when things are going badly, it can turn a setback into a catastrophe—as many, many families found out in 2008.

Like I say, it’s complicated.

This list illustrates why public policy seems to be struggling to come up with a plan of attack against our current insecurities. The welfare state is relatively good at giving people money: you collect the taxes, write a check, and now people have money. The welfare state has proven very bad at giving people stable jobs and stable families, a vibrant community life, promising career tracks, or a cure for their drug addiction. No wonder so many hopes now seem to be pinned on early childhood education, far in excess of the evidence to support them: it is the only thing we have not already tried and failed at."

Vision of the 21st Century: Give The Useless People Drugs and Videogames!

Below is an interesting conversation between the author of Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari) and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. They note that a large segment of the population is no longer needed for either cannon fodder or factory work. Pretty soon those self-driving vehicles are going to put truck drivers out of work, too. What to do with all "the useless people," they wonder? Harari suggests drugs and videogames. Could this be the 21st Century's "bread and circuses"? We are already legalizing marijuana in the U.S. (a drug that is noted for making users content with their present circumstance). How soon until we start handing out XBoxes to every high school drop out? My guess is that the elites will figure out a way to keep "the useless people" from breeding in the first place. Will people agree to long-term contraceptive implants in exchange for a marijuana dispensary card and an Xbox + GameFly subscription? Throw in some satellite t.v. and a flatscreen and I think a large segment of the population would go for it.

 

 

Edge

"There are fundamental reasons why we should take this very seriously, because generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it's the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it's done, it's over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.

And once most people are no longer really necessary, for the military and for the economy, the idea that you will continue to have mass medicine is not so certain. Could be. It's not a prophecy, but you should take very seriously the option that people will lose their military and economic value, and medicine will follow. [He means that medical advances and resources will be focused on the elites, not the masses.]

...

KAHNEMAN: Yes. I really like that phrase of "people not being necessary," can you elaborate on this dystopia? It's a new phrase for me. ... You have thought about it deeply, can you tell us about people becoming unnecessary, economically, and unnecessary militarily? What will that do?

HARARI: [He makes a great point here that computers/robots don't need to achieve consciousness to replace humans, they just need intelligence -- of the sort exhibited by the self-driving car.]

And this is where we have to take seriously, the possibility that even though computers will still be far behind humans in many different things, as far as the tasks that the system needs from us are concerned, most of the time computers will be able to do better than us. ...

HARARI: Well, again, I am an historian, I am not a biologist, I'm not a computer scientist, I am not in a position to say whether all these ideas are realizable or not. I can just look from the view of the historian and say what it looks from there. So the social and philosophical and political implications are the things that interest me most. Basically, if any of these trends are going to actually be fulfilled, then the best I can do is quote Marx and say that everything solid melts into air.

KAHNEMAN: What I find difficult to imagine is that as people are becoming unnecessary, the translation of that into sort of 20th-century terms is mass unemployment. Mass unemployment means social unrest. And it means there are things going to happen, processes going to happen in society, as a result of people becoming superfluous, and that is a gradual process, people becoming superfluous.

...

HARARI: Yes, the social side is the more important and more difficult one. I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don't think we have an economic model for that. My best guess, which is just a guess, is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology, you will be able to produce food to feed everybody. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with people, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.

My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most ... it's already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their inner problems with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs. But this is just a wild guess.

The Darkling Thrush -- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I leant upon a coppice gate

      When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

      The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

      Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

      The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

      The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

      Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

      Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

      In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware.

 

 

 

 

 

Groove is in the Heart -- Dee-Lite (1990)

Dig

The chills that you spill up my back
Keep me filled with satisfaction when we're done
Satisfaction of what's to come

I couldn't ask for another
No, I couldn't ask for another

Your groove, I do deeply dig
No walls, only the bridge, my supper dish
My succotash wish

I couldn't ask for another
No, I couldn't ask for another

Groove is in the heart, Groove is in the heart
Groove is in the heart, Groove is in the heart

Watch out!

