Brains, Getting To Know You...

[elfs]

Learning to Cook

Kay Steiger brings us an essay on how people graduate from college not knowing how to cook a delicious meal, and concludes that there are three things schools ought to be teaching, but don't: basic financial skills, cooking delicious food (which by default is healthier than fast food), and a comprehensive sex education. I might add that the third ought to be like the second: health and pleasure ought to be on the curriculum.

Jim Manzi explains the credit problem in caveman terms

You and Og make a deal. When he returns from the hunt, he will give you two handfuls of meat. That's debt. If instead of promising you a fixed amount of meat, you agreed that he would give you a fixed share – say half – of what he brings back to the cave, that's equity. As an example calculation, if Og takes one handful of berries under such a debt contract and a second handful under such an equity contract, and if he comes back into the cave with, say, 10 handfuls of meat, then he has to give 2 handfuls to the debt holder and 5 handfuls (half of 10) to the equity holder. He is left with 10 - 2 - 5 = 3 handfuls of meat for his dinner. This combination of debt and equity is called his capital structure.

The Neocons vs. the Realists

Joshua Muravchik and Stephen Walt have a debate on the future of US foregn policy, and in a stunning ending to Muravchik's naive (and somewhat snark-filled) neoconservatism, Walt concludes:

Muravchik claims neoconservatives "treat purely moral concerns . . . as a higher priority than would realists," yet his response evinces little concern for ordinary human beings. He expresses no remorse at the suffering that neoconservative policies have wrought and seems mostly concerned that the neocons are now "taking their lumps" over Iraq. What matters to him is political standing in Washington, not the hundreds of thousands of needless Iraqi deaths, the millions of refugees who fled their homes, or the tens of thousands of patriotic Americans killed or wounded. So let us hear no more about the neoconservatives' "moral" convictions. Amid such company, the realists who opposed the war can stand tall.

Rachel Maddow dissects David Frum. A lesson to all.

I heard this last night on the radio, and was just blown away by it. David Frum opened the show by accusing Maddow, who is frequently chirpily sarcastic and funny about the topics she covers, of lowering public discourse to a level where eliminationist rhetoric became permissible.

Watch the video. Maddow knows what Frum is trying to do: provoke her into the kind of low-brow match Frum claims he's trying to dissuade. Maddow immediately throws out the funny and spends the next ten minutes in dead seriousness forcing Frum back onto topic. Frum, frustrated that he can't get away from what Digby calls "a substantive exchange on the issue of false equivalency in political discourse," just falls apart and concededs that the Republican party this round is engaged in a much nastier game than usual. Frum just totally loses his cool here, and everyone knows it. She pwned him.