Enjoy the day.

"Find your candidate a nasty enemy. Tell people they are threatened in some way. . . . It's a cheap trick, but the simplest."

Politics professor John J. Pitney Jr. writes about the way Jerry Falwell served the interests of liberals:

Many Republicans and conservative leaders regarded Falwell as a liability. During the 1984 race, a Democratic campaign aide told Time: "Jerry Falwell is a no-risk whipping boy." Ed Rollins, who ran President Reagan's re-election campaign, later agreed: "Jerry Falwell, no question, is a very high negative." Politicians also noticed that Moral Majority was mainly a direct-mail operation and had never built much of a grassroots organization. With ebbing support from the political world, Falwell quit as president of the group in 1987. It folded two years later.

Since then, the religious right has had a complex political history. For a time, the Christian Coalition loomed as a powerful successor; and it eventually crumbled. Although conservative Christians took up a key role in Republican politics, they were far from monolithic, having a variety of leaders and viewpoints. Their activists came to see Falwell as a small part of their heritage, if they thought of him at all.

Liberals, however, did not forget Falwell. As a political consultant once advised his fellow Democrats: "Find your candidate a nasty enemy. Tell people they are threatened in some way. . . . It's a cheap trick, but the simplest."

Yeah, we should all be onto that trick by now.

"An aging roué, who is almost too facile, and a grimly ambitious feminist lawyer, with a tough but conventional mind."

Noemie Emery -- in The Weekly Standard -- tells the story of Bill and Hillary as a long-running TV soap opera. What do the script writers have in store for us next season?

Can the couple bring it off once again? If they can't, it won't be the first time a show failed when main characters tried to spin off into separate series, losing much of the magic that made the act compelling. From the start, the thing that made The Clintons work was the unlikely union of opposites, held together in an attraction-revulsion dynamic, with the whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts. As a sum, they are, and remain, an incredible story. As parts, however, they are merely stock players: an aging roué, who is almost too facile, and a grimly ambitious feminist lawyer, with a tough but conventional mind. In 1992, they seemed fresh and exciting; now they are part of the system and the problem; they were young; now they're not far from the age that the elder George Bush was when they ran against him. And if her job was tough, Bill's is still tougher: It is easier to discipline a huge and unruly political talent than to try to breathe talent into a humorless disciplinarian....

Whether this pol will achieve her lifelong ambition is a whole other story, and one that is yet to be seen. Writers are working on three different endings: In the first, she loses and goes back to the Senate, where she makes peace with her limits and destiny; in the second, she loses, makes Bill's life hell, and rages on at him and the world for the rest of eternity; in the third, she wins, Bill pulls her over the finish line, and they go back to the White House for four or eight years of the same old dynamic, but this time with her owing him. However it ends, it will be quite a story. It will be must-see TV.

Ending 1 is way too boring. Ending 2 makes the best TV show -- for my taste, at least. But I'm not watching it on TV, I'm watching it in the news and trying to blog, and from that perspective, I've got to say that Ending 3 looks juicier than Emery makes it sound. Nevertheless, I'm not hoping for the news that makes the best raw material for blogging. That would be evil.

"They will be snuffling in the dust, squeaking with metaphysical neediness and kissing the lovely pink feet..."

Here's a comment on the new Bloggingheads, by mnbr:

This has to be the all time best Bloggingheads.tv diavlog, no?

It's part of Bob Wright's ordinary cleverness to find smart interlocutors who dig talking to each other ... and then to let them have a ball! Having tried Ann and Annie out once before, Bob must have smacked his head, realizing what a gold mine he'd found, having these two beautiful, smart, quirky, ultra-independent, totally charming women go at it ... WOW!

Can I please just prostrate and grovel in awe at this splendid display of the female mind? Please? Surely one could hand over most of one's net worth to secure Ann and (possibly) Annie as second and third Islamic wives?

The rolling riffs here are amazing - trial by blow job, GOP slime moulds, Dems as amoeba, Western varmints, Fatboy Gore, "nature is trying to kill us ... We ovulate more often now... more bumps here and lumps there", comments on the Sopranos twisating [sic] rapidly into thoughts about whether the human soul is constructed artifice or "merely" a chemical imbalance - can you imagine any two men coming up up with this brilliant, fast-moving, intensly [sic] pointed stuff? Noooo ... we smelly, dull buffoons? .. not even close!