The depth of hula groove
Move us to the nth hoop
We're going through to, Horten hears a who

I couldn't ask for another
No, I couldn't ask for another

DJ Soul was on a roll
I been told he can't be sold
Not vicious or malicious
Just de-lovely and delicious

I couldn't ask for another

Someone's in this torso (yeah)
Hot! Gotta deal you wanna know (wanna know)
Dee-Liteful truly Dee-Liteful (liteful)
Makin' it doin' it 'specially at show (show)
Feeling kinda high like a Hendrix haze (haze)
Music makes motion moves like a maze (maze)
All inside of me (side)
Heart especially (yeah)
Help of the rhythm where I wanna be (c'mon)
Flowin' glowin' with electric eyes (ha)
You dip to the dive baby you'll realize (yeah)
Baby you'll see the funky side of me
Baby you'll see that rhythm is the key (hmm!)
Get get ready with it (with it)
Can't can't quit it (quit it)
Stomp on the street when I hear a funk beat (beat)
Playing Pied Piper
Follow what's true
Baby just sing about the groove (sing it)

Groove is in the heart
Groove is in the heart
Groove is in the heart
Groove is in the heart
Groove is in the heart

Songwriters
FAREED, KAMAAL IBN JOHN / HANCOCK, HERBIE / BRILL, D'MITRY / CHUNG, DONG-HWA / KIRBY, KIER

 

 

 

 

Japan prefers Robot Bears to immigrants

I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of folks in Indonesia or the Philippines who would gladly carry elderly Japanese from their beds to their wheelchairs.

Reason

"Japan's subsidized robots are intended to make up for national shortages in human health workers—and a long history of restrictionist immigration policies. In 2010 the country had just 1.3 million nursing care workers, a far cry from the 2 million the Health Ministry estimated were necessary and woefully short of the 4 million the ministry expects will be needed in 2025. Restrictions on immigrant workers make the situation even more dire: Japanese citizens are legally prohibited from hiring foreign workers to help with senior or child care.

The subsidies, then, function as a way of avoiding higher immigration levels. For years, Japan has been notoriously resistant to immigration. Of its current population, less than two percent are from outside the country, and the nation has traditionally only allowed about 50,000 immigrant visas each year—far less than the 700,000 estimated to be necessary to keep population levels afloat.

In early 2014, reports suggested that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe might allow for expanded immigration, perhaps as many as 200,000 newcomers each year. But by summer, he had backed off the idea. "In countries that have accepted immigration," he declared on a Japanese TV show, according to The Financial Times, "there has been a lot of friction, a lot of unhappiness both for the newcomers and the people who already lived there."

Robot workers might provide some assistance for the country's aging population, but they won't do much to solve the nation's underlying fiscal problems: They don't pay taxes, start businesses, or contribute directly to a growing economy. At best, they'll make it easier for Japan to grow old. But unlike immigrants, they won't make the country young again."

The "Robear" has a cub-like face with big doey eyes, but packs enough power to transfer frail patients from a wheelchair to a bed or a bath, Japan's Riken institute said Tuesday.
"The polar cub-like look is aimed at radiating an atmosphere of strength, geniality and cleanliness at the same time," research leader Toshiharu Mukai told AFP.
"We voted for this design among options presented by our designer. We hope to commercialise the robot in the not-too distant future," he added.
A historically low birth rate and ever-increasing life expectancy means Japan's population of elderly people is growing, while the pool of youngsters to look after them is shrinking.
A reluctance to accept large-scale immigration means an increasing reliance on robots, especially to perform physically difficult work.
This frequently combines with the country's love of all things cute, to produce machines with disarming faces and child-like voices.
"As Japan is ageing with fewer children, the problem of a shortage in caregivers for the elderly is getting serious," Riken said in a statement.
"Expectations are high that robotics will help resolve this problem," it said.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-japan-robear-strength-robot.html#jCp

The "Robear" has a cub-like face with big doey eyes, but packs enough power to transfer frail patients from a wheelchair to a bed or a bath, Japan's Riken institute said Tuesday.
"The polar cub-like look is aimed at radiating an atmosphere of strength, geniality and cleanliness at the same time," research leader Toshiharu Mukai told AFP.
"We voted for this design among options presented by our designer. We hope to commercialise the robot in the not-too distant future," he added.
A historically low birth rate and ever-increasing life expectancy means Japan's population of elderly people is growing, while the pool of youngsters to look after them is shrinking.
A reluctance to accept large-scale immigration means an increasing reliance on robots, especially to perform physically difficult work.
This frequently combines with the country's love of all things cute, to produce machines with disarming faces and child-like voices.
"As Japan is ageing with fewer children, the problem of a shortage in caregivers for the elderly is getting serious," Riken said in a statement.
"Expectations are high that robotics will help resolve this problem," it said.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-japan-robear-strength-robot.html#jCp

