Well, what with the mutiny brewing, this may just be asking for trouble, but it looks like Waddling Thunder may have called it well. This week Crescat invites an HLSer to join us as a guest-- Ms. Amber Taylor, an OED-loving Harvard 2-L whose name is also great for making anagrams. I shall leave the arduous task of introducing herself more fully to her.

Juan Non-Volokh's not the only one who can kill a Sunday this way ... [And he doesn't seem to have done it this Sunday anyway . . .]

So, without explaining why-- Night and Day by that lyrical deity, Cole Porter

Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom
When the jungle shadows fall
Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall
Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops
When the summer shower is through
So a voice within me keeps repeating you, you, you

Night and day, you are the one
Only you beneath the moon or under the sun
Whether near to me, or far
It’s no matter darling where you are
I think of you

Day and night, night and day, why is it so
That this longing for you follows wherever I go
In the roaring traffic’s boom
In the silence of my lonely room
I think of you

Day and night, night and day
Under the hide of me
There’s an oh such a hungry yearning burning inside of me
And this torment won’t be through
Until you let me spend my life making love to you

Day and night, night and day

I agree with Heidi's bottom line: "This supposed list of Crescat top 100 books is a sham and a travesty." I write separately to add that I was not a member of the "Crescat Sententia Editorial Board" (nor was I member of this blog at the time) and thus cannot be held responsible for the contents of the list. Were I to create such a list, my top two selections would be The Stranger, by Albert Camus and Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. For reasons known only to the Editorial Board (though I suspect Will will offer some reasons as he did in response to Heidi), neither of these books made it onto the list. To borrow from Heidi, these omissions are nothing short of "a sham and a travesty."

This is all wrong on so many levels.

Her name is Lois McMaster Bujold; the series is the Vorkosigan series.

And she's won four Hugos and a bunch more nominations and a handful of Nebula Awards. But I see. We've never heard of her. Then we hear the assertion that Watership Down is boring. Boring. Boring. It's got war, it's got prophecies, it's got rabbits--what more could you possibly want? Damn it all! What is this blog populated by anyways? Mutant glow-worms with poisonous fangs living in dank underground caves on the decaying carrion of a duck holocaust? (*)

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(*) On the theory that if you can't cast horrible slander mixed with ad hominem attacks against your co-bloggers, who can you defame unjustifiably?

I didn't want to comment on the story I posted yesterday about the creationist theme park in Pensacola. I thought the passage I quoted from said it all. Professor Leiter, though, has collected some thoughts from correspondents and adds his own here.

Professor Leiter's comments prompted me to post a little more from the New York Times article. It closes with the following:

"We've been to museums, discovery centers, where you have to sit there and take the evolutionary stuff," Mr. Passmore said. "It feels good for them to finally hear it in a public place, something that reinforces their beliefs."

The Passmores are a family the Times interviewed for their story. Here's more on them as reported by the Times:

Robert and Schön Passmore took their children to Disney World last fall and left bitterly disappointed. As Christians who reject evolutionary theory, the family scoffed at the park's dinosaur attractions, which date the apatosaurus, brachiosaurus and the like to prehistoric times.

"My kids kept recognizing flaws in the presentation," said Mrs. Passmore, of Jackson, Ala. "You know — the whole `millions of years ago dinosaurs ruled the earth' thing."

So this week, the Passmores sought out a lower-profile Florida attraction: Dinosaur Adventure Land, a creationist theme park and museum here that beckons children to "find out the truth about dinosaurs" with games that roll science and religion into one big funfest with the message that Genesis, not science, tells the real story of the creation.

I now turn the mic over to Professor Leiter:

the creationist theme park is really just the tip of the iceberg--namely, the vast commercial empire devoted to producing goods and services that reinforce the beliefs of the orthodox, and shield them, and especially their children, from any other sources of information. The consequences for democracy and public culture are potentially very serious.

Re: Heidi's complaints below:

Tolkien's listing is an unforgivable error on my part-- the place goes to the entire trilogy, not simply to the Fellowship, and I've corrected the list.

Speaker For the Dead is superior to Ender's Game. Children of the Mind if pretty awful, but in a cute way, and Xenocide is quite decent. But in a cleverly manipulative vote-counting scheme, I counted any vote for Ender's Game by my co-bloggers as if it were a vote for the entire sequence, thus supporting my own preferences.

Bukold Vorkosigan is not on the list because I have never heard of her, and apparently my co-bloggers haven't either, or didn't like her. Watership Down is not on the list because it is boring.

This is not the first Crescat mutiny, nor will it be the last, I fear.

I would simply like to note how odd it is that I first noticed Slithery D's blog when he criticized the practice of holding doors open for others on the grounds that it was tantamount to genocide, and now here he is championing genocide:

In my moral calculus it's acceptable to kill several million people who may not have any personal culpability in order to exterminate such ideologies and permit the remaining hundreds of millions today and tomorrow to live without that shame and guilt.

This supposed list of Crescat top 100 books is a sham and a travesty. I think my score is 38, and there's serious problems with this list.

First of all, it contains only the Fellowship of the Ring, not the whole trilogy with beautiful appendices.

Yet it contains Ender's Game (which I'm okay with), Speaker for the Dead (somewhat more problematic) et cetera when the further books in that series just should be shot dead as generally not in the right range. How is this justified?