Sure, we're the only ones who're going to figure out some obscure outer reaches of the Reimann Hypothesis ... but, who cares? ... all the mathematicians who could do that stuff will have put away their sticks of chalk, they will be snuffling in the dust, squeaking with metaphysical neediness and kissing the lovely pink feet of these mercurial goddesses ... yes, no?

This amused me -- partly because praise is cool, but also because it's a little weird and because it stirs up memories of the old Larry Summers controversy that seized the national imagination back in 2005:

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested the other day that innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers....

By some accounts, Summers referred to "innate ability" or "natural ability" as a possible explanation for the sex difference in high-school test scores....

What's the evidence on Summers' side? Start with the symptom: the gender gap in test scores. Next, consider biology. Sex is easily the biggest physical difference within a species. Men and women, unlike blacks and whites, have different organs and body designs. The inferable difference in genomes between two people of visibly different races is one-hundredth of 1 percent. The gap between the sexes vastly exceeds that. A year and a half ago, after completing a study of the Y chromosome, MIT biologist David Page calculated that male and female human genomes differed by 1 percent to 2 percent—"the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee," according to a paraphrase in the New York Times. "We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it," Page said. "But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome." Another geneticist pointed out that in some species 15 percent of genes were more active in one sex than in the other.

You'd expect some of these differences to show up in the brain, and they do. A study of mice published a year ago in Molecular Brain Research found that just 10 days after conception, at least 50 genes were more active in the developing brain of one sex than in the other. Comparing the findings to research on humans, the Los Angeles Times observed that "the corpus callosum, which carries communications between the two brain hemispheres, is generally larger in women's brains [than in men's]. Female brains also tend to be more symmetrical. … Men and women, on average, also possess documented differences in certain thinking tasks and in behaviors such as aggression."...

Already Summers is being forced to apologize, in the style of a Communist show trial, for sending "an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women." But the best signal to send to talented girls and boys is that science isn't about respecting sensitivities. It's about respecting facts....

So, men are also overrepresented among political policy geeks. But political policy commentary, more so than the physical sciences, can be done different ways....

Preserve the historical landmarks of American popular culture.

I didn't know it was called Trimper's Rides. [CORRECTION: I'm mixing up Ocean City, Maryland and Ocean City, New Jersey.] We just called it "the Boardwalk," all those summers when it was the highlight of our week-long stay at Aunt Isabel and Uncle Henry's cottage in Ocean City, New Jersey. I was young enough to find the Tilt-a-Whirl unbearably thrilling and to marvel at the kids who had the nerve to ride the merry-go-round and grab for the brass ring.

Now, I see it was called Trimper's Rides. Tthere's a news story: after 117 years, the place is closing. The property is too valuable, and the taxes go too far beyond what you can make with an old-fashioned place like that:

Trimper's is the oldest continuously owned amusement park in the United States, and its demise would reverberate beyond the mid-Atlantic shore, said Jim Futrell of the National Amusement Park Historical Association.

Closing Trimper's "will forever change Ocean City, and I don't think it will change it for the better," Futrell said. "It would rob the community of its soul."...

There are the arcade with rows of Skee-Ball lanes, the pipe-organ carousel with hand-painted horses, the haunted house and the mirror maze.

Granville and Doug Trimper have appealed the taxes with the state. They also have reached out to Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and lawmakers for help. Options under consideration include a historic designation or legislation to change the way the park is assessed, Doug said.

The place is more than twice as old as the Coney Island amusement park. It is classic Americana. We are fools if we don't preserve these landmarks of American pop culture. This isn't even a question of designating the place a historical landmark to prevent its destruction. The owners want to preserve it. They just want tax relief to spare them from the spiraling property assessments. And doesn't the value of the surrounding property come, in part, front the classic amusement park that gives Ocean City character? I can't believe the city doesn't do everything it can not just to preserve but to restore something so distinctive and so profoundly and historically American.

Memorial Day.

Picture source explained. More here. Memorial Day always makes me think of my parents, who are both dead, not that they died in a war, but they did meet in the Army, during WWII.

My first Memorial Day post:

My mother was a WWII veteran. She joined the Women's Army Corps for reasons she would never put in personal terms. I used to ask her, "Why did you join the Army?" I wanted to hear the details of a teenager who cared for her infant sister, named Hope, who was doomed by spina bifida, incapacitating the poor baby's mother with grief, and who went to college, at the University of Michigan, when she was only 16. I wanted to hear about how she had a great passion to leave Ann Arbor, where she had lived all her life, to have new adventures. But her answer was always devoid of a personal story. It was always: "You have to understand how it was for everyone at the time. There was a war."