The "Robear" has a cub-like face with big doey eyes, but packs enough power to transfer frail patients from a wheelchair to a bed or a bath, Japan's Riken institute said Tuesday.
"The polar cub-like look is aimed at radiating an atmosphere of strength, geniality and cleanliness at the same time," research leader Toshiharu Mukai told AFP.
"We voted for this design among options presented by our designer. We hope to commercialise the robot in the not-too distant future," he added.
A historically low birth rate and ever-increasing life expectancy means Japan's population of elderly people is growing, while the pool of youngsters to look after them is shrinking.
A reluctance to accept large-scale immigration means an increasing reliance on robots, especially to perform physically difficult work.
This frequently combines with the country's love of all things cute, to produce machines with disarming faces and child-like voices.
"As Japan is ageing with fewer children, the problem of a shortage in caregivers for the elderly is getting serious," Riken said in a statement.
"Expectations are high that robotics will help resolve this problem," it said.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-japan-robear-strength-robot.html#jCp

The "Robear" has a cub-like face with big doey eyes, but packs enough power to transfer frail patients from a wheelchair to a bed or a bath, Japan's Riken institute said Tuesday.
"The polar cub-like look is aimed at radiating an atmosphere of strength, geniality and cleanliness at the same time," research leader Toshiharu Mukai told AFP.
"We voted for this design among options presented by our designer. We hope to commercialise the robot in the not-too distant future," he added.
A historically low birth rate and ever-increasing life expectancy means Japan's population of elderly people is growing, while the pool of youngsters to look after them is shrinking.
A reluctance to accept large-scale immigration means an increasing reliance on robots, especially to perform physically difficult work.
This frequently combines with the country's love of all things cute, to produce machines with disarming faces and child-like voices.
"As Japan is ageing with fewer children, the problem of a shortage in caregivers for the elderly is getting serious," Riken said in a statement.
"Expectations are high that robotics will help resolve this problem," it said.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-japan-robear-strength-robot.html#jCp

The "Robear" has a cub-like face with big doey eyes, but packs enough power to transfer frail patients from a wheelchair to a bed or a bath, Japan's Riken institute said Tuesday.
"The polar cub-like look is aimed at radiating an atmosphere of strength, geniality and cleanliness at the same time," research leader Toshiharu Mukai told AFP.
"We voted for this design among options presented by our designer. We hope to commercialise the robot in the not-too distant future," he added.
A historically low birth rate and ever-increasing life expectancy means Japan's population of elderly people is growing, while the pool of youngsters to look after them is shrinking.
A reluctance to accept large-scale immigration means an increasing reliance on robots, especially to perform physically difficult work.
This frequently combines with the country's love of all things cute, to produce machines with disarming faces and child-like voices.
"As Japan is ageing with fewer children, the problem of a shortage in caregivers for the elderly is getting serious," Riken said in a statement.
"Expectations are high that robotics will help resolve this problem," it said.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-japan-robear-strength-robot.html#jCp

Huck Finn encounters the art of a dead, depressed girl

"They had pictures hung on the walls -- mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called "Signing the Declaration." There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before -- blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas."

Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said "And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas."

These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.

She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon -- and the idea was to see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face,but there was so many arms it make her look too spidery, seemed to me."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XVII, Mark Twain (1884)

Ten Great Conservative Novels

This list appeared in 2010. It seems rather sound. No Country for Old Men (#10) is a great book, as good as the movie. Bonfire of the Vanities (#6)  is one of those few novels that I have read more than twice. Shelly's Heart (#7) is a remarkable book by one of my favorite authors, Charles McCarry. You might want to start with his Tears of Autumn, however. I'm not so sure about the greatness of The Thanatos Syndrome (#5), but then again it is sort of science fiction, which is just not my genre. 

Based on the endorsement of this list, I will be seeking out and reading Elmer Kelton's The Time it Never Rained (#4) and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (#8).

Advise and Consent (#1)  is a really long book that I just can't see myself tackling. I liked the movie, though. I've had so-so experiences with Mark Helprin (#9)'s books, so we'll see. Same goes for Dos Passos (#2), but I'm more willing to give him another shot. I can't remember if I ever read Mr. Sammler's Planet (#3); I went through a Saul Bellow binge once, so it's possible. It's Bellow, so it would be worth re-visiting in any event.

