Leftists as conservatives

Unlike his father, former vice-premier Xi Zhongxun, who is a bona fide “rightist” and ally of the late party chief Hu Yaobang, [Xi Jinping] is believed to harbor much more conservative views

In China, anyway.

The internets don't know everything

Case in point: over the last few weeks, the local Aldi's has had limited supplies ("special purchase") of Witor's Pralines (the dark chocolate variety sold out quickly) and Benton's best Dark Chocolate Covered Candy Cane Cremes and Benton's best Dark Chocolate Stars. But Aldi didn't mention the former on their site, and only Aldi mentions the latter two.

update
The Candy Cane Cremes are delicious, but the chocolate covering is if anything too thick.

On the other hand, the Dark Chocolate Stars are just chocolate coated graham crackers with sprinkles. But they're great when you sandwich peanut butter between 'em.

Another update
I microwave the Chocolate Covered Candy Cane Cremes on ultra low to soften them up, and I'm slowly growing addicted.

Sex is shameful, but money isn't

Perhaps nothing but a piece of news about money would have made Mrs. Wither so far forget herself as to shriek in front of the maids, who were putting the last touches to the cleared tea-table and setting it for dinner. There was nothing shameful about somebody getting a huge sum of money, and Mrs. Wither instinctively felt this. Sex was shameful, and any bit of news about it must be hidden, but money was all right: any one might hear about that.

An excruciating bore

He could not help feeling a satirical pity for Mr. Spurrey, either; all that money (and not a tightwad, either) and no idea how to spend it. Mr. Spurrey had always been suspicious of women and rather afraid of them, so he had not had any fun there; and men only tolerated him. Fun and jollity had a way of quietly going off the boil when he came up, even if he did not say a word. He was too sharp to tolerate toadies yet too stupid to please even ordinary kind people, and his habit of trying to frighten his hearers, when he was not excruciatingly boring them, had put the lid on; no one, all his long life, had really wanted to be with Mr. Spurrey.

I wish I was dead

"All right then, I'll come, but I don't want to a bit and I wish I was dead." "Well, one day you will be, and so shall I; but meanwhile we may as well behave with courage and common sense..."

An elegant printed invitation

It looked exciting. It made you think "Now why didn't we splash a bit and have our cards done like that?" It was only later that you realized that the party itself, the house it was given in, the food and the drink, would have to be even more exciting than the card, in order to justify the excitement the card had raised. Then, of course, you gave up the whole idea and bought ordinary cards as usual.

Some dogs are hard to like

Chappy was an enormous great dog, of extraverted temperament and seething energy, disliked by the entire neighbourhood. He was not vicious: everyone wished that he were, and then there might have been a chance of getting rid of him. He was only too much; too large, too friendly, too energetic. He was also He was also a barker, delighted with any excuse — or without any excuse — to bark for an hour or more. He liked galloping round with a gang of small boys. He liked a crowd, preferably a well-dressed crowd, but any crowd was better than none.

How to be happy

The Hermit was happy too; but then he always was. He had no inhibitions, and a sense of his own importance that was never shaken no matter what anyone said or did to him. Small wonder he was happy.

Poppy or sesame

Or plain: these are the only ones that I managed to slash:

They deal with us because it’s in their interest

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates:

The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments — some governments — deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.

For the time being, anyway.

Civilization As We Know It Is Corrupt

Civilization as we know it is corrupt. It may be doomed; there are plenty of omens. Its foundations are rat-eaten, its towers go up unsteadily into lowering clouds where drone the hidden battleplanes. But it can, and does, supply its young daughters with luxuries at prices they can afford. No woman need be dowdy, or shabbily genteel. While she has a few shillings to spend on clothes, she can buy something pretty and cheerful. This may not be much, but it is something. Tomorrow we die; but at least we danced in silver shoes."

Shut Up

The truth always sounds fantastic. The Hermit, with his lack of responsibilities, his interest in everyone's affairs, and his admiration of himself, was the happiest person in the neighbourhood. If only it weren't for them bloody birds. 'Ow they did go on, waking you up at five o'clock in the morning, shrieking and hollering after dinner when you wanted a doss. Then there was that one that went on 'alf the night, as though all day wasn't enough. Skizz! He viciously whizzed a stone in the direction of a dazzling song among the water-rooted hazels, and out darted a small brown bird, singing as he flew away. "Gar," muttered the Hermit. "Shut up."

Subtle Chekhovian Currents

As for Hetty, she was wondering if she should ask Viola what it was like to live at The Eagles? but she decided not to, because it was plain that although Viola was a girl with much natural charm, she was also a girl with much natural silliness, who would think The Eagles a boring place and be quite unconscious of the subtle Chekhovian currents that moved sluggishly through its dark silent rooms. I expect she would love the kind of existence we lead at home, which is about as subtle as a pie-dish and far less useful, thought Hetty. Not that I ought to grumble.

Hetty goes on to acknowledge her good fortune, but in describing a party that fascinates Viola, thinks

All their food, eaten in circumstances unheightened by the imagination, was excellent, and all of it tasted the same to her. Food only became interesting when it was symbolic, or when it was eaten to the music of witty talk, or by brave men in danger, by true poets who were starving.

You Just Wait

Viola:

like most very young people, she found it difficult, almost impossible, to admit that she was unhappy to somebody old. Old people (she dimly felt) were so beastly pleased when you said you were fed-up. Ah, their faces said, so life isn't all roses and honey, after all, you see! Just because you're twenty-one, you needn't think you'll escape. You'll learn. You just wait.