My father was drafted into the Army after the end date of the war, so he was not, technically, a veteran. They are both dead now and so are among the many of their generation who did not live to see the [WWII] memorial. They met in the Army. My father had one of those Army office jobs, and so did my mother, who was transferred from working on battle fatigue cases to an office job when it was learned that she could type. My father had made some coffee in his office, and my mother went into the office attracted by the smell of coffee. They were married two weeks later. Personally, I owe my own life to the Army and the smell of coffee, but to be more like my mother, I shouldn't tell it as a personal story: There was a war. People did what had to be done.

May flowers.

Poppy:



Peonies:



Peonies?

"I thought I was making a movie about a paralysed guy but I realised I was making a film about women."

Says Julian Schabel, accepting the directing award at Cannes, for his film "The Butterfly and the Diving Bell," which is based on a book that I was just recommending here. I had no idea there was a film.

The subject of the film, Jean-Dominque Bauby, was a fast-living playboy, the toast of the Paris fashion world, until he suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of 42.

Schnabel shows him waking up in a seaside hospital after weeks in a coma and suffering from what a neurologist calls "locked-in syndrome" -- he is unable to speak or move any part of his body apart from his left eyelid.

The title refers to Bauby's feeling of being trapped in his body, which has come to resemble the airtight chamber of a diving bell, and his still active mind, still agile as a butterfly.

He writes a beautiful memoir by way of that one eyelid and dies 10 days after it is published. How to make a movie out of that? Schnabel's quote hints.

ADDED: And the Palme d'Or goes to a Romanian film about abortion, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" by Cristian Mungiu:

"Pitch perfect and brilliantly acted, '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' is a stunning achievement, helmed with a purity and honesty that captures not just the illegal abortion story at its core but the constant, unremarked negotiations necessary for survival in the final days of the Soviet bloc," reviewer Jay Weissberg wrote....

Mungiu offers a shocking image of the aborted foetus, but it is the abortionist's graphic description of the process and his chilling exploitation of the women's dilemma that make for particularly excruciating viewing....

"Because of the pressure of the regime, women and families were so much concerned about not being caught for making an illegal abortion that they didn't give one minute of thought about the moral issue," he told reporters.

"It was either you or them getting you for what you did."

He put the foetus on screen to serve as a reminder to audiences. "It makes a point -- people should be aware of the consequences of their decisions," he said.

This sounds as though it will upset those who are both pro- and anti-abortion, which may be a good thing. I support abortion rights but think people should face up to "the consequences of their decisions."

A new Bloggingheads: "The Slime Mold Edition."

With me and Annie Gottlieb. Topics (and times):

Hillary and Bill's secret pact (08:50)

How the GOP is like a slime mold (11:38)

Is McCain too tough? Is Obama tough enough? (10:35)

The power of jokes to shape public opinion (11:49)

Al Gore, heavyweight contender (10:28)

Ann and Annie vs. Mother Nature (08:53)

The Sopranos: Shakespeare for our time (17:04)

ADDED: Speaking of slime mold -- so is it an animal or isn't it? -- remember that time I found some in my yard?



And remember that time I thought my yard should be wearing pants?

"Do voters have any idea what they are doing?"

Possibly not:

In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” [Bryan] Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.

Guess which way Americans are "systematically biased"?

...Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more progressive on social issues like abortion and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in foreign policy.

Love the name, Scott, but why am I not feeling confident that your own "ingrained biases" are not affecting your studies? I'm picking up a bit of the old: if only people thought clearly, they'd agree with me. I'm never surprised when a professor discovers that democracy is defective because Americans aren't more left-wing. But unlike Althaus, Caplan thinks voters are incompetent because they aren't libertarian enough.

To encourage greater economic literacy, [Caplan] suggests tests of voter competence, or “giving extra votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy."

Until 1949, he points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners and graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens are less likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter turnout.) Most provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has suggested a curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn’t the Council of Economic Advisers be able to strike down laws as “uneconomical”?

But who designs the economic literacy test, and who appoints the Council of Economic Advisors? I assume Caplan doesn't think it would be Althaus and his ilk.

