Uh, Oh, I'm a Cultural Elitist

I'm no Pauline Kael, but I guess I'm not exactly a woman of the people, either, according to this Pop Quiz inspired by Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." I get a few points for having done a little manual labor and having once ridden on a Greyhound bus. On some questions you get credit for your spouse's activity, such as buying a pickup truck, but for hunting and fishing I guess it counts only if you do it yourself. Well, at least I have friends who are evangelical Christians and/or who disagree with me profoundly on political issues. So my score is "You can see through your bubble, but you need to get out more." I could have done better if I'd ever sat through an Oprah show or watched last year's Transformer movie. But no credit for enjoying Jeff Foxworthy? For frequenting Sonic drive-ins?

I knew I was in trouble when out-of-touch Michelle Obama took flack for buying Tuscan kale in a local farmer's market. We grow Tuscan kale and think it's great stuff.

H/t Ace of Spades.

Can This Be Right?

Inflation adjustment is a little tricky, but this still seems like a strange claim:

However, Aaron Blake at the Washington Post finds that controlling for inflation, in fact George Washington would be the nation’s richest president.... In today’s dollars, Washington’s net worth would amount to more than $500 million.

I'm not after the basic claim of the article, which is that we've had a lot of presidents richer than Romney would be if elected.  What interests me is the claim that George Washington was fantastically rich.  I had never gotten that concept from readings of history.  What I thought I understood was that he began quite modestly, as a surveyor -- I've been to places he surveyed, including the town in Virginia that now bears his name.  His marriage to Martha Custis brought him some wealth, and his status as a war hero made it possible for him to obtain more, but I thought he was in debt for a long time after that, nearly until the war started.

That seems to be in accord with the Wikipedia article, which notes:

After retiring from the presidency in March 1797, Washington returned to Mount Vernon with a profound sense of relief. He devoted much time to farming and other business interests, including his distillery which produced its first batch of spirits in February 1797.  As Chernow (2010) explains, his farm operations were at best marginally profitable. The lands out west yielded little income because they were under attack by Indians and the squatters living there refused to pay him rents. However most Americans assumed he was truly rich because of the well-known "glorified façade of wealth and grandeur" at Mount Vernon.  Historians estimate his estate was worth about $1 million in 1799 dollars, equivalent to about $18 million in 2009 purchasing power.

Eighteen million dollars is still quite rich, but it's nowhere near $500 million.  Is the Washington Post as bad with numbers as everyone else in D.C., or is there some way of making sense of the claim?

A Man or a Mouse?

It seems many Americans perked up when they heard Mitch Daniels's opposition speech after the State of the Union, prompting a heated debate over whether a dark horse could enter the race at this late date. At Pajamas Media, Ron Radosh explains some of the pros and cons of this gambit, but it's the comments section I find most interesting. I had forgotten that Daniels cited his wife's opposition as his reason for giving up the campaign, and that his wife had left him to marry her high school sweetheart, then returned to remarry him ten years later, after he'd earned millions of dollars. To many voters, this apparently marks him as a Beta Man unsuited for the Oval Office.

I don't doubt that that's a common reaction. It's not quite mine. His wife's high school sweetheart was a California plastic surgeon who ditched her after a few years in favor of a younger model. The picture I get is of a woman who made a horrible mistake by choosing a flashy passionate poseur, then came to her senses and realized that the stolid father of her children was the real man. To her great good fortune, he still cared for her and wanted to repair their family. In my eyes, that makes her a reformed liberal, and it makes him a strong man who knows his own heart. There's someone home in there. (Contrast with Ace's piechart of the most common reasons for supporting a candidate:)

Anyway, it's a narrative I prefer over the guy who keeps screwing around on his wife, marrying his mistress, and then doing it again.

What the heck is the matter with the GOP that it can't produce a candidate with a nice, conventional home life who also knows how to translate his personal, economic, and political principles into coherent policy proposals? You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Then I wake up when I read sensible advice like this from commenter "Patrick in Atlantis":

We’re trying to thin the field out, not grow it. If Daniels get in the race now, he’ll have his you know what handed to him. You don’t like any of the contestants? Too bad.