Betrayed By What Is False Within

When Viola remarks that it's difficult for the old Hermit to carve well, Hetty responds:

"Oh, he actually sells his carvings sometimes to motorists, so it is not so funny as it appears. He stands at the crossroads on Sundays with a tray from Woolworth's round his neck and the carvings on it, and the motorists, lured by his unusual appearance, pause, and are betrayed by what is false within — namely, their own taste."

"But they aren't very good, are they?" in a whisper.

"They are more bad than the eye inexperienced in bad carvings would conceive it possible for carvings to be," drawled Hetty, "but I imagine that the motorists are amazed that an object can be made by the hands alone, because all the objects which they encounter in their daily lives are made by a machine or emerge from a tin. They are so amazed that they assume that an object made by the hand alone is necessarily worth having, and so they buy it."

"They are so amazed that they assume that an object made by the hand alone is necessarily worth having, and so they buy it." Even in 1938, people were suckers for "handmade" crap.

Worn Paths

Thoughts, quietly sad as she imagined the thoughts of the old must be, rose uselessly in her mind. They were all familiar to her, like worn paths; she experienced anger and boredom even while the well-known train unfolded.

after her mind wanders down the "worn paths" of having a career or of loving one's family:

I wonder why (this path was so worn that she turned from it, in sick impatience, even as the thought came up) I've never had anyone in love with me? Other women do, not half as nice-looking as I am. Of course, I've always wanted love very much; real love, for keeps, not just an affair, and I'm sure that puts men off. They hate you to be serious.

After some misgivings, she gives in to her desire to take driving lessons from the family chauffeur Saxon:

Tina had stopped trying to be honest with herself, put Selene's Daughters [a psychology book that she's using to try to understand herself] away in a drawer, and decided to be — not honest perhaps — but certainly sensible.

Rubbishy Books By Immoral Highbrow Authors

Mrs. Spring reflects on her niece, who lives with her:

...Hetty had taken after her father's side, the unsuccessful (that is, poor) Franklins who were all teachers and parsons and librarians, and as dull as ditch-water, with their noses in books, their socks in holes and their finances in muddles. Hetty was a disappointment. All that Mrs. Spring could do with Hetty was to let Victor see that her investments did not go down, while she herself chose her clothes and tried to marry her off....Hetty was also a discontented, queer girl whom nothing pleased but rubbishy books by immoral highbrow authors...

As for Hetty, she had not the courage to say so, but she considered the life she led at Grassmere to be tedious, futile, and coarse.

Having one's nature deepened by tragedy

In Nightingale wood, Stella Gibbons writes

I must get a better job, thought Saxon, running lightly downstairs with his waisted jacket over one arm, but he did not think it dramatically or tragically; he thought it with impatient common sense. Neither he nor his mother were tragic people; tragedy overtook them, but it did not deepen their natures, because it found no answer therein. The long-drawn tragedy of his father's life had made Saxon, not bitter and humiliated, but self-respecting and ambitious.

I didn't entirely understand this any better than the Aristotelian view of tragedy that I came across before. For example, as George R. Noyes wrote of those who view Oedipus Tyrannus or Agamemnon

By the excitation of such lofty passions our own purely human emotions are purged of disturbing elements, are deepened and purified.

Personally, I could do without it, and when I see others engaged in frivolities or purely concerning themselves with superficialities, I envy them.

How to make more people die

On November 23, Michelle Higgins wrote,

The Federal Aviation Administration agrees with the safety board that a child is safer when belted into a child restraint system, or CRS, and states on its Web site that “keeping a child in a CRS or device during the flight is the smart and right thing to do.”

But the F.A.A. continues to turn down the child seat request. The rationale? It maintains that doing so would require families — now accustomed to children under 2 years old flying free if they sit in a parent’s lap — to pay for the extra seat. That cost, the F.A.A. surmises, would cause some families to revert to car travel, which is less safe. “Consequently,” states the agency in its latest response to the safety board, “entire families would be subject to far higher fatality rates, which would produce a net increase in overall transportation fatalities.”

On November 18, Nate Silver wrote,

More stringent security procedures, in essence, function as a tax upon air travel, and produce a corresponding deadweight loss. Teleconferences are often a poor substitute for person-to-person interaction, and when people are reluctant to travel, some business deals don’t get done that otherwise would have. Recreational travelers, meanwhile, may skip out on vacations that otherwise would have brought them pleasure and stress-relief (while improving revenues for tourism-dependent economies). The tenuous profits of the airline industry are also affected, of course. Revenue losses from the new bag-checking procedures may have measured in the billions, according to the Cornell study.

Other passengers may substitute car travel for air travel. But this too has its consequences, since car travel is much more dangerous than air travel over all. According to [a study by three professors at Cornell University], roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit.

At a certain university...

An administrator suggested that courses should have no more than 20% of students who failed, withdrew, or even received Ds or incompletes. Meanwhile, according to a review of "The Five-Year Party", Craig Brandon

...describes the vast majority of colleges as "subprime," which he defines as any school that has lowered its standards to the point at which almost anyone can pass. There's a college for every student at any price point, regardless of ability or career goals. At subprime schools, Brandon estimates, only 10 percent of students are really interested in academics. The rest are there for mostly social purposes.

The slackers take dumbed down courses in which grade inflation results in 90 percent of students getting As and Bs. Learning is optional, neither required nor expected. Even mental midgets who do no work are too big to fail. Nobody fails. That would make the professor look bad, and the school would risk losing a paying customer.

What's the payoff for students?

A large number of those who do graduate have trouble finding good-paying jobs or end up doing something for which they do not need a college degree. Brandon's conclusion: Millions of people would be better off doing something else with their time and money.

Update
So college teachers are kind of like drug dealers.