My Pal Lou, Looking for ET

One of my best friends from childhood was a kid named Lou Nigra.  Mrs. Cooke's class, fifth grade, Belleaire Elementary School, Bellevue, Nebraska.  He remained my friend when we both became guys, and I'm proud to say that we have remained friends as men. 

Lou has had a varied career, but he finally realized a dream that many boys of a certain generation had -- I know it was on my short list of dream professions when I was in my early adolescence.  Lou and I and our buds all grew up during the space race and the excitement of the early years of space travel and unmanned deeper-space exploration.  And, speaking now only for myself, I was a science/nature nerd.  (Was?, I can hear you asking.) 

And so there was a period of time when I was certain I was going to be an astronomer.  One day I realized it involved calculus and hard physics and almost no actually looking up at the sky through the eyepiece of a big honkin' telescope, and that was the end of that.  (Also, I noticed that it was cold at night.)   But not for Lou, who got his Ph.D. in the subject a few months ago from the University of Wisconsin.

Not only that, but he landed an extremely cool job:  He's Project Scientist for SETI Live (SETI = Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) based at the very cool Adler Planetarium in super cool Chicago, right by the fabulously cool Lakefront.   I mean, it's a damned cool life for my pal.  You can read his first blog here:

       Science in the Moment

Here's an even cooler thing -- the citizenry (that's you) can participate in the search for ET by devoting some of your computer processing power -- and, more importantly your own powers of observation -- to analyzing radio signals from outer space collected by the Allen Telescope Array.  I think you can get instructions on how to do this at the main site, http://www.setilive.org/.  (Note that you will need a recent version of one of the popular web browsers to access this site and participate.  You can download one for free from the intro screen.)   You can get additional information by clicking on the SETILive banner and reading a couple of earlier posts by project head Jill Tarter. 

I should add that this is not related to some earlier citizen SETI efforts, like SETI@Home, where one just lent part of one's home computer to processing signals.  This one actually asks you to attempt to see patterns that might stand out from the "background noise" of the universe and call them to SETILive's attention.  I don't know exactly how it works, but it sounds like a very fun way to get involved in something we're all curious about -- who's out there broadcasting (and, we hope, listening -- unless, of course, they're murderous monsters from beyond).

Allen Telescope Array, Listening to the Universe

And keep an eye on The Science Channel, which has a sponsorship role in SETILive and will be reporting on it.  So you might see Lou himself on your TV screen holding forth on this project, with images of the Trifid Nebula or the Andromeda Galaxy in the background.  Can't miss his handsome mug (he was absolutely the fifth grade throb), he looks just like this:

Dr. Louis M. Nigra

(Can't you see him in one of the early scenes to those old-timey alien invasion movies gazing through his refractor and trying to warn the countryside of an approaching UFO?  I don't think he smokes a pipe, though.)  

It's making news elsewhere as well:
       SETI Website to Crowdsource Alien Life.

So if you want to personally join the search for ET, Lou and SETILive have what you're looking for.  If you find anything Out There, let Lou know immediately!  And then drop me a line so I can scoop the Journal of Astrophysics, not to mention Sky & Telescope.

I'll have updates as the project progresses.

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Super Tuesday's Eve

I suppose I should know what the polls are saying about what's going to happen tomorrow, but my mind has been elsewhere recently.  I've been shaking my head over the Republican contest. 

I'm a right-of-center guy.  (Surprise!)  Not a Tea Party enthusiast.  But I would say that Rick Santorum and I would agree on a lot of things.  Never mind on which things we disagree, but suffice it to say that I got no major beef with his positions on a number of things. 

But  .  .  .  .

Let's assume that I'm a Republican primary voter.

Let's assume that I really, really think that Barack Obama has been a poor President and must be defeated for the good of the Republic.

Let's further assume that I'm a mainstream conservative voter, right of people one might generally think of as politically "moderate."

And let's say that I've decided, based on the laceratingly astute analysis I read in The Cool Hot Center ("Advice for Republicans: Scratch that Itch, and Then Move On"), that Newt is not the guy. 

But hey, there's Rick Santorum.

Assume that I trust Rick Santorum to advocate forcefully for mainstream conservative principles based on (most of) his record and his utterances during the campaign.

But maybe I view Mitt Romney, on the other hand, as a straight-down-the-middle moderate.  Forget about whether he is correctly so characterized, just assume that I believe that he's to the left of Santorum.  And maybe I don't trust him to be as conservative as he claims.  and in general I don't like moderates because some of their views are immoderately to the left of center.

But now let's say that absolutely no one in his right mind thinks that Rick Santorum can defeat Barack Obama, but that many of those same people think that Mitt Romney might.  It will be tough, that POTUS is a smooth and crafty deceiver, but Mitt would at least have a colorable chance.  And I've heard these opinions, and seen these polls, and I more or less think it's true.

So why in God's name would I vote for Rick Santorum if, assuming my position were shared by enough like-minded people, it would guarantee the re-election of Barack Obama?  What possible satisfaction could there be in gloating in 2015 over my vote in 2012 while my health care deteriorates, my retirement funds erode in value, the only vehicles allowed in the HOV lanes are EPA-approved GM electric vehicles praying they get where they're going before their batteries die or asplode, my house is entirely lit by miserable curly light bulbs that I hope don't break and poison the dog, I can't buy replacement parts for my Colt Python, and I watch John Roberts swear in new Justice Alec Baldwin?  I exaggerrate, a little.

Let's review:

Obama v. Santorum = Obama, for a dead-bang certainty and even fewer constraints on his statist agenda through 2016.