Elberton

Elberton, Georgia, is an interesting place.  The wealth of the city is based on granite, quarries, that sort of thing.  But the history is important.

We went to the McIntosh Coffee shop.  Nice place.  Good prices for lunch, if you wanted lunch.

Georgia's district tartan -- recognized by Scotland's King of Arms, on the sidebar -- is based on the MacIntosh tartan.  I guess a lot of folks don't know that anymore.  John "Mohr" MacIntosh -- that is, 'John the Great' -- was brought to the south of Savannah after the '45.  He was there with Oglethorpe for the wars that kept Georgia and the Carolinas for the English, against the Spanish.  

The post road has run through there since the Washington administration.  It's kind of funny to think that we're looking at the end of the postal service, and to remember just how long it's been around.  Not that long:  two hundred years and change.  It was new in France in the 1600s; Dumas made a point of the novelty in The Three Musketeers.  

Took My Own Advice Today...

Went out to detox from the internet.  The few little towns around here are pretty disconnected from the internet-world, as demonstrated by our most-local pet store:

Hey, I didn't make it up!  I just took the picture.

Do I Hear Twenty Percent? Going Once...

Maybe We Need a Brokered Convention to Get This Guy Back in the Race

From Mitch Daniel's rebuttal to the 2012 (as well as the 2011 and 2010) SOTU address:

An opposition that would earn its way back to leadership must offer not just criticism of failures that anyone can see, but a positive and credible plan to make life better, particularly for those aspiring to make a better life for themselves. Republicans accept this duty, gratefully.

The routes back to an America of promise, and to a solvent America that can pay its bills and protect its vulnerable, start in the same place. The only way up for those suffering tonight, and the only way out of the dead end of debt into which we have driven, is a private economy that begins to grow and create jobs, real jobs, at a much faster rate than today.

Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew. Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say "First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you'll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love."

Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Private sector jobs. That's where everything starts, and that's what everything else hangs from.

The Roman Internet

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a surprising historical metaphor for the difficulties we face in making good use of the Internet.

The metaphor is Nero's court, and the model for success is one Gaius Petronius Arbiter.  He is supposed to be the guide for how to deal with these massive feasts without being numbed by them.  The model is better than the others around Nero's court; and yet, as the end of the piece shows, ought to be deeply alarming.  Decadence has a high price for even the best human soul.

I'm thinking about this in terms of last weekend's forced detachment from the world.  Along about Sunday, I realized that there must be some interesting news about how the South Carolina primary had gone -- the matter was much debated the week before, and here it had been over and done with and I had no idea how it had turned out.  Instead I was rereading a work of history on an old Anglo-Saxon blood feud, and enjoying it.  I had forgotten the author's insights into how Northumbria was divided, and how that fit into the question of feuds and politics in the generation before the Norman Conquest.

It may be that the real answer is not in refinement of decadence, but in periodic detoxification.  I like to take to the road at times in the year, and go for a while into the mountains or some wilderness.  It is always good, but much of the year it is not available -- we are expected to remain connected at all times for professional reasons.  I have managed to resist this more than many, but even I feel often required to be abreast of the situation, the latest detail.

The table groans, and so do we.

The End of the Grand Old Party

Foreshadowed tonight in a comment by a "Top Romney Advisor":



So the argument here is that party elites will let you vote for Romney or, if you won't, they'll simply remove the decision from your hands.  Romney won't get their nod, and neither will Gingrich, nor anyone else who has won delegates out of the votes of the people.  The party and not the voters will decide.

The Democrats got this result in 2008.  Do you remember?  The debate was over whether some states -- Clinton-won states -- would be allowed to vote their full slate, or if they would have to accept limited or no participation in the convention.  Then-Senator Clinton's campaign made a big deal about counting every vote.  When the convention came, though, she took the Secretary of State position instead of forcing a contest; and they ended up counting none of the votes, but nominating then-Senator Obama by acclamation.