National Review

1. Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury (1959): “It may be a long time before a better [novel about Washington] comes along,” noted Saturday Review on the publication of Advise and Con­sent. The first work of fiction by veteran reporter Allen Drury won a Pulitzer, stayed on the bestseller lists for nearly two years, and became a well-regarded movie starring Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton. The book was loosely based on the case of Alger Hiss, and it sizzles with issues of loyalty and security. Half a century since its first publication, Advise and Consent still provides a penetrating look at Washington’s never-ending clash between ambition and integrity. The strength of the book is that even though it’s a political novel about a confirmation battle between the executive branch and powerful senators, it doesn’t wear politics on its sleeve. Instead, Drury shares the conservative’s preference for studying people, with their vices and virtues, before their stated ideologies. His novel exhibits a firm appreciation for the checks and balances at the heart of the American constitutional order as well as a sophisticated view of human na­ture. Even now, Advise and Consent remains a page-turning thriller that both describes and celebrates the obfus­cations, oratorical mannerisms, and etiquette that are designed quite de­liberately as speed bumps in the paths of the statist behemoth. That is just one reason it remains a book that every student of the U.S. Senate should read — as well as any student of American literature. – Roger Kaplan is a writer in Washington, D.C. 

 

2. Midcentury, by John Dos Passos (1961): Midcentury is more than just a great conservative novel. It’s one of the undiscovered classics in 20th-century literature. Dos Passos returns to the unique style he developed in his acclaimed U.S.A. trilogy, where multiple stories intersect with real-life headlines and portraits of the rich and powerful. His themes are the great issues of the 1950s: the Cold War and the aftereffects of the New Deal. Midcentury uses both fiction and history to show how Communists and organized crime corrupted labor unions, when they were at the peak of their power. The book also displays cultural foresight, es­pecially in its portrait of a sneering James Dean titled “The Sinister Adolescents.” Dos Passos anticipates the emerging counterculture, which he interprets (con­troversially, but plausibly) in light of the subversion and loss of traditional institutions, as the “Greatest Generation” failed to match its bravery overseas with the efforts necessary to take on domestic adversaries. (“Why not resentful? There’s more to life; the kids knew it. Their fathers won a war but weren’t men enough to keep the peace, they let the politicians and pundits wheedle them into defeat; they let the goons pilfer their paychecks, too busy watching TV to resent oppression.”) Midcentury is even more remarkable because Dos Passos made his literary reputation as a socialist and is perhaps the only first-rate novelist to make a conscious journey from Left to Right over the course of his career. Never shrill, Midcentury bristles with insight and the hard-won wisdom of an ex-leftist who knows his history. – Larry Kaufmann, an economic consultant in Madison, Wis., contributes to YeahRightBlog.com. 

 

3. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow (1970): If Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, was not written for the sake of conservatism, it was widely read as a conservative manifesto. Set at the end of the dispiriting 1960s in a New York City that has descended into moral anarchy, it chronicles America’s cultural decadence. Young people thrill to the humiliation of the elderly, criminals celebrate their own righteousness, and the sexual revolution has given birth to a base nihilism. Via such depictions, Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a novel of decay and rot. Moreover, Bellow seems to say, the American Left is no passive bystander but an active vehicle of decline. Artur Sammler, the titular character, is a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor and an erstwhile liberal optimist. The novel pivots on a shocking translation: Sammler applies a pessimism he has learned on Europe’s killing fields to the spectacle of late-20th-century America. His weary wisdom lends the novel its taut intellectual drama. With Elya Gruner, the book’s other hero, Bellow repudiates the littérateur’s formulaic pity for respectable members of the bourgeoisie. Gruner’s plodding commitment to family annoys his ungrateful children, lacks the sanction of cultural fashion, and forms an ideal to which Gruner himself does not entirely live up. Yet, in the novel, it also enables a small island of decency and goodness. Bellow’s was a sui generis conservatism planted at the center of literary Manhattan circa 1970, a calculated provocation from a writer destined to win the Nobel Prize in 1976. – Michael Kimmage, an assistant professor of history at Catholic University, is the author of The Conservative Turn. 

