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Saturday, May 18, 2013

WSJ Links -- Barbecue, Golf, The Plantagents - A Great Weekend Edition; The Internal Revenue Scandal: Just a Simple Misunderstanding

Section D (Off Duty):
  • Wow, this is incredible. I have just moved into the heart of barbecue country (actually in San Antonio, I was already there, but somehow there's more talk about barbecue up here; be that as it may). So, the very first article I see in today's WSJ: The new barbecue.
From San Antonio:
American cooking is being reinvented before our eyes by the most creative, skilled generation of chefs in history. It was only a matter of time before some of them took on the sacred cow of barbecue. At the Granary 'Cue & Brew in San Antonio, Tim Rattray serves a classic Texas menu of brisket, ribs, links and other standards at lunch. 
From Dallas:
Though not a modernist like Mr. Rattray, Tim Byres at Smoke in Dallas hews to another great trend in contemporary American cooking: the return to following the seasons and sourcing ingredients locally. Smoke has its own vegetable garden and displays a kind of primitivist bent that feels revolutionary, especially in a city like Dallas, which is so dominated by big chains. "Dallas is pretty straightlaced," said Mr. Byres.
Section C (Review):
  • DSM-5 run amock.  This, by the way, will be why ObamaCare will break the nation:
Today the public complains that psychiatrists seem ready to call every state of mental distress an illness. They see that any restless boy can receive a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, that troubled veterans—whether exposed to combat or not—are routinely said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and that enormous numbers of discouraged, demoralized people are labeled victims of depression and have medications pressed upon them.
The public is not far wrong. A recent nationwide diagnostic census based on DSM claimed that the majority of Americans have or have had a mental disorder. As a result, an appalling number of young adults in schools and colleges are on one form or another of psychiatric medication.
In April 1349, as an epidemic of bubonic plague devastated his subjects, King Edward III of England staged a lavish tournament at Windsor Castle. This spectacular festival of jousting culminated in the creation of an exclusive club, the Order of the Garter. Edward was fascinated by stories of the legendary King Arthur. In founding a new order of chivalry, he sought to establish his own Knights of the Round Table, with an expanded Windsor standing in for Camelot.
Yet as Dan Jones amply demonstrates in "The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England," such ostentatious display amid the horrors of the Black Death was justified by harsh personal experience: Edward's father, Edward II, had been deposed and murdered in 1327 because of his failure to win the respect of his war-minded nobles. By inviting them to join his new fraternity, Edward III was not only rallying the military support he needed to pursue a claim to the crown of France—he had invaded the country in 1346 and warred there consistently through 1359—but taking steps to ensure that he would never share his father's dismal fate.
Richard III was the last English monarch of Plantagenet descent, but Mr. Jones's book stops in 1399, with the deposition of Richard II by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. This episode ended the run of eight Plantagenet rulers that began with Henry II in 1154. Between 1399 and 1485, by contrast, the throne was occupied by rival Lancastrian and Yorkist "cadet" branches of the Plantagenets. (Mr. Jones is currently writing a sequel that will take the story through the tumultuous 15th century, culminating in the sporadic bloodletting of the "Wars of the Roses" and their gory finale at Bosworth.)
The anarchy only ended when Henry's grandson—the offspring of his daughter Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou—assumed the throne as Henry II. It was Geoffrey's penchant for wearing a jaunty sprig of broom (Latin Planta genista) in his cap that gave the dynasty its evocative name, although it only entered common usage three centuries later. The dynasty is more strictly known as the "Angevins," after Geoffrey's title, Count of Anjou.
Readers can learn all this without tackling Ray Monk's "Robert Oppenheimer," as Mr. Monk acknowledges in a preface that generously pays tribute to previous biographers. He credits, above all, the "staggering amount of research" in Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's "American Prometheus" (2005). But no biography, Mr. Monk notes, has attempted to assess Oppenheimer's contributions to physics.
So Mr. Monk devotes many pages to how Oppenheimer's mind worked, the papers he published, the students he taught and the reasons why "Oppie" (as he liked to be called) dueled with his competitors, especially Dirac. Yet the author's approach demonstrates why previous biographers did not bother with detailed descriptions of Oppenheimer's scientific papers. The author's summaries of his subject's work—literary or scientific—arrive dead on the page, dropped into the narrative, in a way that hardly encourages the reader to continue.
Ironically, Mr. Monk's account suggests that Oppenheimer's discoveries were really on the periphery of the physics research that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. (Oppenheimer's most original contributions were to astrophysics and to the discovery of "black holes"—a discovery that neither Oppenheimer nor his contemporaries were able to appreciate during his lifetime.) While breakthroughs in nuclear physics excited Oppenheimer, he never explored them in his own work. An account of his scientific career need not deal very much with the subject of physics at all. But to understand the whole man, one must understand why Oppenheimer did not win a Nobel Prize and why he did not carry on his work in nuclear physics.
Section B (Business & Finance):
  • Lots of small stories; not that caught my attention.
Section A:

The widely criticized new version of the U.S. psychiatric diagnostic manual released Friday faces a potentially diminished role in research, which would mark a shift for what has been considered the bible of American psychiatry for 30 years.
This fifth revision of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM-5, represents the first major overhaul of the book in nearly 20 years.
This, I suppose, is the medical profession's "rules" akin to the oil industry's rules on fracking. 
The U.S. Golf Association said Friday it will make public on Tuesday its final decision in the anchored-putting controversy. Nothing is official yet, but all indications are that the USGA and its international rules-making counterpart, the R&A, will push forward with the rule they proposed last November, to ban anchored putting once and for all time.
Op-ed: openly gay Democratic mayor of Houston. And they say Texas is a red state. LOL.
  • Houston's recent track record is startling. For the calendar year ending in February, it saw the fastest pace of job growth (4.5%) among the country's 20 largest metropolitan areas. (With a population of 2.1 million, it's the fourth-largest U.S. city.) In 2011, the last year such data are available, Houston had the fastest-growing large metropolitan economy, at 3.7%.
US ambassador killed in Benghazi: just so much noise. -- the President
US ambassador killed in Benghazi: what does it matter? -- Hillary
 Internal Revenue Scandal in chief, Steven T. Miller, please don't misunderstand me:

Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, The Animals

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