We have watched the capture of the Democratic party by public-sector unions, the vastly rich corporate powers that support the unions, and their dogs in the New Class who make up the leadership of the Occupy movements.  It's destroyed a party that meant a lot to America over the course of its history; it meant something to me.  I fought for it for a long time, even in twilight.

I've never been a Republican, and the fate of that party is of no special interest to me.  All the same, it seems like someone ought to say this:  the Republican party isn't like what the Democratic party has become.  If they pull the trigger on this, and set aside the voters for the will of their internal elites, they will lose everything.

This is because the base of the Republican party is middle America, and middle America won't accept this.  The success of the Gingrich campaign to date is predicated on their hatred of the party elites.  Deny them the power to vote for their leadership and their representatives, and they will come looking for heads.

Perhaps that is for the best.  What we need is a genuinely populist revolt against the political class, and the removal of all those who rest in easy seats of power.  Perhaps in the aftermath of what was once the Republican party, we can build a movement that will break the chains of eighty years of submission to the state, to the powerful, and to the guidance of those said to be wiser than we.

Wergeld

Can we agree that, if a man kills someone's family pet over a political campaign, and that man is later hunted down and killed, we will all pledge not to convict the killer of any crime if asked to serve on the jury?

Living in bubbles

Charles Murray has a new book out, and an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal summarizing its argument. He maintains that the richest and the poorest Americans are more isolated from the rest of their culture than they were 50 years ago. He suggests that, for their own benefit, they'd both do well to break out. To the inhabitants of the decaying low-income, low-education areas, he recommends:

There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

To the sheltered inhabitants of the "SuperZIPs," those giant gated communities near New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, he recommends rethinking their priorities:

Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Most people won't listen to Mr. Murray. In order to strip out results that can be explained by ethnicity or racism, he looks strictly at statistics relating to white people. His ideas in this new book, like the ones in the past several, will therefore be dismissed as racism.

Something like the same sorting trend was described in Bill Bishop's 2009 "The Big Sort," a book that I found unsatisfying. Bishop was persuasive in his statistics about the clumping of like-minded communities, as revealed in fine-grained analysis of changing voting habits over a number of election cycles. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to know what to make of the data, other than to bemoan the increasing difficulty of civil discussions about deep political disagreements. Also, while he thoroughly understood why nice people would naturally congregate in progressive neighborhoods in his own in Austin, Texas, he seemed a little bemused about what all those Americans in red precincts could be thinking.

Mr. Murray, in contrast, has done a lot of analysis over several decades about how much more efficiently our education system now works to sort out Americans by I.Q. I was surprised to read (in "The Bell Curve"), for instance, how relatively recently the Ivy Leagues began moving toward a fairly strict meritocracy. Before 1960, they demanded a moderate minimum level of scholasticism and then mostly sorted by money and class. Back then, the brightest students from flyover country were far more likely to attend local schools and stay in their home towns performing a variety of jobs, rather than gravitate to Wall Street or the Mayo Clinic as they tend to do today.

Our neighborhood is very mixed in education and income. We like it that way.

Cruise liner

The Net brims with explanations of how Romney could have blown South Carolina, but as usual my favorite comes from Mark Steyn:

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive. . . . Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? For a guy running as a chief exec applying proven private-sector solutions, his campaign looks awfully like an unreformable government bureaucracy: big, bloated, overstaffed, burning money, slow to react, and all but impossible to change.

Well, if he loses the nomination, maybe Romney can shoot for EU president.

P.S. -- but I'll still vote for him if he wins the nomination. A.B.O.

Rainfall

Due to the torrential downpours of the last several days, we've been without phone or Internet since Saturday.  It's working currently, but it's also still raining, so we'll see how long it lasts!  The rain has also made some of the local roads impassable, meaning that I've had the interesting experience of being entirely shut off for the world for a few days.

Did I miss anything?

Crazy

Cassandra reminds me in the post below that it's been too long since I did something really wrong.  A man has to sin once in a while, or else he'll get to feeling self-righteous, which is the worse sin than the sin he put off.

So here.  It's for the health of our souls.



