Andrew Jackson

Jackson, our seventh president, may have been only partly literate. Don't let that fool you. Historian David Hackett Fisher relates an event when the exact wording of complex legislation was being debated in Tennessee for over a week. Some early drafts had been misplaced; people wanted to consider returning to an earlier wording of key passages; tempers were running high. Jackson recited all earlier drafts word for word, including the debate about the changes, at points identifying who had said what. Such feats of memory were more common on the frontier, where folks relied less on books and writing for their education. Many who could read could not write, though men of importance labored to teach themselves to make at least their own signature with a flourish.

So in the town histories where your ancestor signed with an "X," it didn't necessarily mean he couldn't read, and certainly not that he was stupid. The term "unlettered" had a specific meaning we have since made general.

Jackson practiced law, specializing in land claims, even though he had read few books of law. He developed a reputation for sizing up liars and charlatans quickly. His marriage to Rachel was clouded in controversy, and there are still conflicting accounts of how proper it was for him to have taken her from her abusive husband. Some say he thought her divorce was final and simply made a mistake; others that he had forced the divorce by absconding with another man's wife.

Some regard him as a great president, others are more sparing in their praise. He was a Scots-Irish frontiersman, rough, domineering, unpolished. He considered himself the representative of the common people, and took any aspersions on his lack of social graces as an insult to his people more than himself. This was not uncommon in a tanistry system (from which we get the word "thane," you Shakespeare and Tolkien fans). The thane and his people were closely identified, sharing glory and insult together.

Democratic Senator Jim Webb, one of the new blue dogs, has written movingly on how the Scots-Irish have made this country what it is more than any of the other waves of immigrants that arrived. (Born Fighting: How The Scots-Irish Shaped America) He is prejudiced, of course, as these are his people, and we all overvalue the contributions of our own ancestors. But Webb may have a case here. John McCain, BTW, is descended from this group as well.

Andrew Jackson would never be elected in our current primary system. The Eastern elites, powerful then as now, would have laughed him out of several states, where he would win only a few percent of the vote where people considered him a bumpkin and a hick. Yet he was likely smarter than they were, and certainly stronger, a better judge of character, and a better leader. He didn't know who the ambassadors from European countries were, and he didn't care that he didn't know. If he had to deal with one, he studied up on it and moved on.

I don't know if Sarah Palin is going to be an Andrew Jackson - that's a pretty high standard for anyone. But that's the type of leader she's aspiring to be, and that may be the best standard to judge her by. As I noted in a previous post, she is not from my tribe, er, hive, and my ears are quick to reject her unless I force myself to look at what she has and has not done, what her tendencies are, where she wants to go. I have to remember that a large percentage of my Puritan ancestors probably looked down on Jackson, but they were wrong. (My own Scots-Irish ancestors, though they came from the Merrimack Valley instead of Appalachia, may have liked him just fine).

Hive, Not Tribe

I saw some of the video of Sarah Palin online tonight - we don't have a TV - and I see and hear what folks mean. I don't like her accent, but it's more than than just pronunciation. Her word choice, her cadence, her facial expressions...she is not from my tribe. I would probably overlook her were she running in the primaries. It causes me to question if this is a great lack in the primaries. Most of our presidents up through Truman would have been weeded out in our current system.

I have a Sarah Palin joke I told at work today, an improvement on the primitive version I posted the day she was tapped by McCain, about being a better shot than Dick Cheney: "If she shoots a lawyer, he's stayin' down." Not politically offensive, see? Once they relaxed a moment even liberals laughed at it. The interesting part was the momentary shocked hesitation among all the progressives that I had even brought her up. Their faces froze; they covered quickly with a worried smile as I told my joke; they relaxed. I found this amusing and made it a point to bring her name up to as many liberals as I could.

The number of women, "feminist" women, who commented almost immediately on their dislike of her hair, her earrings, her shoes, was delicious. I remember a similar thing happening with comments about Katherine Harris in 2000. All these women with advanced degrees couldn't wait to point out her hair, her makeup. Your mileage may vary - I'm dealing with social workers, psychologists, and the like.

If you want some real amusement, tell some of these women that you think they look like her. Watch the claws come out as they tell you what they would have to change to really look like her. (The momentary look of horror is fun, too.) They don't want to say white trash, so they paint it in every color but black-and-white. Feminists, my Aunt Fanny. This is high school all over again. This baton twirler is getting too popular, so they're spreading rumors about how she sleeps with everyone, how dumb she is in class, how ridiculous her clothes are. She is an invader from another hive, and they can't help stinging.

I like the hive analogy. That's my new Arts & Humanities title: The A&H Hive.

Eric Scheie has some wonderful examples of this playing out in a more national setting over at Classical Values. I cut short this post because his is so good.

The NYTimes and Iraq

Just so we remember, now that the NY Times and the rest of the MSM is trying to avoid the topic of Iraq, what they said not so long ago. A sample:

Surge of Ignorance

The only real question about the planned "surge" in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional. -- Paul Krugman, NYT, 1/8/07

There is nothing ahead but even greater disaster in Iraq. -- NYT Editorial, 1/11/07

What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. -- Frank Rich, NYT, 2/11/07

Keeping troops in Iraq has steadily increased the risk of a bloodbath. The best way to reduce that risk is, I think, to announce a timetable for withdrawal and to begin a different kind of surge: of diplomacy. -- Nicholas Kristof, NYT, 2/13/07

W. could have applied that to Iraq, where he has always done only enough to fail, including with the Surge -- Maureen Dowd, NYT, 2/17/07

More from Eric Posner over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Governor Lingle...

...just finished. I thought she was stiff at first, even wooden. Following Gov. Huckabee, who has a comfortable, humorous style, she limped. People wanted to cheer, but they weren't quite sure where she was going. Linda Lingle covered a lot of the early biography of Governor Palin, and frankly, it just seemed like a laundry list.

Boy did that change when she hit the part about Palin's supposed lack of experience. Lingle had been a mayor before being governor of Hawaii, and you could tell she took it personally. She really hit her stride, telling how that's real experience. Governor Lingle was so convincing that she made you wonder whether we should be nominating McCain at all, since he's never been a mayor.

Lingle's line about Lyndon Johnson was a beauty.

The Light Dawns

I had always heard that Jimmy Carter was the smartest recent president IQ-wise. It never made much sense to me, but heck, you can't always tell from afar. His intelligence was even put forward as part of the reason he was ineffective as a president - a lack of trust of others, and unwillingness to delegate, because he worried they wouldn't do it as well as he would.

He had been a nuclear engineer on a submarine in the navy, they said. Well, that certainly sounds like someone with more than an average number of gray cells. So I guess that's it then. All that nuclear stuff is complicated, and engineering is a difficult field. Case closed, right?

I always thought it unusual that he wasn't more pro-nuclear power, being in the field and all, but I figured maybe he knew something I should be aware of. Or something.

Last week I learned what Paul Harvey would say is "The rest. Of the story." It's that nuclear engineer part. The word engineer is kinda funny in English. A train has an engineer, and it's a decent job, but no one thinks of them as - snicker - real engineers.

Jimmy Carter was that kind of engineer. He was in charge of driving the submarine. After being the engineer of a non-nuclear submarine, he took a course so he could drive nuclear subs.

Choo. Choo.

Tribal Fertility Totem

For those who like their controversy tied to an insightful but oversold idea, you can't do much better than the brilliant but flawed Steve Sailer. There are new ideas you just can't get anywhere else. On the Sarah Palin controversies, his most recent post is Tribal Fertility Totem Elicits Strong Emotions. The comments get pretty wild. Not frothing, like at Daily Kos - okay, I lied. There's some frothing - but quite...energetic.

And here’s the fundamental reason underlying all the rage on one side and amusement on the other over Sarah Palin: it’s all about … female fertility.

Human beings have extremely strong emotions on the topic of fertility. It’s an obsession — look at the celebrity gossip columns these days. The who is sleeping with whom stuff bores people now compared to the pregnancy news. Thus, celebrities auction off rights to pictures of their new babies for millions, even though all newborns look alike. The top breeding stock parents — Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt — were looking to snag something like $6 million for the exclusive rights to the first photos of their twins...

In the last paragraph, there's a link at the words "can afford to outbreed them" that has some interesting correlations between marriage, number of children, where people move, and how they vote.

The Blue Whites are alarmed and outraged to be reminded that the Red Whites can afford to outbreed them and are outbreeding them. Modern people tell themselves they don't care about stuff like that, but they do, oh, they do.

Where Were They Then?

Back in March, I chronicled where the people in the political news were in 1969. Let's play again.

The "beauty queen" sneer has been brought out enough times that it deserves comment. At 20, Sarah Palin was a Miss Alaska contestant while a journalism student at U Idaho. Not much of a positive as a VP candidate, but hard to see it as a negative.

