Wisdom from the 42nd Page

Corporate America and Environmental Policy

On the forty-second page of “Corporate America and Environmental Policy: How Often Does Business Get Its Way?” author Sheldon Kamieniecki wrote (emphasis added):

networks," and other mechanisms quickly behind the scenes. In direct opposition to the tradtional pluralist perspective, Gonzalez contents that economic elites have dictated the way government has managed the national forests and national parks, often with the intent to serve their narrow self-interests. They are also responsible for the enactment of basically ineffective wilderness preservation policy and national clean air policy.

Despite Gonzalez's (2001) efforts to provide evidence to support his arguments, his position is generally one sided. Although his study contains a number of perceptive insights, analysts (including pluralists and neopluralists) might contend that he exaggerates the power economic elites wield in American society by downplaying the oftentimes countervailing impact of the media, citizen groups, competing elites (public and private), federalism, and the government's system of checks and balances. If anything, environmental policymaking is a highly dynamic, complex process involving a wide array of independent and often competing actors and groups at different levels of government. Today, most environmentalists tend not to believe that policy is being formulated and implemented by a small, clandestine group of wealthy individuals. Most also do not call for a complete overhaul or elimination of the capitalist system. Reflecting the central thrust of ecological modernization, they instead argue that the country can have been environmental protection and economic growth with the aid of science and technology.¹ Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1996), for instance, maintain that the United States can have stronger environmental protection and continued growth of the GNP, that environmental regulations do not reduce the competitiveness of American industry, and that stricter environmental regulations do not cost American jobs by forcing industries to relocate in nations with weaker regulations.

Business leaders, too, seem to have backed away from their earlier extreme claims and dire predictions concering the U.S. adoption of environmental protection programs. Based on previous research, Press and Mazmanian note how certain companies have "evolved from being heavy polluters to conscientious pollution abaters by significantly reducing emissions, better managing wastes, reformulating products and production processes in order to use fewer natural resources and energy, and making goods recyclable, more durable, and less toxic" (2003, 287). This has occured in leading-edge companies because of "visible involvement of corporate leadership in developing and promoting new management

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The Golden Ratio

On the forty-second page of “The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number” author Mario Livio wrote (some emphasis added):

3

UNDER A STAR-Y-POINTING PYRAMID?

The Pyramids first, which in Egypt were laid;
Next Babaylon's Gardens, for Amytis made;
Then Mausolos' Tomb of affection and guilt;
Fourth, the Temple of Diana in Ephesus built;
The Colossus of Rhodes, cast in brass, to the Sun;
Sixth, Jupiter's Statue, by Phidias done;
The Pharos of Egypt come last, we are told,
Or the Palace of Cyrus, cemented with gold.

—Anonymous, "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World"

The title of this chapter comes from the poem On Shakespeare, written in 1630 by the famous English poet John Milton (1608-1674). Milton, who himself was widely esteemed as a poet second only to Shakespeare, writes:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honor'd bones
The labor of an age in piled stones?
Or that his hallow'd relics should be hid
Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?

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How to Cook Everything

On the forty-second page of “How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food” author Mark Bittman wrote (emphasis added):

full-flavored chicken, meat, or fish stock is good enough to serve on its own.

Stock Ingredients

Stock need not be expensive. You can start with scraps of vegetables that you've frozen and saved over the course of weeks; I do this routinely. Use the trimmings and ends from celery, carrots, and onions (onion peels, especially, add a good deal of color to stocks), and other vegetables, bearing in mind that trimmings from strong-tasting vegetables such as broccoli and asparagus will lend a distinct flavor to the stock, one that you might not always want.

Save, too, every scrap (except for fat, chicken skin, and fish gills and innards) from trimming chicken, meat, or fish. Stock-making gives you yet another incentive to buying whole chicken and cutting it up; the meaty raw bones of a single chicken, combined with a few vegetables, provide enough flavor for a quart or two of stock.

Of course, it's easier and arguably better—if somewhat more expensive—to begin with fresh, whole ingredients. Take a carrot, an onion, a celery stalk, a chicken, some seasoning, at a total cost of less than five dollars (far less, if the chicken was on sale), and you can make three quarts of stock, enough for two or three batches of soup, or a batch of soup and a fantastic risotto. Keep the simmering time short and you can even make the soup and still have a chicken with enough flour to be worth eating.

Almost anything can substitute for anything else in stock, although onion, carrot, and celery should find their way into most stockpots. But if you have turkey and no chicken, use it. Use cooked meat instead of raw. If you have small amounts of many ingredients rather than the amounts specified here, substitute. Just leave out as much visible fat as possible.

Bones, of course, are an integral part of many stocks, and are highly desirable for the body they lend to long-simmering stocks. But a stock made only of bones tastes like bones rather than meat. Most raw bones are quite meaty, so that isn't so much a problem. But if you are making a stock with leftovers, and are using bones that have been completely stripped of meat, buy a few chicken wings, backs, or necks, and add them along with the bones; you'll improve the flavor significantly.