Obama v. Romney =  Maybe Romney, who may be at worst moderate, which at worst is better than Obama at Obama's best, and probably a whole lot better because Romney will know who got him elected.

I'm sorry.  I'm really sorry, friends of mine on the Right. 

It's just got to be Romney.

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Returning very briefly to the non-hypothetical world of the Cool Hot Center: 

I think Rick Santorum shows a lot of signs of kookiness (forcing the teaching of intelligent design -- don't get me started), and he's the Leonardo di Caprio of this campaign.  Directors are always trying to cast Leo in old-man roles (Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover) and romancing beautiful women of prime age (Sharon Stone, in "The Quick and the Dead"), but it never works because he still looks and sounds like he's 14.   Santorum is unimpressive, he's way too far from the mainstream, he's devoted to social positions that the Right has already lost and are not going to be reversed, and he's peevish.  He got absolutely killed in his 2006 Senate re-election bid, 41%-59%, and part of the reason (only part) was that he was perceived as something of an arrogant jerk. 

Mitt Romney looks and sounds good (perhaps a little less pomade), he's flip-flopped in the direction of conservatism, he'll more than hold his own with Obama, and he'll have a first-rate campaign organization.  His Mormonism is a nothingburger.  It means less to voters than John Kennedy's Catholicism did in 1960, and less than Obama's race and affiliation with Jeremiah Wright did in 2008.  I would be far less concerned about religion influencing his governance than I would Santorum's, who's no friend of church-state separation.  He looks like a President and I'll bet he'll find a hard copy of his birth certificate somewhere.

And he's got a sense of humor.

He's welcome to the slogan I have composed for him:

"Mitt is It."

I urge all seven of you who will read this before your state votes tomorrow to keep this in mind as you reach out towards that touch-screen at your local polling emporium.

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When Will the Rockies Blow?

A few years ago the Memsahib and I and her kids and their kids took a vacation to Estes Park, portal to Rocky Mountain National Park.  Had a great time.  A couple of times we drove into the Park.  We saw things the casual visitor hardly ever sees from the road -- a badger (probably not a honey badger) and a bear, along with the stuff you can frequently see (a herd of elk in the upper elevations).  A rainbow ending in a meadow.  Great trip.

I was shocked by one thing that I saw there:   Enormous stands of lodgepole pine, dying tree by tree.  I could hardly believe how serious the attack was in this area of protected natural beauty:

An ill-placed lightning bolt would take out huge swaths of piney mountainside, I thought.  Surely, I thought, someone must be worried about this. 

The reason for this massive dying is well-known:  It's the depredations of the Mountain Pine Beetle.  Actually, there are a dozen or so species of this pest that have moved up from Mexico over the years.  Their activities strip the bark from the trees, water cannot move up to the branches from the roots, and the tree dies.

Turns out, of course, that a lot of people are worried about this.  I have seen it written that global warming is responsible, allowing the beetles to live through winters that would otherwise keep their numbers down.  That theory has been replaced more recently by pointing the finger at the droughts of 2002 and 2003.  The trees would defend themselves by releasing more sap in the areas of the initial attack, something they are not equipped to do in times of very low precipitation. 

But despite the staggering loss of timber, I was very surprised to see that, aesthetic considerations aside, some authorities are not terribly worried about fire.  Here's a clip from an article from a University of Miami School of Communication site quoting experts on "Our National Parks":

"The effects that the mountain pine beetle has had on the park are debatable. It was widely believed that the increased number of dead trees made the park much more susceptible to fires, but this belief is fading as recent studies show that there is only a one-year period where the dead trees are in a "red" phase (the color of the pine needles on the tree) where they add to the fuel load of the park. After that, the dead trees enter into a "gray" phase, where the chances of catching on fire are slimmer."


Really?  A dry grey tree won't burn like a dry gray one?  OK, they're the experts.  More interesting studies:

"But according to preliminary research results from NASA and University of Wisconsin forest ecologists, large fires do not appear to occur more often or with greater severity in forest tracts with beetle damage. In fact, the researchers find that in some cases, swaths of beetle-killed forest may actually be less likely to burn than those without."   (Fourmile Canyon Fire: Perhaps Not a Sign of Things to Come)


There is about this view a flavor of new thinking about forest fires in general -- that they're inevitable and even desirable to clear out old dead growth and start a vital new cycle of vegetation, including pines.  Witness the comeback of Yellowstone following the fires in 1988  (This view -- that this attack is "natural" and, at least as far as fire is concerned, not as dire as it appears -- is seriously irritating to the global warming folks.  Google "North America's Mountain Pine Beetle Pandemic" and click on that PDF that should be first on the list.) 

Even if fire isn't the threat it appears, the aesthetics are appalling and, of course, the death of entire mountainsides has an affect on the ecosystem of the area in many other ways. 

One of the charms of blogging -- you learn a little something you didn't expect all the time.

Blame the Poor

            Got your attention? 

            For the past couple of years I’ve been reading about the growing gap between the wealthy and the – well, everyone else, I guess.  I never paid it much mind.  My first thought was that this is the kind of talk that, when you look behind the generalities, has its origin in definitional chicanery and ginned-up studies.  And it was mostly coming from The New York Times and other ideologically-motivated organs.  And, of course, now we have the “Occupy” folks with their 1% v. 99% mantra.  