At 20, Obama was a cocaine-user at Oxy (but not a dealer! And that's important.) Biden was an unremarkable student at U Delaware, flunking ROTC but getting A's in Phys Ed. He would shortly go on to be a law school plagiarist, lifting 5 pages of a law review without attribution and putting it in his 15 page paper. That actually may be a qualification for public office these days.

Or if you prefer to ask what they were doing in the 1984 year that Sarah was Miss Wassilla, Obama was working for a PIRG, a student run non-profit in NYC. Nothing wrong with that, but not much of a positive either. Biden was plagiarizing again, this time from British politician Neil Kinnock. Joe was also insisting to Henry Kissinger that the USSR could be reasoned, but Reagan was unnecessarily ticking them off.

If you prefer considering what they were doing more recently, an example is here.

Back in February

I liked Sarah Palin before I saw her pictures, thank you very much. The link explains why I was saying "four kids" in the spring. I also liked Bobby Jindal.

I had read about this young governor who had knocked out the corrupt politicians in her own party and squashed the Bridge to Nowhere and thought she looked good to run in 2012 or 2016. Then I heard about the moose hunting and the four kids and said - ah, VP candidate, not president. But even then I thought next time around would have
been better. What experience she has is very good - she has negotiated with
Canada, Russia, and Japan on behalf of her state - but it's still too new.

Then I heard the Down's baby story and saw her pictures and said "Bonus! Sign
her up NOW! It's about time we got us some of that identity politics action." I think McCain is hoping for it all. Reformer; as far from Washington as you can get; Tough Broad; Real Babe - hoping to pick up some votes from each of those categories. The risk is that she is less experienced than anyone who ran in either party - except Obama (ironic), and that it looks cynical because she's a woman. Yet Jindal would have looked cynical because he's Indian-American. And Romney would have looked cynical because he finished second. And Huckabee would have looked cynical because of the Religious Right.

Because the Democrats, and to a lesser extent the traditional media, don't believe that any of the Republicans were actually qualified, they see every possible VP nomination as cynical. It tells you a lot about them, actually. They think having been in Washington doing nothing, and then going out on the campaign trail where they can ask him questions is an actual set of qualifications for Obama. In their incredible blindness, they believe answering questions for the media is most of what a president does. People who actually do something, away from their cameras, puzzle them.

The Rumors

Whenever I hear people wondering about these dark secrets of politicians, I ask myself the following, before I even look at the evidence. "How many people would have to be in on this secret whose careers would be destroyed if it were found out? Why, then, would they go along?" I recommend you start at the same place.

The Obama rumors and the Edwards rumors - not much cost for many people there. The Sarah Palin rumors - dozens of people would have to be putting their careers on the line for a brand-new governor.

Other Themes

Oh yeah, the other themes I mention often at other people's sites but seldom mention here are the two-year delay in a president's effect on the economy; the cultural tribes series in the sidebar; and the Religious Left's power, and their whining because the Religious Right has taken some of it.

Neocon-Paleocon

There are points I made long ago here, but don't keep coming back to here. On the commenting sections of other sites, however, there are themes I keep returning to, sometimes linking to older posts here. Sort of hoping, y'know, that they might stick around and read other things and conclude I'm the bee's knees. (I've inched up from 40 different readers a day to 50 somehow. I check it every few months. And none of them are coming over for the Abba pictures anymore. Hmm, I'll bet I can get up to sixty with a few more of those.)

The following is a comment of mine on Steve Sailer's blog. The context was a new commenter asking why everyone there hated neocons so much. He thought the idea of proxy wars elsewhere rather than large ones here was a good one. Martin, who I think is a regular, gave him a decent but flawed answer: there won't be another of those big European wars again, so we don't have to guard against them. So don't think that paleocons want wars. (That's an unfair summary of mine). My reply is a common theme for me when I go elsewhere.

Of course no one wants enormous wars. Anon's point was that the paleo method brings them about anyway. I think the evidence is mixed on that, but there is at least some reason to claim that the American isolationists and whatever British paleos were called contributed to the large scale World Wars coming and finding us whether we wanted it or not; and much larger than they would have been.

I tend to be a mix, myself. The problem with neocon reasoning is that it works well in retrospect, but not so well going forward. We can look back and see a hundred places in any of a hundred wars and legitimately say "If we had stopped them there, we wouldn't have had to fight them under worse circumstances there." That is not so useful as one might hope, however. There are also past situations where we could legitimately speculate that party A responding to a small threat from party B escalated into an unnecessary war.

The paleos get it wrong because Western Civilization will have to fight proxy wars somewhere or we will fight them everywhere, and there will be no perfect spot to make a stand. Every choice presented to us - Vietnam, Korea, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq - will have serious downsides as well. Yet we cannot avoid them all. This is because paleos are isolationists who became conservative, who still think that because most problems will go away if we leave them alone, therefore all problems will go away if we leave them alone.

The neocons go wrong in underestimating the messiness of the places they choose. They tend to dwell too much on how things could improve if everything goes right. But never does everything go right. Whenever they guess wrong, it costs Western Civilization more than they expected. This is because neocons are liberals who became conservative, and still have the starry-eyed urge to fix stuff.

Palinfacts

The new site Palinfacts brings you things you didn't know about Sarah Palin. Two of my favorites:

Alaskan wolfpacks give Sara Palin first dibs on their kills.

Global Warming doesn’t kill polar bears. Sarah Palin kills polar bears, with her teeth.

Back In Town

Dr. Sanity is back posting again. She had kept up the Carnival of the Insanities all summer (I didn't know), but now is back blogging for real.

Post 1400 - Yeah, That's Really Funny

On the way back from the Denver convention, National Chairman of the DNC Don Fowler comments on possible Hurricane Hannah hitting Florida. Hint: His first thought is how it's going to play politically.

Via Redstate

Dog Language and Political Language

David, who just commented, has a repost at Photon Courier.

When you talk to a dog, you don't have to worry a lot about using syllogisms, complete sentences, good analogies, or crisply-argued chains of logic. What he's looking for is keywords...particular words and short phrases...like "nice doggie" or "here" or, especially, "dinner."

It strikes me that, increasingly, the way in which politicians address the American people is very similar...

Read more.

The A&H Tribe Spews Foam

The Arts & Humanities Tribe is unhappy with the Sarah Palin nomination. Feminists from the Business Tribe or Science & Technology Tribe seem less bothered. That was predictable.

Among the criticisms of Gov. Palin, a few points seem general, such as her experience - I will not touch on those here. What amuses me are the criticisms which clearly come straight from the A&H belly. You can feel them tremble with rage when they point out that she was a beauty queen - our girls don't do that! Those are well, Southern, a little bit low-rent. I mean, I'm sure that there are some very nice girls there, but...; she and her family drive snow machines, and other motorized recreational equipment - those jet skis are so noisy up at the lake, and all those snowmobiles are too, and they put out smoke - I just don't understand what people see in them. Yes, dear, I know the Sartorelli's have them, but he made his money as a plumbing contractor in Framingham - they're wonderful salt-of-the-earth people and Theresa is one of my dearest friends up at the camp, but...; Sarah Palin fishes, and hunts - our sort of people don't do that. That's for rural people, unsophisticated sorts who like to bang away at defenseless animals, euhh....

I know my people. Abortion is their big issue because you know, a woman's career... and anyone can have a baby and be a hausfrau, but... These are cultural markers, and their real measuring sticks. It is not enough to be a successful woman; one has to be successful in the right way.

Markswomanship

I understand she's a better shot than Dick Cheney, too.

Sarah Barracuda

That was apparently her nickname in highschool, because of her intensity as a point guard. I think we should check with her friends, particularly her old boyfriends, whether that was the real reason. I'm not suggesting any specific meaning to that nickname, I'm just wondering what "Sarah Barracuda" would have implied at my school.

Etymological diversion: Nickname is one of those words that got divided wrongly because of the a/an of the indefinite article in English. (Another would be a naeddre, a snake, which became an adder by the reverse type of split.) It was an eke-name, meaning an also-name. "Eke" meaning also is related to "eke" as in "eke out a living." The earlier verb eacan meant "increase."

I don't know where "barracuda" comes from, though. It sounds like a Spanish corruption of a native word.

Libertarian

Her kids are named Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig.

Yup. She's pretty libertarian.

Quote Of The Week

Megan McArdle, over at bloggingheads TV:

We were American Baptist, which is kind of like being a Unitarian without all the dogmatic theology. I used to go to Sunday School there, and it took me years to figure out that the hymns that we sang were about Jesus. Because you never mentioned Jesus or God directly, in case it offended someone.

Ouch.

Arcadia

My brother the theater professor had assured me I would like Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," and Ben just gave it to me, so I followed up The Coast Of Utopia with some earlier Stoppard. Goodness, what a masterpiece.