Ugly tourists.

It turns out Americans aren't the worst, but there's still a NYT article about it.

"... what distinguished Americans was that they could be loud and demanding, and then would invariably apologize and give them big tips."

"Tell people how much you weigh."

She tells: 224.

This is the "Fat Rant" video noted in the article linked in the previous post. I'd seen this before, but hadn't known about all the responses. I watched a few responses: they're not polished and funny like the original. But at least watch the original, especially if you're interested in the politics of fat in America or if you just want to be cheered up about your weight by the 224-pound Joy Nash.

The whole subject of the number itself is quite fascinating. There's a mystique about the 200 mark, and lately I've gotten the feeling that there are a lot of Americans who don't think a woman is particularly fat until she hits 200, and that there is a different group of people who think 125 is the point where fat begins.

There's substantial craziness about the number and yet something like a code of silence about the number. Nash thinks it would help to tell people what the number is. But I bet you're thinking, oh yeah, I'll say the number, in a month or so when I get through this diet -- you know, that diet that you'll either abandon or continue for the next year or so, at the end of which you either will or will not count as success that you stayed about at the number you really don't want to say now.

Hey, why didn't I say all that into my video camera and post it as a YouTube video response?

Time-lapse painting, parkour, blasphemy, and fat rants.

The video response phenomenon in YouTube.

"We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people."

"They like to walk around with it and hold it."

Science for Americans.

Steven Pinker, reviewing Natalie Angier's "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, notes the American aversion to scientific knowledge:

People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

But Angier's book is for the adult who missed the chance to go into science but might read a snazzy enough popular book on the subject:

Every author of a book on science faces the challenge of how to enliven material that is not part of people’s day-to-day concerns. The solutions include the detective story, the suspenseful race to a discovery, the profile of a colorful practitioner, the reportage of a raging controversy and the use of a hook from history, art or current affairs. The lure that Angier deploys is verbal ornamentation: her prose is a blooming, buzzing profusion of puns, rhymes, wordplay, wisecracks and Erma-Bombeckian quips about the indignities of everyday life. Angier’s language is always clever, and sometimes witty, but “The Canon” would have been better served if her Inner Editor had cut the verbal gimmickry by a factor of three. It’s not just the groaners, like “Einstein made the pi wider,” or the clutter, like “So now, at last, I come to the muscle of the matter, or is it the gristle, or the wishbone, the skin and pope’s nose?” The deeper problem is a misapplication of the power of the verbal analogy in scientific exposition.

A good analogy does not just invoke some chance resemblance between the thing being explained and the thing introduced to explain it. It capitalizes on a deep similarity between the principles that govern the two things....

But all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon. For example, in explaining the atomic nucleus, she writes, “Many of the more familiar elements have pretty much the same number of protons and neutrons in their hub: carbon the egg carton, with six of one, half dozen of the other; nitrogen like a 1960s cocktail, Seven and Seven; oxygen an aria of paired octaves of protons and neutrons.” This is showing off at the expense of communication. Spatial arrangements (like eggs in a carton), mixed ingredients (like those of a cocktail) and harmonically related frequencies (like those of an octave) are all potentially relevant to the structure of matter (and indeed are relevant to closely related topics in physics and chemistry), so Angier forces readers to pause and determine that these images should be ignored here. Not only do readers have to work to clear away the verbal overgrowth, but a substantial proportion of them will be misled and will take the flourishes literally.

Pinker is writing about writing: What makes a science book great literature? Pinker holds up Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" as exemplary and gets very specific about what works on a deep level to explain scientific ideas. Angier, he says, uses superficial flourishes, while Dawkins finds an analogy that invites and deserves contemplation.

"I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose."

Andrew J. Bacevich contemplates the accusation -- "a staple of American political discourse" -- that his vocal opposition to the war caused his son's death. You might expect him to say the accusation is repulsive, and he was, in fact, trying to stop the war, which might have saved his son. But he goes beyond that:

After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions....

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics....

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

That is, his anti-war activism couldn't have had any causal relationship to the death of his son because American politics are so beholden to the rich that it has no effect. These are dark, despairing thoughts by a man whose son has died. Is he finding some comfort in his own ineffectuality? But he still writes. It's not nothing, though it is powerful writing to say it's "nothing." That your arguments have not persuaded powerful individuals to abandon their deep commitments does not mean that they never listen and never respond.