            I also thought – and still think, although this is not the point of this particular entry – that after a certain point of material prosperity that starts somewhere in the lower-middle-class, financial and social-status inequality doesn’t matter much to those above that point.  I’m not saying it’s “right,” I’m saying it’s just not a huge deal to those folks.   People who have air-conditioning, flat-screen TVs with cable or satellite, Internet access, and three meals a day don’t feel oppressed by truly wealthy people, much less by the people just next up the social ladder where they would someday like to be themselves.   They may feel oppressed by the tax man, or illegal immigrants, and sometimes by the oil companies, but they’re not a fertile ground for revolutionary agitation.  Witness the petering out of that very Occupy movement.

            I don’t propose to get into the debate of whether certain people are overcompensated – thinking mainly here of certain financial executives, whose risk/reward seems out of whack and who appear immune to shareholder democracy.   (Even there:    We must have some kind of answer for why shareholders continue to elect directors who vote colossal salaries and bonuses and truly incomprehensible severance packages – no one’s bribing them or threatening them to do so.)  I don’t think these guys are the main problem, at least as it is defined by the people who worry about this issue.

            When I thought about this issue at all, I thought that there must be something going on that is reducing the supply of people who perform the functions in society that create the rewards that send them upwards on the food chain, or increasing the numbers of those who can’t or won’t perform those functions:  Education; welfare; structural changes in the economy wrought by the digital revolution; revulsion to learning about math and science – any number of things that could change the incentives toward a distribution of wealth that looks different than it has looked in the middle-past and beyond. 

            These causes could be either pernicious or benign, but didn’t seem to me to be reasons to blame those who benefited from whatever it was that was increasing social and financial inequality.   Even tax policy:  We read of companies and persons who seem not to pay their “fair share” – but is anyone proposing that they should pay more than they owe after they take advantage of tax laws and regulations?   (If the left argues that the government is corruptly influenced by these same entities to enact legislation favoring them, what makes the left believe that giving the government greater authority to regulate – greater even than taxation, the forcible taking of cash money from the population – is going to solve anything?)    My point to myself, I guess, is that if inequality was increasing, it was not only in some sense “natural,” but perceived as natural by those not at the top of the pile, or at least as not resulting from the tyranny of unelected elites.  Witness:  Obama’s efforts at stirring up class resentment isn’t getting much traction, other than among his media acolytes and the usual suspects among his upper-middle-class college-educated supporters. 

            Still, there’s enough in me of the Nebraska egalitarian to worry about these numbers.  Equality – of opportunity, if not of result – is something we all favor.   And enough in me of the devotee of classic capitalism to wonder whether this is something that the theory needs to take account of, and correct if it can be corrected while maintaining capitalism’s heartbeat of freedom.  (Capitalism presumes some kinds of inequality – there are winners and losers even where opportunity is equal.)

            So it was with great interest that I read recent accounts of studies that seem to point the finger here in an unexpected direction.

            The first is from, of all places, The Washington Post, and is by noted American political scientist James Q. Wilson (who, I am stunned to discover, died the day I wrote this).   The title tells you where he’s going (link): 

Angry About Inequality? Don't Blame the Rich.

You may remember him from his “broken windows” theory of neighborhood deterioration and restoration, a theory explicitly adopted by Mayor Giuliani in New York City that is widely regarded as having measurably improved things there.   The second is by iconoclastic scholar – generally regarded as conservative, but not always – Charles Murray in The Wall Street Journal, describing the results of his recent study from his new book Coming Apart:  The State of White America, 1960–2010 (link):

            The Great Divide

Murray you may recall from his controversial work The Bell Curve.   

            I commend both of these articles to you; they’re eye-openers.  Here’s a summary of their surprising findings, very different in some respects but with a fascinating similarity:

            Wilson (RIP) first notes that the “rich,” the 1% as it were, are not a monolithic group.  People move in and out of the upper tier of the wealthy with some fluidity:  "A study by Thomas A Garrett, economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that less than half of people in the top 1 percent in 1996 were still there in 2005.”  Moreover:

Mobility is not limited to the top-earning households.  A study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that nearly half of the families in the lowest fifth of income earners in 2001 had moved up within six years. Over the same period, more than a third of those in the highest fifth of income-earners had moved down. Certainly, there are people such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates who are ensconced in the top tier, but far more common are people who are rich for short periods.

He then cites studies that note that the wages of people with college educations have climbed, while those without have declined.  The growing number of double-income families is also quite significant; the growing number of working women greatly influences these numbers. 

            And then he says something that is a different version with what I’d been thinking:  “We could reduce income inequality by trying to curtail the financial returns of education and the number of women in the workforce — but who would want to do that?”   Who indeed?  Not even the Left.

James Q. Wilson (d. March 2, 2012)

             He notes that European countries are also showing a growing trend in income inequality.  Can you guess the one exception, where there has been a greater leveling of the rich and poor? 

            Greece.  

Soaking the rich, he argues, won’t help and actually isn’t necessary:

The real income problem in this country is not a question of who is rich, but rather of who is poor. Among the bottom fifth of income earners, many people, especially men, stay there their whole lives. Low education and unwed motherhood only exacerbate poverty, which is particularly acute among racial minorities.  *   *   *

Making the poor more economically mobile has nothing to do with taxing the rich and everything to do with finding and implementing ways to encourage parental marriage, teach the poor marketable skills and induce them to join the legitimate workforce. It is easy to suppose that raising taxes on the rich would provide more money to help the poor. But the problem facing the poor is not too little money, but too few skills and opportunities to advance themselves.

He also supports another one of my suspicions – that, in general, even the poor are becoming better off. 

Poverty in America is certainly a serious problem, but the plight of the poor has been moderated by advances in the economy. Between 1970 and 2010, the net worth of American households more than doubled, as did the number of television sets and air-conditioning units per home. In his book "The Poverty of the Poverty Rate," Nicholas Eberstadt shows that over the past 30 or so years, the percentage of low-income children in the United States who are underweight has gone down, the share of low-income households lacking complete plumbing facilities has declined, and the area of their homes adequately heated has gone up. The fraction of poor households with a telephone, a television set and a clothes dryer has risen sharply.