The action takes place in a single room of a country manor(Stoppard plays with the Unities, but uses them heavily). The odd-numbered scenes take place in 1809, the even-numbered in the present. The characters of the present day are trying to determine from records what transpired in the earlier era. It's a common literary device, usually for comic effect, to watch people draw wrong conclusions about events the audience is in on. We know what actually did happen; we laugh at the bumblers misinterpreting the signs.

This theme of working backward from the data is supported by even the sound effects: gunshots in the distance (who or what has been shot?), piano for four hands offstage (who is playing, and why does it grow more intense, then break off?), and a steam engine (for what purpose?). Even the recursive mathematics uses it.

Asimov used the device at least twice. It is central to A Canticle For Liebowitz. Carol Kendall uses it in The Gammage Cup, and a host of detective parodies get mileage out of sleuths being too clever by half in their interpretations. Heck, I even used it myself in a novel I wrote years ago (unpublished, don't try to google for it).

Stoppard had earlier used it to brilliant effect in "After Magritte," my all-time favorite one-act.

Thelma: For some reason my mind keeps returning to that one-legged footballer we passed in the car... What position do you suppose he plays? I mean, what fantastic pluck! What never-say-die spirit, you know what I mean? Bloody unfair on the rest of the team, mind you - you'd think the decent thing to do would have been to hang up his boot.
Harris: It wasn't a football, it was a turtle.
Thelma: A turtle?
Harris: Or a large tortoise.
Thelma: What?
Harris: He was carrying a tortoise.
Thelma: You must be blind.
Harris: It was he who was blind.
Thelma: And how do you explain the West Bromwich Albion football shirt?
Harris: Pyjamas. He was wearing pyjamas.
Thelma: Pyjamas...I suppose he was hopping in his sleep. Yes, I can see it now - a bad dream - he leaps to his foot, grabs his tortoise and feels his way into the street -

I digress. Any excuse to quote from that play. Back to "Arcadia."

Either one of the plays would be interesting alone. Woven together, they take on a universality that highlights one of his main themes.

The comic word-play and sight gags are there as in Stoppard's earlier work - the same tortoise is present in both eras - but he is after bigger and more serious game. The teenage girl in 1809 is gradually intuiting mathematics that will not be discovered for a hundred and fifty years,* setting down diagrams and equations in her copy book, which the later characters have access to. Stoppard gets the math right, by the way, as he got the physics correct in "Jumpers." That in itself is unusual in a modern playwright. The maths are a springboard to both jokes and arguments about determinism, randomness, and inevitability. Stoppard, in his usual risque way, concludes that sex is what undermines determinism, with clever references to the thermodynamics of bodies in heat.

The audience is ahead of the present-day characters in understanding the connections to the past, but even we do not have the full weight descend upon us until the very end. We also solve as we go.

I am always certain that I am missing much of what Stoppard sneaks in as jokes or illustrations. I picked up the subtle reference of the dahlias in print, but they are not mentioned in the dialogue, and not a person in a thousand would both recognize the flower and the mathematical connection. I picked it up only by chance, even with the hint. How many more have I missed?

* Iterated algorithms, for those who care. You don't have to previously understand these to follow the plot.

Dissent

It is toleration of dissent which makes America great, not dissent itself. There is dissent in all nations, even if only under the breath or published anonymously. To claim that dissent is noble in itself, or even "the highest form of patriotism," is rather like claiming that because you are innocent until proven guilty, the most law-abiding thing you can do is act suspicious.

Buzzwords

I think the following words should be banned from church conferences:
Missional
Transformational
Constructs
Catalyzer
Structures

An impious thought: I wonder if any of the words of scripture were buzzwords when they were first written down, seeming dated soon after? Edification? That is soooo First Century.

Jake Armerding

We saw Jake Armerding live two weeks ago, and I bought his CD. Boston-scene singer-songwriter multi-instrumentalist. He carries a "folk" categorization, but he's got a more Allison Krause sound to me. Or Western Swing, or Nickel Creek.

If I tell you some guy is a brilliant lyricist and then quote those lyrics in print, it always looks lame. Lyrics occur in musical context, and without that skeleton, they just lie around like flesh on the floor. But I can give you some hint by telling you that his "Ithaca" is about Odysseus, not New York, and the happy "Little boy Blue" is subtitled North of North Dakota.

The Voice Of Saruman

As the McDonald's bag says, "I'm lovin' it." Joe Biden gets the Democratic VP nomination. Others will tell you better than I about the horse race aspect of this. Let me tell you about Joe Biden. I posted on him two years ago, in an entry called The Voice Of Saruman, and I like my words just as well today.

I believe Joe Biden when I am listening to him. There is something about him that carries such a weight of sincerity that the power of his voice pulls me in. He has the trick of sincerity.

From start to finish, this is not an honest man.

Joe "I think I have a much higher IQ than you" Biden. Senator Biden does not have a higher IQ than the average of this blog's attendees. Okay, that would be true about anyone, but that's why no one should say such dumb-ass stuff. You never know when a faster gun is present.

Update:
Ooh. ooh. The Biden quote from 1988 is available on YouTube. Note the smile at the end.


Update: Steve Sailer quotes from Mickey Kaus's Slate article on the above video. Apparently all the rest of Sen. Biden's comments we hear are uh, untrue.

Larry and Denise

Larry David is the smartest person I ever met, and I have met many. He came out of Dover HS to the summer Advanced Studies Program at St. Paul's in 1970. In that supercompetitive group of hotshots from around the state, Larry was not merely admired, but spoken of in hushed tones. Or laughed about, mostly kindly. Among that year's top physics students in the state, he knew more physics - and he wasn't in the physics class. He knew more math than both the Concepts of Math and Topics of Math people - more biology than those in advanced biology. He went on to PhD MIT - big surprise there - and last I heard (1990) was at Bell Labs working on some sort of low-temperature ceramics for which Japanese companies paid him fortunes year after year. A well-meaning, socially inept genius, which we have always had with us, but only recently have recognised have Asperger Syndrome. It leads to an interesting speculation: if Larry's mill-city school system had attempted to treat him, as we would now, would he have become, well, Larry David, the great Chiezu?

You can't accurately predict which ones are which when they're young. If you don't accommodate them and teach them how to work around different environments, some of them are going to just fall apart and never catch on in life. But if you do, then maybe you lose Isaac Newton. What's the tradeoff point?

Was Larry pleased with his lot? I used to think so - a qualified yes. When I was inviting classmates back for the 1990 reunion I had a phone conversation with Larry - one of my most memorable ever. He told me about his mountain climbing in the Whites and Adirondacks, his company softball and fantasy baseball, but finished with "Y'know Dave, I envy you. (This was undoubtedly sincere. It would never occur to Larry to say such a thing just to be polite.) A wife, children. I often wish that I had done that, but I just can't seem to have a relationship with any girls." Larry, I protested, surely there must be some woman in the AMC who understands enough chemistry to know what it is you do and give you something to talk about. "That's not the problem, Dave. It's that they can't keep up. I like to climb five, six peaks a day." I remember thinking Larry, any grease monkey knows - if the girls can't keep up, slow down! but I didn't say it. In 1990, I decided that Larry could know that if he wanted to, but was choosing not to for some reason of shyness or fear of intimacy or whatever.

I no longer think that. To a person with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, it can sometimes be that the pace you walk is the pace you walk, because your goal is to climb mountains. There's not necessarily anything psychoanalytic about the lack - it's a hardware glitch in your brain. Whether it's a bug or a feature is debatable, I suppose. I don't know if Larry's happy or not. I'm not sure Larry knows.

So it's quite familiar to me when Denise, a high-school sophomore at church, comes up and says, apropos of nothing but with a big smile "Combustion equations are easy to set up, but harder to solve." (That's a positive comment about the equations for Denise). Denise plays the viola, BTW, in case you hadn't guessed something like that. She did drag some boy around a museum while on orchestra tour in Europe this summer, but apparently there was no summer crush involved. She seemed puzzled that I would even ask. Lovely, lovely girl, and in our made-up stories, the Denises and Larrys find each other and are charmingly if clumsily devoted to each other forever.

But in reality, the Denises don't climb mountains fast enough, and the Larrys can't slow down.

"I've Had A Really Rough Road"

She was brought in for a dirty urine tox screen. She has a pre-trial agreement that allows her to be out of jail until her hearing if she follows certain conditions. The trial is for attempting to kill her boyfriend with her car. He survived, but is permanently disabled.

The other side. It really can suck to be bipolar. Off medications, she is slender and cute, charming and the life of the party most of the time. When she is only hypomanic she has friends, people like her, she gets promotions at work. Only when that crests a little higher does she get angry, grandiose, and uncontrollable. Eleven months out of twelve she has a good life. One month a year she is dangerous. On mood-stabilizing medication, she gains weight, she feels tired all the time, she tries to work full-time but usually cannot. She then has few friends and hardly anyone pays her any attention.