You think that's bad?  Try this:

An Interesting Day for Republicans

It looks like Newt Gingrich is about to have his best day on the campaign trail...

...and also his worst.

It's rare to get so many big stories all at once.  It's hard to say how it will shake out.  Here are a few possibilities:

1)  Gingrich is right to say that his marital problems are old news with voters, and the endorsements of his former rival and the 100 TEA Party figures push him over the top in SC.  As the new consensus TEA Party candidate, he goes on to challenge Romney with the solid backing of the more conservative wing of voters.

2)  Republican voters don't like people who screw around with their marriages, meaning that today's new allegations sink Gingrich.  Herman Cain shakes his head in sad sympathy as Gingrich is destroyed by the allegations.

   (As to which:  Why is the headline that he asked for "an open marriage"?  The arrangement is hardly unheard of, especially among the rich and powerful; surely if he had honestly approached his wife with his feelings, and accepted her firm "no," we would take this as a minor sin -- or, these days, even just a quirk -- brought on by a robust nature.  The problems facing Gingrich are that he got around to asking only after he'd already begun enjoying an 'open marriage'; and that, rather than accepting "no," he divorced his second wife for his third.)

There are three sub-cases:

2a)  Gingrich's fall, just as conservative sentiment had lined up behind him, collapses conservative morale and allows Romney to walk to the nomination.

2b) Gingrich's falling numbers causes him to bow out of the race, endorsing Romney as a way to salvage what he can for his political future with the Republican establishment.  While many of his supporters will never accept Romney, enough follow his lead to end the nomination contest.

2c)  Conservatives swap their allegiance to the last non-Romney in the race, Rick Santorum, who was just announced to have actually won Iowa after all.  Only three states having voted so far, there remains a real race for the nomination.

So, the first breaking point is whether we get scenario (1) or one of the sub-cases of (2).  We'll know that pretty soon.  If it's (1), Santorum -- who seems the best of the remaining candidates to me -- probably has no chance of success.  If it's (2), and Gingrich endorses Romney, Santorum also probably cannot overcome the combined weight at this point.  If it's (2) and Gingrich does not endorse Romney, we'll see Romney win anyway unless there is a quick and decisive shift to Santorum.  Even then, he'll be under significant disadvantages of money and establishment support; but perhaps he can make a fight of it there.

Sadly, none of that is in Santorum's hands -- as they say in the NFL, at this point he does not control his own fate.

Troll Valley

I have just finished reading Lars Walker's Troll Valley, which is available for the Kindle and for the Nook readers.  Since we have the benefit of Mr. Walker's company, I really ought just to suggest that you read it, in the hope that we might have the pleasure of all discussing it together.

The book treats the integration of myth into modern life:   both the pagan mythos of Norway and Norwegian immigrants, and Christian myth.  That this is meant to be of contemporary interest is demonstrated by the "present day" characters who frame the book, but the action takes place mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the story, a child with a fairy godmother grows up to lose sight of her, and the myths that guided his childhood.  In the process he becomes a vile and unpleasant man, under the guidance of a mother who becomes ever more domineering and destructive to her own family.  The mother, actually, is one of the most interesting characters.  She embraces the prohibition movement allegedly out of a desire to "do good," but over time we see that her real interest is in control.  She uses prohibition to force her husband's father into submission within his own house; then, she moves into new fields of progressive thought -- eugenics, vegetarianism, and the lot -- to force the old man out of the house entirely.  Finding sparks of resistance remaining in her eldest son and husband, she cranks up the embrace of these intolerant philosophies until she has driven everyone out, and can bask in her role as a woman who has sacrificed everything for Prohibition and Temperance.

There is a wider lesson to her example.  A family home is like a broader human community in that it has rules that establish a way of life, and under that way of life a community is possible.  We see in the early chapters how the traditions of Norwegian families at Yuletide sustained a broad community through hard work.  It is at that feast that the mother first uses her power to force a change in the rules, in her interest and against the interests of others.  It is by forcing continual alterations of the rules of life that she destroys the community within the house, so that finally no one can live with her at all.