In other words, the country has become more prosperous, as measured not by income but by consumption: In constant dollars, consumption by people in the lowest quintile rose by more than 40 percent over the past four decades.

So it is not so terribly surprising that there has not been an outbreak of class warfare, the efforts of the President and the Occupy guys notwithstanding.  And that government income figures are misleading. 

           Wilson would not “blame the poor,” of course, but he does insist that if we want to reduce financial inequality we must find a way to improve the education along with training and employment opportunities for the truly poor.  Wilson does not say it out loud, but it is apparent from his analysis that the poor themselves have a role in creating the conditions for their own advancement.

            Murray is gloomier; he thinks America is “coming apart,” but the divide he’s worried about isn’t financial – it’s cultural.  And he’s not even considering blacks and Latinos, focusing instead solely on whites, a population where one might expect to find a narrowing of cultural gaps.   And he is also focusing solely on “prime-age adults,” ages 30-49.   Up through the Sixties, he writes, the “American way of life” denoted “a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace,” encompassing “shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.”  However:

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

Charles Murray

            Focusing solely on prime-age whites, Murray finds dramatically increasing divergence between the educated, professional (which he calls “Belmont”) and the high-school only, blue-collar workers (“Fishtown) in marriage rates; single parenthood (“[o]n just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families”); “industriousness” (measured by males who say they are unavailable for work or who are settling for part-time work); crime;  and religiosity.

            He further notes that formerly, the upper-middle-class executive and the blue-collar worker shared many of the same cultural experiences – watched the same TV shows, took the same vacations, homes equipped with the same type of equipment and rooms.   Now, however, the upper-middle class have pools, eat different kinds of foods, appoint their homes differently, take longer and ritzier vacations, read different books, watch different TV shows, raise their children differently, maintain their health more avidly, embrace different trends.  And these divergences are even more dramatic in recent years among the “SuperZIPS,” those ZIP codes where the truly affluent live, usually remote suburban areas near major cities. 

            It made my heart glad to see Murray write that “the reforms of the 1960’s jump-started the deterioration.”  The Sixties, in my view, were a miserable ten years for the long run, and I agree entirely with Murray that:

Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

Like Wilson, Murray believes it is fruitless to rein in the better-to-do:

 The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won't make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won't make a difference.

            His remedies for this are desirable, but would be difficult to implement.  He believes that the upper-middle class needs to stop being “nonjudgmental,” and to have the courage of its convictions about hard work, marriage, and the like, and stop acting like behaviors that lead to a life of hardship don’t make any difference.  Bravo that.

            His next suggestion, however, strikes me as quite improbable:  He believes that the better-off should try to involve themselves more in the lives of the less-well-off by the choice of where they live, where they go to church, where they send their kids to school.  “America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people,” he writes.  “If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.”

            Well, Charlie, good luck with that.  I moved into a “changing neighborhood” once, not for altruistic reasons, and once was enough.  Well-off parents are not ever, no never, going to send their kids to schools where a noticeable percentage of the kids are unmotivated, haven’t been read to, and raise hell.  They are not going to buy homes in neighborhoods where the residents tend to party late into the night.   And when the well-off do venture into neighborhoods successfully, what happens?  Property values go up, the existing residents can’t afford it, and there you have it – gentrification.   What Murray advocates simply does not happen – diversity inevitably gives way to homogeneity.      And you think developers are going to build new suburban neighborhoods with some “affordable” homes and some high-end?  Who is going to buy high-end housing, where a large percentage of the buyer’s wealth is tied up in a home whose value is anchored to the value of less-desirable housing? 

            No, I think Murray’s own work and instinct about values gives us the, or at least an answer.  It starts with an end to governmental paternalism.   It continues with permitting the creators of capital to “discriminate” between people who will work, and competently, and those who will not or cannot.  It allows employers to hire or not depending on factors which include their workers’ “lifestyle” choices, and allows educators to exclude from the classroom – leave behind, as it were – those children whose presence consumes enormous resources and retards the progress of those who are there to learn. 

            So, my title notwithstanding, no one is proposing to “blame the poor.”  But resentment of and attempts to level the “1%,” or the 25%, or whatever cutoff the equalitarians would force on us, or punishing those who have developed the skills (or even inherited the brains) to prosper in the modern world, won't get us to equality.  It will eventually get us – Greece.

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Email Steve Lawson:  CoolHotCenter@gmail.com

Advice for Republicans: Scratch that Itch, Then Move On

Let us assume, hypothetically, that a voter believes that a partial list of persons who would be a better president than Barack Obama -- maybe not that voter's first choice, but just a better choice -- would include Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Howie Mandel (all right, he's Canadian, but POTUS doesn't think one's birthplace is important, why should we?), Khloe Kardashian, David Lee Roth, and the constitutionally qualified population of Flasher, North Dakota.  And that the short list of persons who would be worse would include Michael Moore, Pauly Shore, and Joe Biden.

All right, that's hyperbolic.  But the point is that our hypothetical voter thinks that Barack Obama has been a haahhhrrible president.  Whose defeat later this year is imperative to prevent further damage to the Republic and to begin to reverse the damage already done.

And let's say that our hypothetical voter is a Republican preparing to vote in a primary.  And it's even possible, not necessary, but possible, that our voter voted for the President and is not only disappointed, but feels a little  .  .  .  misled.  Misled by the candidate Obama, misled by the mainstream press.

