Using Google Books as a placeholder.

This is for my book on the Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company:

The Survey By Survey Associates, Charity Organization Society of the City of New York

I wonder if I can get this in the DPI that the publisher wants?

Karl Rove is a liar.

People who read that many books in a year don’t count them, and they definitely don’t brag about it in a major American newspaper. And this might make sense:

In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader.

Except wasn’t he a “C” student?

The hardest book I’ve ever read.*

I can’t believe someone is leading a reading group for Gödel, Escher, Bach on Daily Kos. I’m even more stunned that their second diary on it made the recommended list there.

To call this book dense would be the understatement of the year. It is hard sledding! What I remember though, is that it’s an absolute wonderful example of higher-order thinking. The author, Douglas Hofstadter, does a beautiful job of connecting things that don’t appear to be connected.

I wish I had the time to crack the book again, but I have to much Colorado History to read to do that as it’s my first time teaching that class next semester. I will, however, follow the series to the best of my ability and report back if so moved.

* OK, I confess: I didn’t get through it, but I still learned a ton from the first seven chapters (I can tell because my bookmark is still in my copy) and I’m sure I’m not alone.

I’m not an outlier on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

As I expected, I got Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers for Christmas. I’ve read all sorts of reviews and I agree whole-heartedly with the hostile ones that I read which claim that Gladwell is cherry-picking information. Certainly there have to be plenty of bands besides the Beatles that practiced 10,000 hours and went nowhere.

Indeed, Outliers is just one anecdote after another. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but then Gladwell has to go and praise David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. I liked Washington’s Crossing and Paul Revere’s Ride, but I defy anyone who knows anything about American history to read the last chapter of that book and not burst out laughing.

Getting back to Gladwell, as strained as his argument is, I’ve enjoyed reading the book though because he writes so well. There’s plenty of good lines in it, like this one from pages 149-50:

Those three things–autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.

That’s kind of stating the obvious, but I think part of the problem with America today is nobody bothers to state that obvious fact any more. Employers simply assume that everyone will jump when they say “jump” because that’s what they’re supposed to do. No a book about how people can stay fulfilled that’s a little more sophisticated than the Four-Hour Work Week – that would be really interesting!

Somehow this seems appropriate for Christmas.

And in other Python news, I see from their YouTube Channel that Monty Python movies are now available from iTunes. I think I’m going to get Jabberwocky as I haven’t seen it since I was about twelve years old. I don’t think it made much sense then, but I’m hoping it does now.

The UAW is in a lose/lose situation.

There’s a very good story on the reversal of fortune that the United Auto Workers finds itself in these days in today’s Washington Post. Being a historian, I’ll start with the history first:

“The auto workers were for many years the model for the American standard of living,” said David Montgomery, emeritus professor of labor history at Yale University.

Their power stemmed in part from the stunning success of the U.S. auto industry.

In 1950, for example, General Motors reported record profits, declared the largest stockholder dividend in U.S. corporate history and couldn’t build cars fast enough. So when the United Auto Workers threatened to strike, the company agreed to a landmark deal with pensions, a cost-of-living formula and cut-rate health insurance. Fortune magazine hailed it as “the treaty of Detroit.”

Twenty years later, the union seemed to have become, if anything, even more powerful. When legendary UAW President Walter Reuther addressed the union convention in 1970, he was bullish on the organization’s prospects.

“We are, without question, the strongest and most effective industrial union in the world,” he said. “We have taken on the most powerful corporations in the world, and, despite their power and their great wealth, we have always prevailed.”

As a result the union gets treated like this:

For decades after its founding in 1935, the United Auto Workers stood as a powerful model for the American labor movement, an influential organization that historians credit with uplifting living standards for all working Americans.

But with the announcement of the federal loan deal yesterday, the union found itself being forced into concessions that some described as tantamount to surrender.

The $17.4 billion federal loan agreement does keep the domestic auto industry alive. But the terms of that loan also insist that the wages and benefits for union workers be lowered to “equal” the average of nonunion workers, specifically, those at the U.S. plants of Nissan, Toyota and Honda.

Those and other concessions would essentially erase the significant distinctions between union and nonunion auto workers, and the lack of such union worker advantages would render moot the union’s fundamental purpose, some industry analysts and labor experts said.

I agree. If a union can’t raise wages or improve working conditions, it has no reason to exist. You can see the hint of the way out of this in Barney Frank’s comments in the same article:

“The president has added an unfair assault on working men and women, which could require them to accept a disproportionately large reduction in what is currently legally owed to them,” he said in a statement. “I am particularly opposed to the notion . . . that could give foreign auto companies in effect the ability to dictate wages for all American auto workers.”

Frank said that because those requirements were “unilaterally inserted” by Bush, the Obama administration “should take whatever steps are necessary to remove them.”

Hopefully that will happen, but then everybody will blame the UAW when the industry collapses anyway. The ultimate message to unions is that if you collaborate with your employer, the powers that be are going after you anyway. All that’ll do is make the coming flurry of organizing activity that much more radical.

Too bad there likely won’t be an American auto industry to organize this time around. Maybe they can start with Toyota.

George Bush destroyed the economy in order to save it.

Bush said he didn’t think he would be viewed as the 21st century’s Herbert Hoover, who was president during the Great Depression. He said he worked to keep the economy from collapsing.

“I’m a free market guy,” Bush said. “But I’m not going to let this economy crater in order to preserve the free market system.

– George Bush on Fox News Channel (via Firedoglake).

One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. Air Force Major by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Ben Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: “‘it became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a U.S. major says.” To this day, “Ben Tre logic” is a common saying for whenever a “logical” conclusion is to destroy something out of the perceived best interests of everyone involved.

– Ben Tre, Wikipedia, Accessed December 18, 2008.

The Columbian Exposition and much more.

I’m not sure I properly understood what the Flickr Commons is until I read this post at Boing Boing. Now I do, and I’m absolutely stunned by what you can find here. The above example from the Brooklyn Museum’s set on the 1893 World’s Fair is from only one of many groups of pictures available there that I know I’ll use someday.

The Wind in the Willows is 100 years old.

The Wind in the Willows is 100 years old. We took our four-year-old on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland when we were there last summer. The two significantly older kids in front of us in line were asking their father about the source material. Neither them nor their father knew about the book. That made me very sad.

Leave Warren Harding alone!!!

This is what happens when you let British people comment on American history:

Warren Harding’s White House tenure from 1921 to 1923 was marked by notorious scandals and resignations. Under him, it is claimed, the US regressed into a period of isolationism, nativism, and recession, ending with the Wall Street crash.

1. Most of the notorious scandals came out after Harding died.

2. The US rejected the Versailles Treaty and entry into the League of Nations (which marked the start of that period of isolation) during the Wilson Administration.

3. Again, the recession started in 1919 during the Wilson Administration.

4. And about that recession lasting until the Wall Street crash? Hasn’t this guy ever heard of the Roaring Twenties?

He’s not particularly nice to Herbert Hoover either (who I like more than I should), but at least he doesn’t get anything wrong there.

This is all in an effort to demonstrate that Bush might not be the worst President ever. The man has all the obstinance of Hoover and all the incompetence of Harding. It’s too early to tell, but I think Bush is going to be awfully tough to beat on the race to the bottom of the pack. James Buchanan is the only real competition.