Each of these rules is meant to represent moral progress, but each of them destroys the living community in which human kindness is possible.  The living spirit of the community is broken by the rules themselves, and in the climax of the book -- when the mother tries to wield her church group to destroy a young woman who dared to taste beer and dance at a wedding -- we find the broader lesson.  That part, though, you must read for yourself.

I will say no more at this time, but if you are interested, I would be happy for us to reconvene to discuss it once everyone who wishes to join the discussion has had the time to read it.  If you would like to join in, let me know in the comments and we'll arrange a time:  hopefully Mr. Walker will be so kind as to join in our discussion as well.

What's Killing Manufacturing?

Via D29, an answer that may surprise:

“Wages?” I ask. 

His dark eyebrows arch as if I were clueless, then he explains the reality of running a fab -- an electronics fabrication factory. “Wages have nothing to do with it. The total wage burden in a fab is 10 percent. When I move a fab to Asia, I might lose 10 percent of my product just in theft.” 

I’m startled. “So what is it?” 

“Everything else. Taxes, infrastructure, workforce training, permits, health care."
...
Take tax policy. Historically, manufacturing was the high-wage sector of the economy -- manufacturing jobs still pay about 30 percent more than service jobs in education and health care -- so tax policy milked it. Manufacturing companies, in the old days, actually paid the corporate income taxes that many others avoided. Commodity producers (oil, timber, agribusiness) lobbied for, and received, federal subsidies, with investors in oil and gas wells simply voiding corporate income taxes on the profits they earned. Banking, retail and services found their own ways around taxes, often by offshoring intellectual property or shifting profit to tax havens. Eventually, manufacturers figured out how to duck taxes as well -- by going overseas. 

Yet it isn’t just taxes. Wind turbines, for example, are enormous, heavy and expensive to transport -- so there is a big advantage to fabricating them close to the installation point. But consider the predicament of the Spanish wind manufacturer Gamesa Corporacion Tecnologica SA after it began operations in Pennsylvania. Because the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Transportation wouldn’t establish uniform standards for transporting the enormous turbine blades, each state followed its own rules. Whenever a blade crossed a state line it had to be unloaded by a construction crane and then reloaded to conform to the next state’s specifications.

Against SOPA

The blackout is in support of the anti-SOPA movement.



An article describes the issue:

For example if you post a link to the story on your Facebook wall. Under SOPA, all of Facebook can be blocked. To avoid this fate, Facebook would be responsible for policing the copyright status of every piece of content its users post. The same happens with search engines, which to avoid being shut down, Google and Bing would be responsible for policing the copyright ownership of every piece of content they index.

That includes Blogger too, of course:  we could easily find ourselves on the wrong side of this, simply because some other blog on Blogger posted something that was copywritten.  How likely is that?  I'd have to say the probability approaches certainty.

A Poet Looks at Africa

Eliza Griswold reports from the edge of Europe, an island in the Mediterranean called Lampedusa.  It's an interesting piece, if only stylistically -- being a poet rather than a journalist, Ms. Griswold thinks nothing of devoting an entire paragraph to the question, "What am I doing here?"  That liberty is a strength.

The name Misericordia is familiar. I realize I heard it last week when I was with fellow Civitella artists touring the Umbrian town of Sansepolcro. There, in the famous Piero della Francesca triptych, a hooded man kneels at the base of the cross. He looks like a hangman, but in fact he’s a member of this group, Misericordia. While they were doing charity work among the sick and dying, they wore black masks to protect against disease, and to protect their identity so they couldn’t be thanked. I imagine Luciforo in his yellow hazmat suit and a hood. 

“Luciforo, what have you seen that you can’t forget?” I ask. 

“One night, I watched mothers throw their babies into the sea. They popped up like corks,” he says.

The Romney Oppo Book

By coincidence, it appears that the McCain campaign's oppo book on Romney has been released to the web.  Given our ongoing discussion, it might serve as a useful source of information.  While it is, of course, an opposition book -- and therefore designed to be harmful rather than sympathetic -- a good oppo book must be tight enough that the candidate relying on it won't look foolish.