And our voter is mad and getting madder with each new baffling decision and utterance of the President, apparently composed in the brief intervals between rounds of golf, vacations, smoke-and-cocktail breaks, and parties.  Our voter is reminded of her dissatisfaction daily because the Republicans are lining up to try to take his job, pounding away at him.

Michelle  .  .  .  isn't helping.

But our voter knows our President is a smart guy, a very smart guy, a very smooth guy, a good talker, wears clothes beautifully, handsome, a charismatic presence.  Bad as he's been, he could fool enough people again.  Could win, could well win. 

This is very upsetting to our hypothetical voter.  It makes her mad.

And she starts to think a thought that makes her smile, that gives her something to look forward to. 
She thinks: Newt Gingrich would absolutely dismantle Barack Obama in a debate.  He's brainier, he's a better speaker, he's a master of facts -- and he's nasty.  He would penetrate the President's smugness, his condescension, his scolding pedagogy.  All right in front of him, with the whole nation watching.

Newt?  Newt??  Newt!!

Ahhh.  That feels good.  She taps the touch-screen next to his name, smiles again, and sends her vote to the primary election computer.

It is at this point that your decidedly nonhypothetical Cool Hot Center steps into the frame.

Newt Gingrich and I agree on many things.  You will note that he was on my list of improvements over POTUS.   One thing we disagree on is his suitability as the Republican nominee.    One other thing is the likelihood that come November, more voters will agree with me on this point than with him, and his candidacy will have ensured four more years of the terrifying Obama.

It may feel good to throw in with Newt’s soaring rhetoric and liberal-elite-bashing now, but the man cannot be elected.  He is angry.  Like Tea Party angry.  But the Tea Party is not going to elect the next President, just like mainstream conservatives did not elect John McCain.  Or Bob Dole.  Or even George H.W.  Bush against Clinton. 

I agree with our hypothetical voter that Newt might well demolish POTUS in debate for all the reasons she imagines.  But Newt is a man who is not in control of either his thoughts or his mouth.  Did you listen to his victory speech in South Carolina?  He cannot help calling the President stupid,  which few sincerely believe irrespective of their disapproval of the man.   In expressing incredulity at the President’s decision on the Keystone pipeline, he offered this witless appraisal:  “It’s one thing to say the White House can’t play chess, it’s another to say it can’t play checkers,” he said.  “But tic-tac-toe?”   The crowd was notably silent after this gratuitous shot.   And that wasn’t the only one in those rather dyspeptic remarks.

And he will not be able to control his anger over the course of a difficult national campaign.   He is a guy whose grandiosity is, if anything, more virulent than Obama’s.  Give him a prominent forum, and he switches off the prudent politician’s filter; the controversies start to erupt.  Look what happened when he was in the House of Representatives:    He developed the “Contract with America” and was largely credited with the huge Republican gains in the 1994 congressional elections, ending four decades of Democratic rule.   Good Newt.  Welfare reform – good Newt.  Capital gains tax cut – good Newt.  But things started to fall apart.   There was the government shutdown – ideologically pure, maybe, but hugely unpopular.  Then the ethics charges.  But his main sin was high-handedness born of his megalomania.  He was very nearly removed as Speaker by his own party.  Then came the Clinton impeachment which he relentlessly promoted – another one of those ideologically-driven but ill-handled initiatives that came to disgust a lot of the voting public.  1998 mid-terms – the Republicans lost seats, and his status as the face of the Party was assigned a large share of the blame.  A few days later, he not only resigned as Speaker, but left Congress, having alienated the entire Republican caucus. 

Bad Newt.

People who get most of their information from Fox News and featured links on The Drudge Report may find themselves puzzled as to how President Obama’s approval ratings, dismal though they may be, are as high as they are.  We will put aside the makeup of the 45% (as of this writing) who tell Rasmussen that they “somewhat approve” of his performance.  The point is that this is going to be a difficult campaign for the Republicans.  Newt will run a campaign of resentment and anger; Obama will repeat his vague message of hope and change and comforting paternalism.

There is plenty of cause for resentment and anger over the President’s performance.  But voters are going to weary of being harangued, and they’re going to quail at Newt’s streak of meanness, which they will correctly interpret as a lack of judgment and presidential temperament. 

No, folks, for better or worse, Mitt Romney is the choice if the Republicans hope to bring in the moderate voters who installed President Obama.  Of course he has his problems.  He has flip-flopped (although his most recent flip is in the right direction).  He has mishandled the tax-return issue.  But his campaign is cheerful and optimistic.  He is not burdened by Newt’s seamy personal history.  He may be more moderate than Newt and the Tea Party on some issues but ya know something?  So are lots and lots of voters, and Romney is reliably conservative on the big issues.  He has said one of the most important things a candidate can say to conservatives, and that is that he will repeal Obamacare.   He is well-spoken; he can easily be pictured in the Oval Office, dealing diplomatically with world leaders. 

And he'll do just fine in the debates.

Mitt Romney can beat Obama. (Recent statements by George Stephanopolous and Nancy Pelosi that Romney would be the weakest candidate are dead-solid proof that the Democrats are terrified of a Romney candidacy.)   Newt cannot.  I don’t care what the polls say now – by the time the nation has had months of all-Newt, all the time, enough moderates will recoil and either stay home or vote to give our charming President – he is charming, you know – another chance.

So all you Republican primary voters out there:  Do what you have to do to get the fiery Newton Leroy Gingrich out of your system.  Enjoy it.  Send a message, share your anger.  I would say with the South Carolina rebuke of media elites that reversed his fortunes, Gingrich has been as effective as he is likely ever to be on the national stage.  The itch has been scratched.  Time to put some soothing Romney lotion on it, and get on with the important work of getting America back to greatness.