And finally, where the heck is Bujold on this list? Bujold's Vorkosigan series is in every way superior to Card--the characters develop, they make sense, they are pressed in reasonable ways, there's no mystical shit made up by the author at the last minute with random sounding names... Her characters are real; they screw up, and they grow. Plus Bujold is infinitely more clever than Card.

If you haven't read Bujold, now is your time to procrastinate. Read The Mountains of Mourning online. Free.

UPDATE: And where's Watership Down? Come on, come on.

Apropos yesterday's Chipotle blogging:

One odd side effect of working so much with twelve soaked chipotles (and extracting their seeds) is that their oil seeped into my hands and my fingertips tingled for nearly 24 hours. There was much chipotle sauce leftover (my intention) and today smeared on bread it was a great start to a painfully wonderful sandwich. A friend of mine has been known to raise an eyebrow at my masochistic love of spicy food, but she's a ballet dancer, so she can hardly throw stones.

The subtitle of "The Progress Paradox" does a great job summing up what the book is about: "How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse." And to sum up my review: the first half of the book is quite thought-provoking and excellent, but the second half for some reason let me down. Read more for my poorly-articulated explanation for what I mean. :)

Basically, the book's about how life for people in the Western World has never been better -- people are healthier and live longer than ever before, have more leisure time, an abundance of food and consumer goods, luxuries people a few generations ago could never have dreamed of -- yet we're not any happier. The book is littered with conversation-droppers, little facts that percolate in your head and end up finding an appropriate place in all sorts of discussions -- two that I've found myself using just in the day or so since I finished the book:

(1) people complain about having to spend money on health care, but what better thing could we be spending money on than living longer, healthier lives -- Easterbrook argues we should be glad that we can spend such a substantial fraction of our income on something as important and rewarding as health care; (2) society as a whole is well-off enough that even people at the lower end of the income scale live lives that are much closer to how the rich live than ever before in history -- they have cars, and cable TV, and a place to live, and enough food -- the differences are much more marginal than in the past -- life expectancy for the poor is not substantially lower than for the rich -- heck, one of the biggest problems is that poor people are overweight. Poor people in generations past simply could not afford enough food that they could ever be overweight. Crime is down, jobs are less labor-intensive than in generations past, people have more leisure time, education is more obtainable, etc, etc, etc. The vast majority of people live in something approaching The American Dream.

But trend-lines say we're no happier than we used to be. And that beyond an income of $11,000/year, more money really doesn't seem to buy more happiness. Depression rates are rising. Self-reported happiness surveys report happiness down. Easterbrook spends a while arguing that part of it is that people don't feel like the next generation will be any better -- that we already have so much how can quality of life continue to rise. That argument doesn't ring true to me as much as his other big one, that for most of humanity we've had to worry about necessities like food and shelter, and now that most of our necessities are taken care of, we worry about wants -- and there are always more things to want, and more things that other people have, that we can never get fully satisfied. And the wants disappoint when we get them, so we're never really happy. His third (related) argument is that for the first time people aren't worried about the necessities and now have time to ponder the meaning of life and worry about fulfillment -- and that's harder to satisfy than food on the table will satisfy hunger.

This was all very interesting to read, because it's the kind of stuff I sometimes ponder and he's pondered it in a more organized and better-researched way than I ever have, obviously, so I found this compelling. But then the last half of the book seems to lose its nerve and its ambition. Easterbrook argues we should all sleep more, be more forgiving, and keep a "gratitude journal," and that as a society if we raised prices a little bit we could pretty much eradicate the problem of world impoverishment and that we have a duty to give more aid to poor countries. I don't disagree with any of that, but it's not as bold and insightful as the first half of the book got me revved up for. I sleep a lot, and I'm pretty grateful, I think -- but I still wrestle with questions about how to really feel like I'm living a life that matters and wake up each morning content and happy and fulfilled. The book didn't get me any closer. It didn't help explain why it seems like so many people don't admit these concerns and go on living lives that seem shallow and unrewarding. It pretended we all care about this stuff, and I'm not sure we all do. And the foreign aid stuff is great -- but it's not prescriptive toward individual lives so much -- I could give $30 a month to Save The Children, but beyond that there isn't a ton I can do to effect governmental policy (although I guess if everyone read his book and lobbied for higher sales taxes...). CEOs get paid too much, sure. We don't need three TVs per person, sure. But this wasn't what the book built up in its excellent first half to leave me hoping for in the less-excellent second half. I can't recommend the first 187 pages of this book any more than I do. Read them. They're fascinating, thought-provoking, and really excellent. But the next 150 didn't do it for me. I don't know. I don't know what I was waiting for, but it didn't hit me hard enough. I can't help but think there's a different second half of this book on Gregg Easterbrook's hard drive, and his editors wanted a different story. But read the book. It's mostly quite fantastic.

Tyler Cowen and Andrew Chamberlain consider (among other things) whether the quota system for taxicabs makes sense. Their tentative answers seems to be no, which is quite right. As Cowen remarks, cabs do cause some congestion, but one think I noticed when I was in New York last month (and was pointed out to me by co-blogger Peter) is that the optimal number of taxicabs on the street is definitely not the same at all hours of the day. That's why it's impossible to get a cab at rush hour, but there's a useless surfeit of them at other hours of the day. If we're going to persist in such a silly system, it would be wise to have some "rush-hour" medallions to meet the vastly increased demand then.