Predictably, she hates feeling rotten, and has chronic temptations to cut down or eliminate her medications or to take some fun chemicals. It is just plain hard – perhaps impossibly hard for some – to feel that lousy for months on end. Some people with affective disorders are much luckier – they have fewer side effects, better supports, or milder symptoms. The substance abuse has made all this much worse. When you live in a wash of fun chemicals, that becomes the new normal. Your old baseline mood now feels like depression. Would any of us do better up against that wall?

Which is true? Both are true. How can one feel sorry for her? Yet how can one not feel sorry for her? Oh by the way - she used to work here many years ago. We love her and hate her.

Love does the right thing for a person, even if it breaks your own heart and theirs. Without us putting restrictions on her, she will become more and more of a misery to herself and to everyone she meets. If you cut her slack, she doesn’t learn. So we are very hard people at my hospital when we have to be. People try to avoid reality, we turn them back to face it. We don’t rub their noses in it – their noses are already in it.

You can do this job without feelings of love and still be doing it right. Ideally a Christian should be both loving and firm. Easy to say.

Autobiographical accounts from folks who were going wrong but then turned around often stress that it was someone who loved them, someone who wouldn't give up on them, someone who believed in them that made the difference. I'm sure it seems that way, and I wouldn't want to discourage any Christian from hanging on and believing in their prodigal against all sense. I imagine there is something to it if people keep mentioning it. Yet you should notice that biographies written by outside observers don't usually see it that way. Facing a tough reality and compensating for it seems a more common theme there.

An ideal agape love likely includes both, and I can find scripture in both directions which is more important. I say that I lean toward firmness even at the risk of coldness, but that may just be a story I tell myself. With my own sons I may have done the opposite, while only threatening to be a cold hard guy. But however well I did in practice, I'm pretty sure my theory is true. Love does the right thing, though it breaks your own heart and theirs.

Free Market Reminder

The poor should not have to depend on what the powerful agree to give them in order to prosper. A free market at least offers the possibility that you can prosper no matter how selfish and oppressive the others in your society are. Group politics are founded on the idea that enough votes or pressure will shame or compel your neighbors, or even oppressors, into giving up good things. This works moderately well, but has three enormous limitations:

1. The individual is still powerless. He must give his power to the group, with all the compromise and unwilling association that implies. Whatever the collective decides, he is then bound to in a simple up-or-down vote. In a group large enough to have national impact, he is as voiceless as he is in the nation as a whole. Only if he can penetrate to group leadership does he have a say. Elections and government might have to work this way, but a person’s individual freedom and prosperity should not depend on anything so flimsy.
2. What the group can extract from the whole is necessarily limited, and the distribution must go to the whole group. Group politics can bring the indivdual some security, but it cannot ever provide wealth. It can improve justice, but has little impact on fairness.
3. Group politics are economically inefficient, reducing the overall wealth that a society might have.

I prefer not to stake my happiness on how much I can influence those in power to do nice things for me. It's not that group efforts don't do anything, but that they don't do enough.

Political Word Differences

(First part reposted from October 2006)

I have noted before that Republican ads always say they're going to work for you, while Democrats always say they're going to fight for you. I got thrown a curve ball this morning, when Betsi DeVries promised to fight against a sales and income tax, but my code-breaking was successful. She fights. She's a Democrat.

On my trip down to Houston and across to Pensacola I heard political ads in other states, and of course we in southern NH hear the ads on the Boston radio stations as well. Same pattern. People may uncover counterexamples, but I think my observation will hold up generally.

I think that word choice bespeaks a fundamental difference in the way the two parties view government - or at least, if Bethany is correct, how they view their constituents. Democrats believe that powerful people are out to screw the less-powerful, and if someone doesn't fight for them, they're going to get in in the neck. Republicans see people as able to fend for themselves, and government as a tool to limit the damage of the bad guys. Both believe that banding together is necessary to accomplish some things, though they differ on how much of that should be done.

Well, there's some truth in both those positions. I lean heavily toward the make-your-own-life view of the Republicans, but there are certainly times when the powerful need to be constrained, or at least whacked upside the head a few times.

The "Bethany" referenced above had posted the following months ago:

I didn't work last night, and thusly awoke at 3am, too tired to do much, and too awake to sleep. For some reason, while I was laying there staring at the ceiling, I began to envision a national survey with only two questions:

1) Do you believe that everything will work out okay?
2) Do you consider yourself more of a Democrat or a Republican?

I don't really know why, but I spent a good 45 minutes pondering if there would be any correlation between the answers to those two.

I don't know how it is for most people, but I realized that on the days that I am consumed with worry over everything from the funny smell in my car to world hunger, I am more likely to want a Democrat ballot. On the other hand, the days that I feel like things are pretty okay, I want to go Republican. I don't really know why that is, but I'm sure I'll be pondering it a lot more over the coming weeks. I was happy however, when I realized that this all meant that my pervading desire to vote for McCain probably means, for me at least, that things are pretty good here on the Western front.

I see these as related.

With the conventions coming up, you can expect a lot of sameness in the rhetoric. Both parties will warn that we are now on the precipice of falling into Bad America, but we have one last chance to choose Good America. They will both oversimplify both their opponent's positions and their own. But I think you will hear the themes listed above thrumming underneath the speeches, the soundbites, and the talking points.

I'm glad I don't have TV. You poor bastards.

The Coast Of Utopia

Last Friday I was given a number of plays by Tom Stoppard for Father's Day (Thanks, Ben). I just finished "The Coast of Utopia," Stoppard's most recent series of three plays about Russian radicals in the mid-19th C. They are all here: Mikhail Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, Nickolay Ogarev, Ivan Turgenev, all screwing up each other's lives and the lives of everyone they came in contact with; loving and hating each other, simply hating Marx, sacrificing the lives of family members (especially the unfortunate women who ran across their paths) to vast and contradictory causes.

Stoppard, who is Czech though he has lived his adult life in England, is unsparing and generally unsentimental about them. Their idealism does not capture him as it does more liberal writers in the West. Our literary and historical set sees them as noble but regrettably flawed, their bright dreams unfulfilled because of the sad ironies of life. Stoppard shows that their bright dreams were their flaws, and their starry ideals the cause of their misery. Only Herzen comes off well, forever true to an ideal of freedom and prosperity for the peasants, forever funding the unfree and violent schemes of the other radicals, forever a victim of those he sacrifices for.

I don't claim this is the single idea of this trilogy; Stoppard always keeps several balls in the air, smuggling the more serious ideas in under the humor. But nothing impresses so much in the plays as how petty and self-centered all these Great Hearts are. He sets us up to be fond of each, struggling tragically against the dark though bowed down by the oppressions of the world. We are drawn in, glimpsing the coasts of their utopias, but ultimately swinging wide as they destroy themselves and each other. They are not Shakespearean heroes with a single tragic flaw - they are thoroughgoing Flaws with a single tragic virtue. The destruction of millions that they wrought was a necessary consequence of their ideas, not an accident.

Character after character asks "What sort of Moloch is this that kills its children?", each surprised anew. They look to Rousseau, to Hegel, to Proudhon, and eventually to Marx for their answers. They sacrifice their children to their revolutionary ideals (often almost literally), which has its echo in the countries they feed into the maw of this dark god.

I should research what lessons the more marxist critics of literature and the theater have had to say about the three joined but separate plays "Voyage," "Shipwreck," and "Salvage." I already suspect they have missed the obvious.

The Wrong Men

This report on research in Britain has been circulating the past few days, generating comment. It seems that going on the Pill can cause women to be attracted to less suitable men. Before we discuss the implications if it's true, lets start with some reasons to be skeptical. The actual research involved women smelling t-shirts worn in bed by different men.

Well, there's your first problem right there. Women signing up for shirt-smelling research may not be entirely representative of the general female population, eh? But let's pretend they worked around that somehow, and have found an intriguing lead that does generalise to the population as a whole. The upshot is that women on oral contraceptives are more attracted to men whose hormonal profile is more like theirs in a narrow area. This is bad, it seems, or at least not the way things used to be.

You will notice we are not anywhere near a study which measures mate happiness rates of Pill-using teens, newlyweds, and matrons versus the happiness rates of their sisters who use other contraception or none.

This is a plausible explanation, but we haven't nailed it down as fact.

Pretend it is. Pretend that messing with hormones in a Yasmin/Ortho-Novum sort of way causes women to go completely against their interests and latch passionately onto Unsuitable Attachments, or at a minimum, a different guy than they would have found otherwise.

Which is worse - to marry the wrong one or to go on the pill and lose interest in the right one after you've married him?

Don't Plant A Tree

A nurse who worked on my unit was killed in a car accident. The staff has planted a tree in her honor. That is becoming more common, I think.

I like trees. A few years ago I developed one of my enthusiasms for odd subjects and learned to identify local trees and read up on them.

But don't plant a tree to commemorate me. If it lives, it proceeds on into the territory of descendants who could not care less. That chestnut was planted in honor of your great-grandfather... So what?

If it dies, it is one more wound for the survivors, one more great injustice of the world, ending with a whimper instead of a bang.