 

4. The Time It Never Rained, by Elmer Kelton (1973): To say that Elmer Kelton wrote “Westerns” is to confine him to a literary ghetto. He certainly participated in the genre and wasn’t ashamed to do so. Yet his greatest book, about a terrible drought in West Texas during the 1950s, is an unheralded classic — and a profoundly conservative story about the importance of self-reliance in the face of overwhelming odds. Charlie Flagg is a cantankerous rancher who suffers during the dry spell but refuses all offers of government assistance, to the puzzlement and even consternation of his neighbors. Lib­ertarians like to say that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Kelton has Charlie proclaim it in his own regional idiom: “There was nothin’ new about that idea. It’s as old as mankind . . . the hope of gettin’ somethin’ for nothin’ or of getting more out of the pot than you put in it. Nobody’s ever made it work yet. Nobody ever will.” The Time It Never Rained overflows with this kind of homespun wisdom, but the book’s real pleasure lies in its vivid characters and their inevitable conflicts. Charlie and his wife can’t agree on what to have for dinner, in an ongoing battle that masks deeper fissures. Their son rejects ranch life, even though he could inherit the small operation they’ve built. Meanwhile, a Mexican-American boy looks to Charlie as a father figure. “I can’t write about heroes seven feet tall and invincible,” Kelton once said. “I write about people five feet eight and nervous.” – John J. Miller 

 

5. The Thanatos Syndrome, by Walker Percy (1987): Walker Percy was a doctor who contracted tuberculosis. Following his recuperation, he abandoned medicine for literature. He said he wanted to diagnose spiritual, not physical, malaise. His recurrent theme in books such as The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins was that particular malady of the modern dystopia, the triumph of science over charity and humanity. A Catholic convert, Percy examined what happens to a society when it stops believing in the transcendent and relies instead on a medicalized view of the human person, whose ills can be cured through therapy and drugs. On this point, his most compel­lingly readable book may be The Thanatos Syndrome. It features Thom­as More, a doctor who returns home to Louisiana after a stint in prison. It seems the good folk of the town are lacing the munici­pal waters with a chemical designed to eliminate bad conduct, such as aggression, addiction, and other dangerous behaviors. More resists this effort because the exercise of choice and free will makes us human. Trying to erase our flaws — even through the use of scientific methods made possible by our human intelligence — reduces us to beasts, a de­volution vividly recounted through characters who revert to being rutting, language-lost animals. The elimination of undesirable characteristics leads, inexorably in Percy’s view, to the destruction of “unwanted” persons. Scientific judgment, without an infusion of charity, results in decisions that are literally non-human. It was a compelling story in the 1980s, and — in an age of destructive embryonic-stem-cell research, trait-specific abortion, and euthanasia — remains one today. – Gerald Russello is a fellow of the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University and author of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk. 

 

6. The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987): In many ways, the New York City of the 1980s — sprawling, crime-ridden, out of control — has passed into history. Yet Tom Wolfe’s grand novel of this place and time holds up because human nature — greedy, lazy, concupiscent, and beset by status anxiety — hasn’t changed a whit, nor has the tumultuous energy of the city that never sleeps. Wolfe created a huge and vivid gallery of New York types, high and low, who were fully human. (His aim was that of Dickens, to write about every level of society.) At the center is Sherman McCoy: preening, eaten by insecurity, and terrified of his wife, his mistress, his boss, and the nemesis that awaits him as punishment for an act of cowardice. And there are so many other characters who persist as recognizable types, including slothful journalists, trophy wives, career-pushing prosecutors, snobbish nannies who lord it over their less well-heeled clients — all ground through the gears of a tight and perfectly turning plot. Wolfe despised arty, introspective fiction and sought to write a panoramic, large-scale, 19th-century-style novel that would realistically portray 20th-century urban life in all its rollicking glory and sordidness. He succeeded so well that some of the turns of phrase he coined — “Mas­ters of the Universe,” “social X-rays” — are fixtures of American English more than 20 years later. Sherman McCoy will live forever as one of 20th-century America’s most distinctive fictional characters, and researchers will be consulting Wolfe’s book for centuries to find out what New York was — and is — really like. – Charlotte Allen is the author of The Human Christ. 