More Proof for my Elmore Leonard Theory -- And It Becomes an Actual Theory

Elmore Leonard
Artist:  Kerry Waghorn
http://www.kerrywaghorn.com/

Last March I posted an article wherein I noted that there was a particular phrase that appears in many, if not almost every, Elmore Leonard novel. 

That phrase is:  "How's that sound?"

You can read about that theory -- which I had to admit was more of an observation, since I couldn't think of any grand conclusion to draw from it -- here:  A Minor but, I Think, Original Theory About Elmore Leonard. 
I gave seven or eight examples from recent novels searchable online or on my Nook.  I must say that I did not find it in the most recent novel, Djibouti. 

I just downloaded a short novel called "Fire in the Hole."  It provides some background for the award-winning FX original series "Justified" based on the adventures of one of my favorite Leonard characters, Raylan Givens, a quick-drawing U.S. Marshal.   In the novella, Givens is pursuing a childhood friend, Boyd Crowder, who has gone bad.  He heads a white supremacist group that plans (and carries out) acts of robbery and terror in the name of fighting against what it regards as Jewish-controlled and racially bastardized American society.   Crowder's brother Bowman has just been shot to death by his severely abused wife, Ava.  Ava, the late Bowman, and Raylan Givens had all been in high school together and Ava had a crush on Raylan before Raylan and Boyd went to Vietnam.  Raylan visits Ava to try to get a lead on Boyd, who is billeted with his fanatics in several locations in the Appalachian backcountry. 

Ava puts the moves on Raylan.  The final paragraph of Chapter VII:

"She said 'Hey, I'm just teasing you.  I know you have  a life.  You must a cool guy like you?  No, I just thought, you're here, why don't we party?  I can still do those old Wildcat cheers I know you liked to watch.  I still have all the cute moves.  Get your motor turned on.  You want, Raylan, you can spend the night.  How's that sound?'"

So, there you have it.  More proof of my theory-which-was-really-just-a-puzzled-observation. 

But wait!  There may be more to this than I originally thought.  On the website http://www.elmoreleonard.com/, we find the following quotes:

--  "Writing is just a bunch of sounds."

--  "Leonard admits he never visited Djibouti.  He chose the title because he liked the sound."

--  In criticizing the movie made of his novel "Be Cool":  "It's not my sound; it's not my attitude at all."

 In my original piece last March, I wrote:  "I wish I could argue that Leonard plants this phrase in all of his books (if he does) as a pointer toward the importance of sound in literature, a subliminal reminder to his serial readers that prose must have the cadence and vocabulary of ordinary speech to engage the reader." 

I may have been on to something. 

Or, quite possibly, not.  Make of it what you will.

Some Thoughts on the Passing of -- Judy Lewis?

Judy Lewis died a few weeks ago at the age of 76.  Her death prompts a question I’ll get to in a moment.

You probably never heard of Judy Lewis.

She was a lovely young woman, and lovely as she aged.   

She had an off-and-on television acting career, her longest-lasting role being on the soap opera The Secret Storm in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  She had small roles in other series and occasionally guest-starred on others.  After leaving acting, she got a master’s degree in clinical psychology.  She became a licensed family and child counselor and eventually practiced as a psychotherapist specializing in foster care and marriage therapy. 

I don’t know whether she was a good actress, counselor, or psychotherapist.   I don’t recall ever having seen her perform. 

But I do know this:

Her mother was Loretta Young.

And her father was Clark Gable.

Which is more than Judy knew until she was 23.

Gable, 33, was married to someone.  Young was very young (22), and unmarried, and Catholic.  They were co-starring in “The Call of the Wild.”  Gable was the biggest star in Hollywood, and Young was already a star in her own right.  Both among the most beautiful people in the world.   

Clark Gable and Loretta Young in "Call of the Wild" (1935)

Abortion was out of the question for the (sometimes) devout and very public Catholic Loretta. 

But also out of the question for each of them and for Twentieth Century (this was the last film made at that studio before the merger with Fox) – in those days – was the ruination of both of their careers.   So here’s what happened:

Loretta traveled to Europe to hide the pregnancy.  She returned to California to give birth to Judy, who was immediately placed in a series of homes.  Then Loretta announced that she had fallen in love with an orphaned child and was going to “adopt” her – nineteenth months later.   Loretta later married producer Tom Lewis and Judy took that name. 

The little girl had very large ears.  To dampen speculation that Gable was Judy’s pop, Loretta had the child undergo an operation when she was seven to bring them closer to her head. 

Loretta frequently dressed little Judy in bonnets
to hide her Gable-like ears

She needn’t have bothered.  The cirumstances of Judy’s birth were an open secret in Hollywood.  But Loretta never told Judy, nor did anyone else.  Gable never acknowledged her (although he met her once when she was 15, spoke to her briefly, and kissed her on the forehead without admitting a thing) and never had another child until a son born after he died.  Judy didn’t discover the truth until her fiance told her when she was 23.   But Loretta refused to admit her father's identity until eight years later.  When Judy confronted her with a demand for the truth – when she was 31 -- Loretta threw up, asking tearfully how she could admit to a mortal sin.

As you might imagine, this was very traumatic to the young adult Judy.  She grew up  not knowing who her parents were, and worse, falsely believing they were some unknown couple.  She wrote a book about it called Uncommon Knowledge.  She became estranged from Loretta.  Loretta died in 2000 and in a posthumously published autobiography finally admitted that Gable was Judy’s father.