If you are a complete nobody, you are forgotten by all a year after your death. The beloved fare only a little better, I'm afraid. Twenty years after your death only a few close relatives with retain any memory, and those only occasionally. In a hundred years, those who are remembered will be recalled inaccurately. This world is not your home. Store up treasures in heaven.

Faux Pas Recognition

There is a faux pas recognition test used for diagnosing Autism Spectrum Disorders. No, really. And it's apparently pretty good. There is both a children's version and an adult version. They are interesting to read. Social situations are described, and the subject is asked if anyone said or did anything awkward. In some situations there is a faux pas, in others there is none. The diagnosis is not made from the True-False score, but from the questions based on the subject's response.
Developed by Simon Baron-Cohen (and others), autism expert at Trinity College in Oxford and author of popular books on the subject, Mindblindness and The Essential Difference: Mail and Female Brains and Autism, the test is slowly coming into use.

You wonder if you recognise the name? Yes, Simon is the cousin of comedian Sasha Baron-Cohen. The whole family seems to be rather accomplished. I think that the irony is amusing, and not quite accidental. Borat's psychologist cousin develops a diagnostic test based around faux pas. Very nice.

Be A Fireman

If you'd really like to work in a profession that protects the poor as well as the wealthy...

"I have no ambition in this world but one, and that is to be a firefighter The position may, in the eyes of some, appear to be a lowly one; but we who know the work which the firefighter has to do believe that his is a noble calling. There is an adage which says that, "Nothing can be destroyed except by fire." We strive to preserve from destruction the wealth of the world which is the product of the industry of men, necessary for the comfort of both the rich and the poor. We are defenders from fires of the art which has beautified the world, the product of the genius of men and the means of refinement of mankind. (But, above all; our proudest endeavor is to save lives of men-the work of God Himself. Under the impulse of such thoughts, the nobility of the occupation thrills us and stimulates us to deeds of daring, even at the supreme sacrifice. Such considerations may not strike the average mind, but they are sufficient to fill to the limit our ambition in life and to make us serve the general purpose of human society.” Edward Croker, NYFD chief 1910.

Sell All You Have

We attended a wedding yesterday which was boycotted by the bride's brother. He is furious that his ex-wife was one of the attendants and told his sister "You no longer have a brother." This type of drama queen behavior has been coming from him for several years now, worsening over the last two. This particular sister was the one he was closest to, who defended him longest, and even when he was at his most vindictive continued to visit and keep clear of the controversy.

His father is heartbroken, and keeps replaying old conversations in his head, hoping to find some slight thaw in his son's attitude, some ember that might be nursed into a flame. I fear that gradual softening may not provide the solution.

Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell all that he had. We usually think of this verse as cautionary that we do not become too attached to the riches of this world. We think of it as a general admonishment about wealth that applies to all of us somewhat, rather than a specific direction to a specific individual. But if we think of "all that we have" as a more general category than money and goods, we might find the command applies to all of us.

This young man's resentment is his greatest treasure, the one he has sold everything else to possess. We think of resentment as a burden, but many of us do treat it as a treasure. Our self-pity is our pearl of great price. This man will find no freedom in small gestures or middling attempts. He must sell it all and give it away to be free. It is a hard cost and a brutal price.

I have to wonder what my own greatest treasure is.

Self-Respect

Reposted from October 2006

Congressman Foley resigned, as he should. Dr. Sanity discusses shame and guilt cultures in a post from last year, and I think the distinction between guilt and shame might apply here. Resigning from Congress could spring from either guilt or shame (or some of both), but I think other information suggests guilt.

My own personal soapbox on this is self-respect versus self-esteem. If our goal is self-esteem, then when we do evil things we are hopelessly lost. After having been caught making wildly inappropriate sexual comments to a 16 y/o, reliance on self-esteem would leave one forever wounded. But if your goal is self-respect you can at least make your next act honorable. If you have nothing else, you can at least reassert your ability to make some moral decisions correctly. It is in some ways more painful, because your ability to make a correct moral choice on Tuesday implies pretty strongly that you had that capability on Monday as well. But it is at least reality. You can salvage something. With self-esteem, you either have to accept that you have none, or start lying to yourself to get some.

Tangentially, I am always grateful for sins I'm not tempted to. I don't do so great with the ones I am tempted to, and I'd hate for that list to be longer. So I am hesitant to condemn in detail people who have done things I never could. I'm harder on those whose temptations I understand.

Can Christianity Cure OCD?

Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment, by Ian Osborn, MD.

Excellent book; terrible title. Exactly the sort of title I would pass by in a bookstore, and in fact did pass by when a friend sent a link to the volume two months ago. What are these people thinking? Don’t they know that Christians with OCD or other interior battles have seen such things a dozen times before, all containing cliché-ridden bad advice from people who just don’t get it? Hey Christian! Why not use that obsessiveness to memorize Scripture, eh? That’ll get Satan on the run! And while you’re at it, here are some short prayers that will allow you to claim victory in the Name of Jesus! All together on the chorus now:

Trust and obey, for there’s no other way…

I can’t tell you how much I have come to hate such people. They are not well-meaning – they are arrogant.

The Epilogue’s title might have been better for the book: “How Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Saved Christianity.” That has echoes of the popular books How The Irish Saved Civilization, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Such a title doesn’t hint at treatment, true, but most people with OCD would be curious and give it a look, even if they weren’t religious.

Ian Osborn gets it. He acknowledges how Christianity has sometimes caused or worsened OCD, and makes careful distinctions in what he advocates. He has been through it himself and now practices at an OCD clinic. He is up on the research; he sees connections between current brain science and the behavior of great figures in the church over the centuries.

In particular, he focuses on Martin Luther, John Bunyan, and Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower beloved of Roman Catholics. He illustrates from their autobiographical details how each had severe OCD, the terrible advice they often received from other Christians, and how their search for relief from their tormenting thoughts led each independently to a stunningly similar theology, despite their different religious traditions.

As these three would be a good start for anyone’s all-star team of the faith over the last 500 years, we do well to pay attention even if there were no modern connection. But when that theological solution accords with many of the recent advances in cognitive-behavioral treatment specific to OCD and the neurological glitches related to obsessions, we have some powerful stuff here.

I tried to read the book straight through, finding so many previously-unseen connections to my own OCD* that I sought eagerly for more. Yet time and again, I found myself staring out silently, preoccupied with following one of those thoughts through my own experience. As I finished the book, I turned back again to the beginning, this time with a highlighter. Perhaps if I had kept up with OCD research Osborn’s book might have been less arresting, but much was new, and stunning. Thought-action fusion: I had never heard of it but recognized it on sight. Inflated responsibility; add-on obsessions; fixed action patterns. I had known these since childhood and now knew their names. Obsessions and compulsions that had slipped away unnoticed when I went on fluoxetine two decades ago now waved cheerily back at me, stripped of their previous intimidation.

I suspect that non-Christians might also get significant benefit from the book, as might those who suffer from conditions similar to OCD, such as phobias or addictions. The language and concepts are not far off from what one would read in 12-Step literature, and parts of the treatment bear significant similarity to some Steps. I imagine that Osborn’s earlier book, Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals would provide less barrier to a nonreligious person, and he writes approvingly of Jeffrey Schwartz’s Brain Lock, but I haven’t read those and can’t comment.

The Christian clichés come with meat on their bones here. Dr. Osborn emphasizes that trust in God is integral to the treatment, but he describes how that looks in the specific context of OCD. He uses the term “faith” but uses Martin Buber’s distinction between trust in someone and belief that something is true. Finally, you can reflect on where the church would have gone were it not for the corrective of these three giants of the faith and their tormenting obsessions.

*My Y-BOC score in the 1980's was 26. I now score a 14, which seems -heh- normal to me.

Never, Ever Talk To The Police

When I saw this video loading up at Maggie's Farm, I scoffed. Good people try to help the police in their investigations. Innocent people have nothing to fear. It's like helping people in trouble, picking up your litter, or giving directions to strangers. This law professor convinced me otherwise.

If that's not enough to convince you, Part Two is a police investigator who has done thousands of interviews. (Download time is long).

There is plenty of time to help the police with their investigation - after you have consulted with your attorney. The Fifth Amendment is there for a reason.

Obama...

...went to Germany to discuss America's poor racial attitudes. People cheered. Back home, too.

Missing The Point On The Manny Trade

Update: I wrote this post before Jason Bay's first game with the Sox. Side note: sportswriters still don't get it, noting that Bay had "failed to put the ball in play" in his first five appearances. He had two walks and a hit-by-pitch. He was a baserunner four of the six times he came to the plate. Forget batting average. Ignore batting average. On-base-percentage and slugging percentage. (There are other useful stats, but that's where you should start.)

Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.