There are two extremely flavorful stock ingredients you should choose to include or omit based on your own taste. These are garlic and dried mushrooms. I like the scent of garlic in many savory soups, and dishes, and sometimes I put a whole head right into my simmering stock. I put a whole head right into my simmering stock. But once it's in you can't take it out, so I only do that when I'm making a relatively small amount of stock and know that the garlic will be a welcome addition whenever I use that stock.

The distinctive flavor of mushrooms is almost always a fine addition, and I usually throw some directly into the stock as it's simmering. There's really no reason not to do this; if I'm feeling economical and dried porcini are too expensive, I use dried shiitakes, sold as black mushrooms in Chinese markets and very, very cheap. The trimmings from fresh mushrooms, of course, are also good. But I don't include either of these ingredients in my basic stock recipes because, as I said, their inclusion is up to you.

Stock Techniques

Condensing fat

There are two special "techniques" for stock that concern fat. The first is really more something to remember than to learn: Don't allow stocks (or, for that matter, soups) to boil vigorously. This is a generalization; there are times it will do no harm at all. But once fat is rendered by the heat of the liquid, rapid boiling can cause it to become so thoroughly dispensed in the liquid that it will be difficult to remove it. This not only makes for a fattier

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Armed America

By a slim one vote majority the United States Supreme Court confirmed in Heller today that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects a meaningful individual right (as a majority of citizens have always intuitively understood).

In honor of this historic decision, we turn to the forty-second page of “Armed America: The Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie” where author & historian Clayton Cramer (whose research cited by the majority opinion and who was instrumental in unmasking the fraud of Prof. Michael A. Bellesiles's Arming America) wrote (some emphasis added):

thereby drawe from us the trade of beaver to our greate losse and their profit and besides the Indian being furnished with as much of both guns and ammunition as they are able to purchase, It is enacted, That every man may freely trade for gunns, powder and shott: It derogateing nothing from our safety and adding much to our advantage.... [emphasis in original]

In October 1665, Virginia again prohibited the sale of guns and ammunition to the Indians. The statute admitted that Dutch sales of guns to the Indians had made the March 1657/8 law unenforceable, saying that "those envious neighours are now by his majesties justice and providence removed from us." The ban was again in force—but not obeyed. In March 1675/6, Virginia enacted a new statute, complaining "the traders with Indians by their [avarice] have soe armed the Indians with powder, shott and guns, that they have beene thereby imboldened." The new statute made it a capital offense to sell guns or ammunition to the Indians, and also declared that any colonist found "within any Indiane towne or three miles without the English plantations" with more than one gun and "tenn charges of powder and shott for his necessary use" would be considered guilty of selling to the Indians, and punished accordingly.²

Contemporary accounts of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 refer to gun battles with the Indians in which multiple guns in a single Indian home were unsurprising.³ Bacon himself complained that Governor Berkeley had restored firearms to the Indians, and supplied them with ammunition in violation of the law.⁴ (At least some of the tribes supplied by Governor Berkeley were regarded by him as allies, or at least friendly; his goal was to assist them to fight against less friendly tribes farther back from the frontier.) After the rebellion, Charles City complained that Berkeley's friends had supplied ammunition to the Indians: "[W]ith ammunicon they were better furnished by the traders then wee his majesties subjects....."⁵ In spite (or perhaps because of) Virginia's vacillating policy about gun sales, the Virginia frontiersmen had much to fear from well-armed Indians.

New England colonies also wrestled with the pros and cons of placing guns in the hands of Indians. When the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, the local Indians had no guns. By 1623, Indians unfriendly to the Pilgrims had been "furnished (in exchange of skins) by some unworthy people of our nation with pieces,

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Fahrenheit 451

On the forty-second page of “Fahrenheit 451,”—the classic sci-fi story of a world in which books are forbidden and must all be burned—author Ray Bradbury wrote (some emphasis added):

the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet.

Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the air, her Seashell was tamped in her ear again, and she was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling.

Wasn't there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to ask what was for dinner? Well, then, why didn't he buy himself an audio-Seashell broadcasting station and talk to his wife late at night, murmur, whisper, shout, scream, yell? But what would he whisper, what would he yell? What could he say?

And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of gentleman, drunk, coming home late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser.

"Millie?..." he whispered.

"What?"

"I didn't mean to startle you. What I want to know is..."

"Well?"

"When did we meet? And where?"