Now, as it turned out, Judy did all right for herself; no telling what it would have been like – in those days – had the truth been publicly acknowledged. 

But Judy Lewis’s story prompts a question.

One doesn’t have to approve of our times’ casual acceptance of out-of-wedlock births  to wonder which is better:   To have grown up like Judy Lewis in a time when the circumstances of her birth were regarded as scandalous, or to grow up knowing one’s parents, whether married or not, together or not?   To grow up the victim of a series of lies to protect public morality, or to redefine morality in a way that lets a child grow up without those lies?

I guess that’s two questions.

I’m not going to thrash you with my views on the sexual revolution.  OK, I’ll thrash you with them enough to say I don’t think it was a good thing.  Surely, though, a morality or a religious belief (however extreme or misguided) that results in what happened to Judy Lewis is in need of some adjustment.

Happy New Year to you all, and Judy Lewis, RIP.

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Beware the Brilliant Fool

In prior articles, I have wrestled with how we regard the everyday concept of “intelligence” when a person who apparently has a lot of it makes terrible decisions. I have speculated that because a very prominent person – our President – fits this description, it might cause people to think about “intelligence” in a new way.   (See here and here.)
In one way it is a futile inquiry, because intelligence has many definitions. Can’t beat the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on the topic: “Intelligence has been defined in different ways, including the abilities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence and problem solving.”

Well, there’s one answer right there. A person may have vast capacity for abstract thought, but poor understanding. One can still fall within the definition because a crackerjack abstract thinker, but still be defective in understanding; that is, intelligent, but wrong.

I know this isn’t any brilliant insight. Think of any issue that divides large numbers of people – for example, whether there was a conspiracy to murder John Kennedy. There will be people on both sides that we would think of as highly “intelligent,” as we mean that word in daily use. But some of those very intelligent people have got to be wrong.

In the November 2011 issue of New English Review, British writer and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple published an essay about a prominent biographer, Isaac Deutscher, who was a Marxist. I was struck by this passage (emphases are mine):

"His language was clear, but his thought was not. He was what might be called a dialectical equivocator, made dishonest by his early religious vows to Marxism. This made him unable to see or judge things in a common-sense way. His unwavering attachment to his primordial philosophical standpoint, his irrational rationalism, turned him into that most curious (and sometimes dangerous, because intellectually charismatic) figure, the brilliant fool. He was the opposite of Dr Watson who saw but did not observe: he observed, but did not see. He was the archetype of the man, so common among intellectuals, who knows much but understands little."

I’m guessing that if any one of us spent an afternoon in the private company of Newt Gingrich, or Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney, or Nancy Pelosi, or Rush Limbaugh, or Al Franken, just shooting the breeze on topics unrelated to their public policy positions, we would come away thinking that we’d been in the company of a pretty smart person. Perhaps even brilliant.

The brilliant Junior Samples

So what? So . . . people can be brilliant but very wrong. Some of them have stupendous knowledge and experience but no judgment; some are subtle analysts but select incorrect or thin information; some, as Dalrymple suggests, are in the grip of ideology – they apply their brains to deceive others, but mainly themselves, in the service of what they regard as a higher truth.

Most of us, most of the time, can spot the unreliable smart person. The high-IQ person who you would not trust to advise you on your day to day choices, or to be a leader of any polity to which you belong. We generally get the leaders we deserve, although not enough people saw through the brilliant fool who’s running the show now. We can debate the reasons for that another time. (Hint: the usual culprits – media bias, liberal racial guilt, a deceptive campaign, class resentment, weak opposition, disgust with the incumbent, and, truth to tell, a magnetic persona and charming manner.)

And there’s the lesson: We encounter gifted minds throughout our lives. The first time many of us are overwhelmed with the brilliance of a particular individual is college, when our professors present an image of learnedness that is absolutely genuine. And yet, faculties are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats and worse.  Strongly redistributionist, politically correct, and believers in enforced equality of result. Theories that have never worked in the history of mankind, at least not in any free society (and the unfree societies that have enshrined them have declined and even failed, some very recently and very dramatically).

Most adults understand that many of these academics are brilliant fools, but the unformed barely-post-adolescent mind daily exposed to brilliantly foolish instruction does not, and so we end up with things like The Sixties, the McGovern candidacy, and MoveOn.org.

Some of us shake it off when we start working, raising families, and paying taxes.

Some of us don’t.

Some of us think we have done so, but can still be wowed by the singular, eloquent, attractive intellect without regard to whether he or she is selling something that simple observation of the world would tell us is quite unlikely to be correct. 

And brilliant fools are everywhere, wanting our votes, our investments, our time, and our hearts and minds.

Beware.

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I Googled "Execrable" and "Paul Krugman" and Got 81,800 Hits

I’m in favor of civility in public discourse. We need more of it on both sides of the aisle.

It’s one of the reasons that as little as I care for President Obama, I always try to find a little something nice to say about him, and to avoid all name-calling and ad hominem characterizations except under the most extreme provocation.

In Paul Krugman’s case, I’ll make an exception.

Prof. Krugman is the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Princeton professor who contributes to the New York Times Op-Ed Page. He is very liberal; a leftist, I would judge. He does not believe government spends, or controls, nearly enough. He also holds forth, way left, on political and social matters, although to my knowledge he has not received any awards in this area. (His Nobel was awarded for his work in explaining patterns of international trade through consumers’ desire to chose from a variety of products, not a subject that will nourish a lot of Op-Ed pieces.)