When statisticians claim that 80% of the variance in baseball is due to
chance, people leap to the ridiculous conclusion that they mean “baseball is 80% luck.” We all pretty readily conclude that we personally would get a hit off Josh Becket 0% of the time, and would strike out Albert Pujols 0% of the time, so we reject the notion immediately. It is this kind of misunderstanding that leads people to reject statistical analysis in general.

Well, actually, people reject statistical analysis because they don’t want to do any math more complicated than addition and subtraction, but they want a more elevated reason to tell other people.

Variance at the major-league level includes the important detail that you are starting from a pool of people who are the 1000 best in the world at this game. Because they all, even the worst of them, fill up the “skill” portion of the equation to almost 100%, the chance factor looms larger than it would in a pure situation.

Chance is why the better team can lose 11-3 in MLB. The NFL equivalent
score of a better team losing 42-14 never happens. There is chance and
luck in football, of course, but not to nearly the same degree. In baseball, Albert Pujols can hit 3 towering flies to the warning track and go 0-3; a guy you brought up from AAA for a week because of injuries can hit a bleeder through the infield and drive in the winning run. No one looks at that game’s box score and says “OMG, we’ve got to get that guy who outhit Pujols yesterday!”

Two rules of thumb for determining how much a sport’s variance depends on chance are a) how many games they play in a season and b) what percentage of games the championship team loses. These are not independent.

Superior skill in baseball shows over time. Over 162+ games, the slight skill advantage will gradually squeeze out the element of chance.

With that in mind, let’s look at the Ramirez trade. For this season, what is the expected outcome for the Red Sox in wins and losses? (We’ll turn to subsequent seasons in a moment). Sabermetricians usually estimate this in terms of runs. We can’t know in advance whether the runs player A creates will be in a situation that wins games, but we know that over time, creating more runs wins more ballgames. Manny has an Onbase Plus Slugging of .926. Bay has an OPS of .894. Over the remaining 50+ games, that would translate into an estimated 7 extra runs for the Red Sox with Manny in the lineup. That is a difference of 0.4 wins. In a pennant race, that may be significant. It can be the difference between going to the playoffs and going home.

But wait, there’s an extra wrinkle. Manny’s estimated extra runs are predicated on he and Bay having the same number of at-bats. Is that a reasonable assumption? Not at all. They might end up with an equal number of at-bats from here, but Bay has more AB at this point in the season for a good reason: Manny’s been hurt a little. Who is more likely to be hurt and miss games during the rest of the season? Manny, of course, and in Boston, those at-bats would likely be have been picked up by Ellsbury or Crisp. Their OPS for those 10-50 AB must be factored in to Ramirez’s total to get an accurate picture of the trade. The Red Sox have lost about a third of a win this season with this trade, on average. Chance factors make a range estimate more accurate. Boston may lose as many as three wins with the trade; they may gain as many as two wins. Throw in fielding and baserunning, and this is a nearly even trade. For this season.

Next season, they already have a guy under contract who is about 20 runs per season less good than Manny Ramirez, for one-third the price. Those extra millions will go a long way toward paying people you want to get or keep.

The Red Sox robbed the National League blind with this trade.

Conservatives Need To Chill Out

A conservative site which will remain nameless has a post today about progressive attitudes toward children. It is perhaps fair game to point out that because progressives as a group have fewer children, they might value children less. But I don't see how that applies to the liberals who actually do have children of their own. The post itself, and certainly the comments, included dire warnings about how bad liberals' children were going to turn out, and what bad parents they are.

Go back to the dugout, shortstop. Don't automatically conclude parenting values from political values which include some of the same words. More importantly, while parenting may be the largest factor in how children turn out, it may not be a majority factor and is certainly not overwhelming. Genetics (especially temperament), siblings, neighborhood, churches, friends, schools, books, media and chance all play their part as well.

Woodstock

NPR did a short piece on the Woodstock Museum this morning. The 1969 event has taken on mythic proportions, both positive and negative.

Here's what you need to know: It was an outdoor concert. A lot of people went to it. That's it.

Because the crowd kept growing, from an expected .25% of the population from 15-30 to a full .5%, the people there decided that they had participated in an earth-changing event. They were aided in this idea by several irrelevant factors:
1. They were young and had not finished myelinating, and were still narcissistic enough to believe that whatever happened to them and their friends was more important than other things happening in the world. Anything that felt so powerful to them must be significant, right? It's the same thing that happens at the end of co-ed adolescent summer camp every week of the summer.

2. They were taking drugs, in particular marijuana, which is noted for its ability to convince you that random events have cosmic importance.

3. The performers had never played before crowds this big and all concluded that they must be hotter stuff than they had thought before.

4. The attendees were still a minuscule minority, which allowed them to think they were an elite of coolness. Coolness, you may recall from reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is what everyone is supposedly looking for.

5. The movie and record people saw dollar signs if they could bring out stuff to sell that reinforced the above notions. My generation has always been easily manipulated by people selling us stuff on the basis of telling us that we are more important than other people.

6. A lot of guys reportedly got laid, which made the males who hadn't gone feel they had missed an important opportunity.

Just so we're clear on the concept, these are the true descendants of Woodstock: The Flight of the Conchords.

(H/T Neco Dracones)

Postliberal

A repost of where the idea of "postliberal" comes from. There were quite a few comments - well, sort of.

Nothing against conservatives - I usually agree with them. But there are Social Conservatives, Economic Conservatives, Religious Right, Paleocons, Neocons, Envirocons, Crunchy conservatives, Country-club conservatives, and proabably a few others I haven't been introduced to yet. None of them suits, exactly. There are also several species of Libertarian, with whom I also have some sympathies.

But "Postliberal" also gives a sense of my history and my approach to issues.

(Full post here)

Liability

One of my all-time favorite players, Jason Varitek, is now a liability to the Red Sox. His OBP has always been low, but this year it is atrocious - .299. He is about the 30th-best offensive catcher in the majors as of today, depending on what stats you value most. He has remained useful the last few years because of his occasional power and his handling of pitchers. From 2001-2006, Red Sox pitchers had better ERA's with Tek catching. Usually much better. With young pitchers (Lester, Masterson, Buchholz) coming up and Dice-K and Okajima coming from Japan, it seemed natural to have the proverbial steady hand at the tiller. But that is a narrative, no longer borne out by the facts. Fans feel as if Varitek is the heart and soul of the team. I'd rather have OPS (or OW%), thanks.

The Sox need to bring up Dusty Brown, George Kottaras, or make a trade.

It won't happen this year, but it should.

Fear Vs. Greed

In my recent repost There Is No System, I did not make the concept specific to free markets. I spoke with a friend at work today who believes that the oil companies are in bed with the automakers, that there are only a few corporations which control everything, and that there is a market system that can be manipulated by these nefarious entities.

Well wouldn't they just love to. It is best to think of most players in the market as amoral agents. Not that they are all amoral, but that this method provides the best overall predictive value. If they could manipulate the market, they most certainly would try. Groups succeed at having undue influence for awhile because they control a prized resource or process, but this is short-lived.

These large corporations are wrestling with the same large, ungainly mass of rubber bands that we are, trying to get a good grip to move things their own way. They're bigger, they can do a lot more, but no entity is large enough to move the whole market more than a little. You have to leverage the advantage you find, and leveraging means vulnerability and risk.

We use the nice words risk and benefit to describe actions in the market, but if you want to describe it starkly, it's fear versus greed. In the checks and balances of the market, fear is the great limiter of greed. This is why federal bailouts, government corruption, and sweetheart deals are so bad for us. They eliminate the fear and so allow greed to run unchecked.

Nice, well-meaning people get taken advantage of at times, but for the really spectacular falls, keep your eye on the greedy. This is how casinos make their money. The folks with limited greed can only be taken for so much of a ride, because the they don't have an intoxicant causing them to underestimate the fear.

It gets more complicated, certainly. In some professions, taking no risks whatsoever is itself a risky strategy - adapt or disappear. But for shorthand understanding of why InBev buys Anheuser-Busch or GM is slow off the mark making electric cars, analysing it in terms of fear versus greed will take you a long way.

Taking it one step further, it applies to foreign affairs as well. Countries take risks to obtain more benefit: fear versus greed. Refusing to play only grants more power to the other players, by removing the check of fear on the greedy.

There is a great exception to this last, which I leave to your own analyses.

Odd Sabbatical

The First Congregational Church of Dunbarton, NH is on summer sabbatical, according to their sign. It seems odd to be taking Sabbaths off as a sabbatical.

Context and Bias

In my role as Assistant Village Idiot, I again point out the obvious, because it seems not to be noticed.

In any persuasive essay or discussion, you are trying to give evidence for a particular point of view. You are not obligated to make the other chap's argument for him. But in the larger scheme, you are not supposed to be proving one point of view, but arguing a side with an eye to all of us getting nearer the truth. You believe your view is closer to the truth, someone else believes theirs is, and together you press on toward a better understanding.

This is perhaps discussion rather than argument, though it is argument in its higher and better sense. It involves some listening, some granting that the other disputant has made some valid point.