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America's Game

On the forty-second page of “America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation” author Michael MacCambridge wrote (hyperlinks & emphasis added):

newspaper reporter, "or he'll go to hell." Bell indeed went to Penn in 1914, majoring in English and playing football for three years as a quarterback. In 1916, Penn went 7-2-1 and expected a bid to the Rose Bowl. Bell started at quarterback in the game, January 1, 1917, where unbeaten Oregon prevailed 14-0. After a two-year stint with an army medical unit in France, he returned to captain Penn's football team in 1919, graduated in 1920, and returned that fall as an assistant for Penn head coach John Heisman, where he remained on staff through 1928.

Though he worked nominally as a stockbroker during the '20s, Bell spent the decade living a life not unlike the romanticized cinematic visions of the '20s, frequenting nightclubs, dancehalls, and speakeasies, tooling around town in a cherry-red Marmon roadster and a coonskin coat, playing with equal vigor the stock market, the gambling halls, and the horses, devoting the month of August to the summer season at Saratoga. On summer Saturdays in Chelsea, when his father would leave for Philadelphia to attend church services the following morning, Bert Bell would often throw a party, hosting his eclectic assemblage of friends—ranging from entertainers like Bob Hope and Cesar Romero to blue-collar acquaintances from the resort town.

After a series of financial setbacks, Bell was working for his father, managing the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Broad Street. It was there he met the musical comedy actress and former Ziegfeld dancer Frances Upton, a sweet, vivacious dazzler with a dramatic streak and a staunch moral fiber, a perfectly complicated Catholic beauty of the modern age. Between starring roles in such Broadway hits as Whoopee!, with Eddie Cantor, Frances Upton often performed sets at the Ritz's small, swanky rooftop lounge. Doting on Frances, the smitten Bell would wait until she finished her performance, then escort her to a nearby Catholic church where a mass was held at two in the morning for late-shift printers and newspaper workers. While the daily communicant Frances went inside, Bert remained outside on the street, reading the paper, joshing with the police officers, and watching the nightlife. One summer night when Bert professed his undying love to Frances, she told him she could never marry a drinking man. Surrounded by friends, he ordered one last drink and downed it, then vowed to her he would never touch alcohol again. By all accounts, he didn't; they were married January 4, 1934.

The previous summer, Bell had borrowed $2,500 from his fiancée and along with his former Penn teammate Lud Wray, headed a syndicate that bought the NFL's defunct Frankford Yellow Jackets francise, a pro power in the '20s that had gone bankrupt during the 1931 season. Renaming the team the Eagles, after the eagle logo on the National Recovery Administration's em[blem]

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Democracies in Flux

On the forty-second page of “Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society” (edited by Robert D. Putnam) contributor Peter A. Hall wrote (hyperlinks & emphasis added):

1960s and 1970s saw even more rapid growth in public programs utilizing voluntary endeavor, notably in the spheres of poverty, urban renewal, and child care, where they were closely allied to a host of new voluntary associations, such as Shelter and the Child Poverty Action Group.⁷⁰ The Local Government Act of 1972 authorized local authorities to spend up to 2 pence on the rates of local taxation to fund voluntary organizations, and the same year saw the establishment of the Volunteer Centre and the Voluntary Services Unit in the Home Office to coordinate and enhance the role of volunteers in the provision of social services.⁷¹

Although operating from multifarious objectives, the Conservative governments of 1979-97 reinforced this trend by encouraging local government to contract out a wide range of services to nonprofit organizations in order to reduce the size of the state sector. Shortly after taking office, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared, "I believe that the voluntary movement is at the heart of all of our social welfare provision," and between 1976 and 1987, the income of the voluntary sector from fees and grants almost doubled.⁷²

By 1994-95, 12.5 percent of the income of voluntary associations in Britain (£687 million) came from local authorities, while central government provided another £450 million (not including funding for housing), much of which went to organizations delivering social services in the spheres of community care, family welfare, education, and recreation.⁷³ Although many of the organizations receiving these funds employed professional staff as well as volunteers, government funding apparently did not erode their voluntary character. Leat, Tester, and Unell found that local voluntary associations receiving large amounts of public money utilized more volunteers than those receiving fewer funds. Moreover, Hatch's inquiry into the origins of voluntary organizations in three towns found that public officials provided the impetus for creating more of them than did any other source.⁷⁴

In short, British governments have worked to ensure that voluntary activity flourishes, using volunteers alongside professionals for the delivery of social services. This commitment has been accompanied by large public expenditures, including grants and fees for services, to associations that mobilize voluntary action on the local level. All indications are that these policies have made a major contribution to sustaining the kind of associations that augment the level of social capital in Britain.