He recently unburdened himself of some rather brief thoughts on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in his New York Times column “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Here it is, in its entirety, clipped here without permission:

=======

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

=======

This brief insult is so full of nonsense that one hardly knows where to begin.

(1) “Are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?” What could that question possibly mean? Of course they were subdued.  Thousands of people were horribly murdered and our nation was awakened to the threat to it from fanatic religious totalitarians. What did Krugman expect, so that it seemed “odd” when he observed how subdued it was? Celebration? Riots? Expressions of joy? Has he ever been to a memorial service? While there, did he perhaps observe that it was subdued?

(2) He immediately realizes how fatuous that question is, so he answers himself – but even his answer is gibberish. “I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.” Now think about that. First he says “I don’t think it’s me,” which means that he believes that his observation that the commemorations were “oddly subdued” is shared by others, validating it. But in the second part of the sentence he says, “it’s really not that odd,” which can only mean that his observation that it was “oddly subdued” was really not that correct. This isn’t just bad thinking – it’s bad writing.

(3) He then proceeds to assign his belief in the reason for its lack of oddness: “What happened after 9/11 . . . was deeply shameful.” Where was Krugman living in the days following 9/11? The nation and its leaders were at some pains to ensure that this Islamist crime did not result in our own jihad against Islam. The public’s reaction was moderate, patient, and careful. The nation’s reaction, and that of its leaders, was measured outrage. It was a proud period for the United States, not a shameful one.

(4) But he goes on, explaining that leaders transformed it into a “wedge issue.” In what respect? When the source of the terror became apparent, there was enormous support for the punitive expedition to Afghanistan. The strategy eventually employed there and the subsequent invasion of Iraq can be and were vigorously debated, but even that debate was not motivated by any “shame” in the goals articulated. To the extent the public didn’t like what the Bush administration or “neocons” did, they made their feelings known on Election Day 2008.

But even that isn’t evidence of a 9/11-justified “wedge.” Just how little of a “wedge” was “what happened after 9/11” is demonstrated by the fact that the Obama administration, beloved of Krugman, has generally continued the policies of the Bush administration in these matters, has committed even more troops in Afghanistan, and, if anything, has pursued individual terrorists with even greater heat. (The President’s shutdown of military operations comes nearly at the end of his term – coincident with a the elections, can you believe it?) Candidate Obama repeatedly said that victory in Afghanistan was essential, and stated that his administration would reverse the gains of the Taliban insurgency. Corrupt?

No, the voices calling for decreased vigilance are few and faint. The most serious “wedge” Krugman has experienced since 9/11 is the one he probably experiences when they search him at LaGuardia.

(5) Finally: To what “corruption” did “professional pundits” turn a “blind eye”? Again, there are legitimate criticisms to be made about the conduct of the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, and pundits have made them at length almost from the outset. But in what sense is any of what took place “corrupt”? The professional punditry in this country was overwhelmingly anti-Bush both before and after 9/11. If our leadership really used 9/11 as a mask for “corruption,” wouldn’t you think that these pundits, a large number of whom are Krugman’s colleagues at The New York Times, would have their Pulizter-hungry mitts all over it? No less a liberal than Robert Kerrey, in commenting on the intelligence documents on the runup to the Iraq invasion, said that while they did not show a significant al-Qaeda connection, they did show that Saddam was “a significant enemy of the United States.”

As you sit there now, can you think of a single instance of political corruption – which Wikipedia defines as “the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain”? What personal, or even political, gain did any of those individuals receive? Bernard Kerik, one-time New York City Police Commissioner? He was found to have violated various laws unrelated to 9/11 and went to jail. How did things work out for “fake hero” Rudy Giuliani? George Bush? The last was re-elected in 2004, but to call that a result of corruption is to rob the word of any meaning. And by 2008, he was so widely reviled that his party suffered one of its worst electoral defeats ever.

And let’s not forget that America’s reaction to 9/11 was largely mirrored in Congressional support for the 9/11-related foreign and domestic policies during a time when the Democrats had a narrow majority in the Senate. The most dramatic reaction to 9/11, the Patriot Act, was passed in 2001 – and President Obama and the Democratic Congress has supported an extension of its most controversial provisions, and many of its provisions have survived or been extended by other legislation.

* * *

No, The only credible syllables in that entire piece are those that concede that the reasons for disabling comments are “obvious.” I myself would like to stifle reaction when I broadcast something inane.

There is a place for the contrarian, for even the provocateur, in American opinion. But most writers of that ilk at least convey the impression that they believe what they write. Krugman does not, could not. No other American, no other human, could have experienced any of the 9/11 commemorations and concluded that the proceedings today are somber because we are ashamed of how we reacted ten years ago.   I’m proud of how America reacted. We have bent over backwards to give Islam the benefit of the doubt, possibly more than it deserves, while working diligently – and successfully – to keep domestic terrorism to near zero.

This column is academic elitism at its most odious. Krugman is jabbing a stick at through the cage bars at the lovers of freedom he scorns as unsophisticated yahoos imprisoned by their naivete and ignorance. He patronizes them -- us -- from his Princeton perch whenever he can. To him, average Americans with average reactions to murderous assaults on the very freedoms that the 9-11 Islamists cannot abide, the very freedoms that allow Krugman to make a jackass of himself, are reactionary rabble. He knew this column would anger those people on the very day of their saddest recollections, and it did. It was a small, mean, act by a small, mean man.

As I said, I’m in favor of civility. But Paul Krugman is a putz. When I read bilge like this, or listen to interviews with his oh-so-entitled philosophical children now “occupying” various patches of our fine cities, I think that we have less to fear from fake heroes than from fake intellectuals.

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