It is different in a court of law, where an attorney is obligated by profession to give ground only for tactical reasons, and a certain obscuring of the facts is part of the process. When an attorney negotiates for you outside of a formal hearing, s/he might engage in more give-and-take, but the understanding in a formal hearing is that you grant nothing, and make the other side prove everything. This is because it is a judge or jury, a (hopefully) neutral hearer with no dog in the fight, is making the decision. Without this - if the attorneys had to resolve the dispute between themselves - the line of questioning would be different.

I don't understand why this specialised type of questioning is considered proper in political arguments, journalism, or in online discussion. A paid advocate must act like an attorney, perhaps, but even an op-ed writer, if seeking after truth, acknowledges some justice in the other side, even as he seeks to answer it. Political cartoons are unfair and one-sided; editorials should be fair, not intentionally ignoring information to score a point.

National journalists must think they are prosecuting attorneys. Their goal does not seem to be arriving at the truth, but in being as challenging as possible, even if unfair. Let Governor Buncombe make his own argument. My job is to undermine it. No, not really.

Isn't it true, doctor, that you prescribed this treatment knowing that death was one of the possible side effects?

MD: Well, this particular treatment...

Just answer the question, doctor: yes or no?

MD: Yes.

We consider this fair because we know a cross-examination is coming next - the doctor is going to get to give the context of how likely the side effects are, what precautions, he took, and what his other choices were.

Ms. Wintergreen, isn't it true that you pushed and elderly lady to the curb and she injured herself?

Ms. W: Well I had to because...

Yes or no, Ms. Wintergreen.

Ms. W: Yes.

The other attorney will take the line of questioning which reveals that the elderly lady was pushed in order to get her out of the path of a speeding vehicle.

Why should we admire this type of questioning from journalists? Why do they consider themselves not only justified but downright noble when they do so? How is it that advocates for causes con themselves into thinking they are being righteous when they do this? Why is it okay to ignore or dismiss known truths for the sake of the Cause?

Yeah, that's the same question, asked four different ways.

Whether live or online, I seldom stay in discussions with such people. Whether they be fool or knave is no matter - there is nothing to be gained.

There Is No System

Reprinted from Sept 2006

...So contemplating that “system” and how it got there, and what our place in it should be, or what we should do, will get us precisely nowhere. We will pour our energy into a problem that doesn’t exist and neglect the one that does.

In America, there is no system. That's the American system. That's a gross oversimplification, and I could make a more accurate statement by going on about how there are many systems, all of them complex and interrelated, yada, yada, ya. But taking that approach only encourages people to stick with the same sort of approaches and answers. For purpose of rethinking, it is better to start from the radical statement: there is no system.

(Full post here)

Alternative Energy

Saving you the trouble of looking these up.

Solar on the immediate horizon.

Nanosolar

Cold fusion, of which I am always suspicious of new developments, nonetheless has something encouraging.

Small scale nuclear reactor. Wouldn't you love to have one?

More small nuclear.

I don't know how sensible this is, but geothermal energy from volcanoes just seems very cool.

Update: Via Instapundit, new biofuel from algae.

The Outsiders

I had a fascinating correspondence with Grady Towers in the pre-email days of my Prometheus Society membership. Grady succeeded me briefly as president. I remember this essay coming out in Gift of Fire, the in-house publication poorly-printed in the days just after mimeographs. It convinced me to stick around and give the society one more chance. The essay starts with a discussion - fascinating but based on unreliable (and probably exaggerated) information - of William James Sidis, who, it is claimed, had the highest IQ in history. But the meat of the essay is the extended discussion whether the superintelligent are more likely to be socially inept and isolated. Grady and many others lean toward the explanation that people of high-to-very-high IQ are better socially adjusted than average, but that something starts to happen around the 155 range, and there is a large percentage of misfits.

The update is that Asperger Syndrome was little-known and poorly understood at that time. There is growing speculation that some manifestations of AS or High-Functioning Autism are common in the extreme range of ability for certain disciplines, which would be a confounding factor in measuring the social adjustment of those of ultra-high IQ. Incidentally, I no longer see or classify myself as an ultra High. I think test accidents and personality traits made it look that way, but were partly an illusion.

Humorlessness II

It's so easy to get behind the curve. All of a sudden, Barack's humorlessness is the topic of the hour. I try to contribute my bit.

Barack Obama and a kangaroo walk into a bar and order arugula salads. The bartender says “We don’t serve arugula salads here.” Obama says “I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Did the civil rights movement mean nothing? It’s 2008, and a person of mixed race can’t be served in a bar open to the public? That’s racist, and the destructive politics of the past.”

-----------------------------------------

Barack Obama and a kangaroo walk into a bar and order arugula salads. “That’ll be $20 each,” says the bartender. Barack pats his pockets and the kangaroo pays. After a bit, the bartender says “You know, we don’t get many of your kind here.” Obama pulls a hand mic out of his pocket and goes off on a 10-minute rant about hope and change we can believe in. The kangaroo looks at him a long time and then says to the bartender “At these prices, you won’t be getting many more, either.”

----------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama and a kangaroo walk into a bar and order arugula salads. The bartender says, “Hey, isn’t he from a foreign country?” Obama slams down his fist and says “You’re just showing your prejudices. That kangaroo was born in an American zoo, is completely native to this country, and his patriotism shouldn’t be questioned. And even if he was an immigrant, he would still have rights, because this is America.” The bartender says “I was talking to the kangaroo.”

---------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama and a kangaroo are crossing the street to go into a bar to order arugula salads. Barack throws the kangaroo under a bus.

------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama walks into a French café with his daughter. The waiter says “Bonjour Monsieur et Madamoiselle.” Obama says, I’m sorry; I am embarrassed to be an American. My daughter and I don’t speak any French.” The waiter shrugs and says “That’s okay, I speak good English.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama and a group of lemmings walk into a bar to order an arugula salad. The bartender says “What are those things, rats?” Obama says “Those are my friends. I love them like my own family. I have more small donors than anyone else.” The bartender says “Okay, they can stay, but I can’t see why you’d want to spend your time with rats.” The lemmings, eyes shining, watch Obama eat his salad. He goes back to the bartender “You know, you’re right, they are a lot like rats. They’ve been around for years and I never noticed before. I’ve decided I can’t stand them.” The lemmings all nod and follow him out of the bar.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama walks into a Dutch café with his daughter. The waiter says “Welkom Mijnheer en Meisje.” Obama says, “I’m sorry, I am embarrassed to be an American. My daughter and I don’t speak any Dutch.” The waiter shrugs and says “That’s okay, I speak good English.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says “That’s a real nice one. Does he say anything?” Obama says “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” The bartender says to the parrot “That’s pretty good! Did it take long to teach him that?”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says “That’s a real nice one. Where’d you get him?” The parrot says “Chicago.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama is about to walk into a bar when he sees an accident in the street. He pulls out his cell phone and dials 911. The dispatcher asks “What happened?” Obama says “I’m not sure, but it looks like a whole lot of lemmings threw themselves under a bus one at a time.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama walks into a Moldovan café with his daughter. The waiter says “Buna Dimineata, Domnule si Domnisoara.” Obama says, “I’m sorry, I am embarrassed to be an American. My daughter and I don’t speak any Moldovan.” The waiter shrugs and says “That’s okay, I speak good English.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama walks into a bar with his daughters to order arugula salads. “I’m sorry,” says the bartender “but I can’t serve them here.” Barack goes ballistic “I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Did the civil rights movement mean nothing? It’s 2008, and a person of mixed race can’t be served in a bar open to the public? That’s racist, and the destructive politics of the past.” The bartender says “No no no! It’s not that. I can’t serve them because they’re underage.” Bill Clinton turns pale and quickly leaves the bar.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama walks into an English pub with his daughter. The waiter says “Good afternoon, would you like arugula salads?” Obama says, I’m sorry, I am embarrassed to be an American. My daughter and I don’t speak any English.” The waiter nods “That’s what we’ve been telling you Yanks for years.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barack Obama runs into a panhandler on the street. “Barry! My man Barry!” says the panhandler. “You were my best friend at Occi! I remember you used to get the most righteous weed. Have you got any now?” Obama looks at him narrowly. “That was in the past and it’s racist of you to bring it up now.” The panhandler looks puzzled. “Sorry Barry. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to get you mad. Have you got any spare change?” Obama looks even more narrowly at him. “Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.” The panhandler looks at him funny. “So – no change?”

Humorlessness

Megan McArdle over at The Atlantic explains why David Horsey's cartoon about McCain is not equivalent to the New Yorker cover of the Obamas, and it is as good an introduction to the subject as I have found. The humorlessness of the Obama supporters is on full display.

Megan is dead on here with the explanation. The New Yorker's entire tone for decades has been irony, mostly directed at the actions of the rest of America, but with a salting of self-mockery as well. It has not done splashy political cartoons, but ironic takes on the political process in general, though from a generally liberal POV.