 

7. Shelley’s Heart, by Charles McCarry (1995): Charles McCarry is sometimes called a “conservative John le Carré” for his highly intelligent espionage thrillers. The difference is that le Carré presents British spymaster George Smiley and his Soviet foe Karla as moral equivalents, while McCarry believes in the superiority of Western ideals. His spy novels depict the unpleasant, even tragic, actions that are sometimes necessary to preserve those ideals. Shelley’s Heart is a political thriller and the finest fictional account of how modern Washington works — or doesn’t, as the case may be. The novel eviscerates politicians, aides, journalists, and judges as they vie for power. McCarry’s depictions can be deeply cynical: A radical nominee for the Supreme Court will likely be confirmed because he has spent his professional life making sure that none of his controversial views is ever on the record. As for the supposedly free press, “All the front pages carried the same stories in the same positions under headlines that said the same thing.” Thanks to environmental policies that have run amok, the streets are dark at night and the capital is infested with deer. Here is how McCarry describes a president who has made a momentous decision that he knows runs counter to the best interests of the country but may save his career and advance his political agenda: “Like most political figures of his generation who embrace progressive convictions,” McCarry writes, “Lockwood had never in his adult life been anything but a politician.” He “was a politician to the depths of his being, and his office was all he had.” Sound familiar? – Melanie Kirkpatrick, a former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, is a writer in Connecticut. 

 

8. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (2004): This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel is about virtue, and virtue rewarded. It takes the form of a letter from father to son, the last testament of the ailing John Ames, a fourth-generation minister in the small Iowa town of Gilead during the 1950s. He has lived according to what he calls the “obvious question”: “What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?” The answer is not always apparent, Ames finds. His is a divided heritage: between his fiery abolitionist grandfather, who fought in the Civil War, and his pacifist father. Ames faces his own stumbling block in the form of Jack Boughton, his godson and a Prodigal Son who returns seeking his godfather’s blessing. Throughout the novel, Ames seeks to untangle a series of knotty moral questions: What is the relation of divine justice to earthly justice? How is that justice consistent with grace? Gilead grapples with these “mysteries” of human existence, even as Ames cautions that “we human beings,” frail and sinful, have “so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace.” The result is a book of both humility and hope, aware of our limitations, but also of the goodness of creation. “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true,” Ames writes. “‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” There is, indeed, balm in Gilead. – Cheryl Miller is editor of Doublethink magazine. 

 

9. Freddy and Fredericka, by Mark Helprin (2005): As the Allies closed in on the Nazis, U.S. soldiers arrived at the door of Richard Strauss. Drawing himself up (one ima­gines), Strauss greeted them with, “I am Doktor Richard Strauss, composer of Salome and Der Rosenkavalier.” In­teresting that he should have chosen those two works, for self-identification. Under Mark Helprin’s name, on the cover of his latest book, Digital Barbarism, we find, “Author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War.” Those are extraordinary, even great, novels. One or the other is many people’s favorite book. But there are other Helprin creations to absorb. All of his novels are “conservative,” in that they deal with enduring truths and how to live. They are also shot through with religion, having the quality of prayer. But at least one of those novels is conservative in even a political way. That is Freddy and Fredericka, a comedy. And though it is a comedy — a dazzling one — it becomes perfectly profound. Freddy and Freder­icka are a prince and princess of Wales who are banished to America, where they find their true selves. Helprin writes a hymn to America, his home country — a hymn with no triteness at all. But he also sings of England as few Englishmen have. They should knight him for it. In writing about love and life — and how could the two be separated? — Helprin lifts you up. He is a rare combination of big, big literary talent and big, big humanity. – Jay Nordlinger is an NR senior editor. 

 

10. No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (2005): Some novels are not ostensibly political but nevertheless have a special appeal for conservatives, especially those in the Augustinian tradition. Such people are skeptical about plans for improvement and cynical about the morally pretentious. They think that we live in a fallen world and that natural law is a lie told by an atheist. Their favorite authors are Pascal, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and, in our day, Cormac Mc­Carthy, America’s greatest living novelist. McCarthy’s The Road recently has been turned into a film. A better introduction to his work may be No Country for Old Men, itself the subject of a superb movie. McCarthy’s message is that evil walks the land, that fate rules the world, that God owes us nothing, and that His silence is unbroken. Those who accept this have a certain nobility, but redemption comes only through His grace. No Coun­try is the story of a chase, of a hunter and the hunted, of a hit man and his victim, told through the prism of a sheriff, the novel’s moral center. The hunter, Anton Chigurh, is an avenging angel, the agent of amoral fate in a dark world, the most frightening character you’ll ever encounter. “If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?” asks Chigurh, before he pulls the trigger. The sheriff follows moral rules, but like Chigurh does not expect they’ll help him in any way, which is why Chigurh permits him to live. – F. H. Buckley is a law professor at George Mason University.