Explaining Changes in Social Trust

The one indicator for social capital to have fallen over the postwar years is that measuring the generalized trust people express in others. We can

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The Disappearance of Childhood

On the forty-second page of “The Disappearance of Childhood” author Neil Postman wrote (hyperlinks & some emphasis added):

became synonymous with the world child. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt express it this way:

Whilst under the tradtional system [of apprenticeship], "childhood" effectively ended at the age of seven... the effect of organized formal education was to prolong the period during which children were withheld from the demands and responsibilities of the adult world. Childhood was, in fact, becoming far less a biological necessity of no more than fleeting importance; it was emerging for the first time as a formative period of increasing significance.¹⁴

What is being said here is that childhood became a description of a level of symbolic achievement. Infancy ended at the point at which command of speech was achieved. Childhood began with the task of learning how to read. Indeed, the world child was frequently used to describe adults who could not read, adults who were regarded as intellectually childish. By the seventeenth century, everyone assumed, as Plumb tells us, that "the process of a literate education should develop with the developing child: reading should begin about four or five, writing follow, and then gradually more sophisticated subjects should be added.... Education [became] tied almost inflexibly to the calendar age of children."¹⁵

But the tie between education and calendar age took some time to develop. The first attempts to establish classes or grades of students were based on the capacities of students to read, not on their calendar ages.¹⁶ Differentiation by age came later. As Ariès explains, the organization of school classes as a hierarchy of reading competence brought the "realization of the special nature of childhood or youth and of the idea that within that childhood or youth a variety of categories existed."¹⁷ Ariès is expressing here a principle of social perception, alluded to earlier: When a group—any group—is formed on the basis of a single characteristic, it is

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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

Loyal 42nd Page reader Ben sends us another forty-second page: this time of “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” where author Jerry Mander provacatively—in 1978—wrote (emphasis added):

have been able to explain to white America that to care about what was going on down there they would have to have cared about the Hopi perception of reality; the Hopi mind and its integration with natural forces? Viewers would have had to care about the landscape, the spaces, the time, the wind, the color, the feel of the land and the sacred places and things. How could I have conveyed something through the medium so that anyone would have cared, when everyone was sitting at home in darkened living rooms, watching television? It was time travel that needed to be conveyed. How could I have carried a viewer from home through time and space to another reality which can only make sense if experienced directly? I decided that my report would have been no better than this Hollywood crew's had been. In fact, theirs was probably as good as could have been done within the limits of the medium. But in the end, the Hopis were hurt, not helped. Their struggle was revealed, perhaps, but they themselves were further fixed into the model of artifact. The medium could not be stretched to encompass their message.

On the other hand, what if I had four minutes, or even one minute, to convey the essence of a product? A car? A stereo set? A toy? Could I accomplish that efficiently?

I certainly could. It suddenly became obvious to me that a product is a lot easier to get across on television than a desert or a cultural mind-set.

Understanding Indian ways enough to care about them requires understanding a variety of dimensions of nuance and philosophy. You don't need any of that to understand a product, you do not have problems of subtlety, detail, time, and space, historical context or organic form. Products are inherently communicable on television because of their static quality, sharp, clear, highly visible lines, and because they carry no informational meaning beyond what they themselves are. They contain no life at all and are therefore not capable of

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The Case for Mars

On the forty-second page of “The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must” authors Robert Zubrin & Richard Wagner wrote (emphasis added):

vehicle can be used to send it to Mars. However, there are major problems associated the MOR scheme. In the first place, two separate launch vehicles are needed, which doubles the risk of launch failure causing mission failure. Also, two complete spacecraft are needed, each of which has to be designed, built, checked out, and subjected to launch environment testing (when you launch a spacecraft it is subject to severe vibration and acoustic loads, and these must be simulated in expensive setups before launch), and each must be integrated into a launch vehicle. Basically, doing all this will double mission costs. Furthermore, the interfaces between the two spacecraft must be perfect, not only in the factory, but after launch and years of space flight and thermal cycling both in space and on the Martian surface. Guaranteeing this is a very touch design problem; in fact it probably can't be guaranteed since it can't be tested in advance. Finally, the autonomous rendezvous, dock, and sample transfer in Mars orbit required to do this mission is an undeveloped technology which will be very costly to develop and which cannot be tested in advance of the mission. This multiplies the risk associated with this already marginal mission plan still more.

In an effort to make the MOR plan look more attractive, its advocates have taken to innovative accounting techniques, such as assigning the cost of the two required launches to separate missions. In more extreme proposals the rover would be flown out on a prior mission, so that its costs and the costs of its mission operations can be charged to someone else. In this case, the lander carrying the MAV now must satisfy the additional requirements of performing a landing with nearly pinpoint accuracy next to the rover. Once again, this cannot be tested in advance, yet it would represent a drastic improvement of the state of the art for targeting unmanned Mars landers, which currently involve landing errors of up to 100 kilometers. For the sake of novelty, apparently, some orbital rendezvous fans have also proposed moving the location of rendezvous from Martian orbit to interplanetary space. This saves propellant on the ERV, because now it does not have to capture into or blast out of Mars orbit, but it adds not only a considerable amount of propellant to the MAV, but also an untestable requirement that the MAV be able to blast off at ex[actly]

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