I didn't think that the original cover worked that well, but I saw the point. The delicious irony for me is how much this rips the mask off the distant, amused, ironic attitude of New Yorker readers. When that same archness is directed back at them, some have become as rabidly tribal, with humor just as coarse and unsubtle, as those they have been ridiculing for years.

The two covers are not the same in tone - the first cartoonist is clearly making fun of the criticism of Obama, not Obama himself. If you can't see that, then you might be careful about being condescending to others in the future, dig?

If Obama is smart he will laugh loudest, but I don't think he's got in in him. Perhaps he's a jolly guy when you get to know him, but he comes off as humorless. I have noted before that the ability to laugh at yourself is an excellent quick measure of emotional balance.

A commenter named Passerby in Megan's next post fights back against the completely un-American attempt by Obama and his supporters to forbid humor about him. He provides the beginning of the collection of the campaign-approved jokes that are allowed about Obama.

Knock Knock!

Who's there?

Barack Obama

Barack Obama who?

Barack Obama who wants to see that Hope is restored to America through Change, Change in our country's politics; Change in our Great Nation's Ability to Lead through Peace, and Change in the Eating Habits of Children, so that together we can face this Century with Hope. Hope brought through Change.

-------------------------

a boy, a girl, and Barack Obama walk into McDonald's. The boy says to the cashier "Thanks to the dietary advice from Senator Obama, I'd like a healthy salad and a water for lunch!" The girl says "I'd like the same and I'd also like to talk to the manager about how I can access employment opportunities."

--------------------------

Barack Obama is standing on stage at the Ivesco Center, he adjusts his tie and says to the audience "Take my wife, please ... She's an example of how America offers promise but fails to make that promise available to all. For too long people like my wife, Michelle, have had to work too hard to achieve for reasons that are historical, but that can change. Together, we can make a difference."

--------------------------

Barack Obama took his wife and children to see a talent show agent. The agent asked Senator Obama what the family act was.

Senator Obama explained that his family represented the opportunity for change, the ability of people to improve their lives through hardwork, that children can reach their potential even at the cost of ten to fifteen thousand dollars per year in music lessons and summer camps, that families can struggle to eat healthy foods, such as fresh fruit and leafy greens, and, that all this can happen despite being limited to speaking in one language.

The agent sat back, decided he would never smoke again, order healthier foods that contained zero transfats, begin saving a percentage of his income, donate to charity, and invest in that RosettaStone package he'd seen advertised on television, and asked Senator Obama what the name of his act was.

"The Aristocrats"

------------------------------

How many Barack Obamas does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. Barack simply hopes and the light bulb changes itself.

----------------------------

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Hope. And a desire for Change.

--------------------------------


Barack Obama, Maureen Dowd, and Bob Novak are standing at the Pearly Gates. Barack says to Maureen Dowd - "So, why should I let you in?"

I think I'm going to have a go at this myself. Watch for updates

Yearly Pilgrimage

Goffstown, NH

Why Boomers Went Bad

These take awhile to load.

I sang along, remembering every word



I loved Clutch Cargo, especially the dog, Paddlefoot. But even then I knew there was something creepy about the mouths. The technique is called Synchro-Vox.

Cultural Improvement Moment

Reprinted from August 2006

There is a longish but excellent article over at the Social Affairs Unit discussing "Wealth and Poverty: A Jewish Analysis." For those interested in what the Church should do about poverty and social justice, there is much to digest here. Note that the author writes A Jewish Analysis, not The Jewish Analysis. Christians writing on the same topic tend to be less humble, claiming to know what The Biblical Answer is.

The POV is at 45 degrees to our usual discussions in the Church, which tend to break down along left/right lines. It is important to notice that several of his major points are in sharp contrast to things that Jesus said, and a Chrisitan interpretation would contradict at those places. Still, there is a lot of common ground and common language, and several thoughts I had not encountered before. An excerpt from the essay, quoting Maimonides

Charity is not justified by the good it does to the soul of the giver, but by the degree to which it removes the misery of the recipient, physical and more especially psychological. An act which enables him not to need charity is higher than any charity.

When I Say 'Religious Left'

All the brouhaha over Obama's Church and Rev. Wright have shone a light on the religious left, long believed extinct, or at least moribund. But two years ago I had a long post cataloging the leftism of the mainstream denominations. This was the first in a series that continued in August. I may collect them into a sidebar group.

The conventional wisdom is that there has been no religious left since the heyday of civil rights and antiwar protests, a time which many boomer Christians look back on in fondness, overvaluing the effect of their protests. In this model, liberals in the church have just sort of gone quiet while the Religious Right did all this grassroots organizing and splashy politicizing. Only now (and they hope it’s not too late) has the liberal church begun to slowly re-emerge, claiming back the territory in the public square that was usurped by conservatives.

That is nonsense. Liberal Christians own the power structures of the mainstream denominations...

(Full post here)

The Agenda

Eric over at Classical Values links at the end of the post to a story at WorldNet Daily that declares the actions of one gay man suing Bible publishers part of "the homosexual agenda."

I'm not sure where the line is drawn, but I think we need some standards. People complain about The Agenda of opposing groups a lot, on very slender evidence. An article in an obscure publication, or a century-old document from a similar group convinces people that they have unearthed the secret plan of the other guys. Aha! We have discovered the communist agenda, or the conservative agenda, or the Christian agenda, or the homosexual agenda.

If one church advocates something, does that mean it is part of the Christian agenda? How about one state chapter of NOW - does its action reveal the feminist agenda? How many of your opponents have to be fully signed on to an idea, plus how many more willing to passively go along, before you can claim to know their agenda? How much of the leadership has to be on record? How recent does the documentation have to be?

I propose a minimum standard: one person, in no position of authority, is not enough to generalize from. One Jew, one Freemason, one lesbian, one Democrat voter - it's not a trend, okay? Criminy, is that so hard?

QOTD

From Carl, at No Oil For Pacifists.

Never bet the "under" on Euro-silliness.

Full silliness here.

Who Would Jesus Bomb?

I haven't scoured old posts for reprints for over a year. Not only are there a lot of comments on this post, but there are even two from good old Copithorne! From July 2006:

The people closest to Jesus were remarkable for their repeated inability to anticipate what He was going to do and say. This alone should give us pause when making claims of knowing what Jesus would have us do. If Peter and John couldn't figure Him out until much later and after much reflection, then who are you? I make no claim that random or always counterintuitve actions are what Christ wants from us, only that the simple answers sometimes blow up in our faces when contemplating Our Lord. Jesus fed the multitudes and quite sternly admonished the rich to give. But he also criticized Judas for wanting to give money to the poor in a particular way at a particular time. Jesus went with complete nonviolence to His death - almost immediately after beating the moneylenders out of the Temple.

(full post here)(discussion of "peacemakers" here)

Where Credit Is Due

Without JD Drew, the Red Sox would have been in free-fall in the month of June. He batted in or scored 1/3 of their runs (and no, I didn't count the HR's twice in that, as some do). I spent last season fantacising about better, less-expensive right fielders that we could have gotten instead.

It is more exciting, and seems more important, to remember Jim Rice carrying the Sox for two weeks in Sept '86, or Yaz carrying them for two weeks in Sept '67. But they all count the same in the end, and sometimes a guy who can stop the bleeding is all you need.

Hypocrisy

Commenter TomG links to an excellent article on recent research into hypocrisy. Excellent article by John Tierney, with some uncomfortable truths. A more extended quote:

The more interesting question is how presidential candidates, and their supporters, turn into hypocrites. It has been demonstrated repeatedly in experiments that humans are remarkably sensitive to unfairness. We’ve survived as social animals because we are so good at spotting selfishness and punishing antisocial behavior.

So how we do violate our own moral code? Does our gut instinct for self-preservation override our moral reasoning? Do we use our powers of rationality to override our moral instinct?

“The question here,” Dr. DeSteno said, “is whether we’re designed at heart to be fair or selfish.”

Today's News

The main headline on today's Concord Monitor:

US DEATHS IN AFGHANISTAN TOP IRAQ TOLL

So the numbers of deaths per month in Iraq have gone down enough so that they are now below Afghanistan. But the Monitor couldn't possibly give you that good news.

On NPR, a lead commenter (Something Bernstein from the Economic Policy Something Something) tells us that the median wage between 2000 and 2007 hasn't changed much. But those aren't the same people - they never are. How many people have started in the work force since then, including young people, legal and illegal immigrants, and folks coming off welfare? Would you say they tended to come in near the bottom of income or near the top? How many people have retired in those years? Would you say they have gone out more toward the bottom of income or more toward the top? Not to mention the increased value of benefits (your health care costs more because THEY CAN DO MORE NOW), the increase in home equity (about 70%), and the increase in retirement funds.

I hate these &%&#@ people.