Had Enough Therapy?

Alissa Nutting's Anxiety

2012-01-29T08:20:00.000-08:00

In a New York Times column yesterday Alissa Nutting recounted her attempts to find solace from a severe anxiety disorder and panic attacks.

I daresay that her story is a lot more compelling than your average Modern Love column.

I might have been drawn to the piece because it addresses a topic that is relevant to the theme of this blog. But, I was more impressed by the exceptional quality of the writing.

It doesn’t happen every day that you discover great writing, so, I reasoned, why not give it its due and link it without a disquisition on anxiety disorders or anything else.

Link here.

Harrumph

2012-01-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

You’ve probably never had the experience, so bear with me on this one.

Two days ago I clicked on a link on an Economist blog and, alas, saw one of my finely-crafted sentences reduced to onomatopoeia.

Last Wednesday, blogging about Obama’s State of the Union address I opened with this sentence: “There’s talking down to people, and then there’s condescending.”

I was referring to a study showing that the most recent Obama SOTU address was pitched at an 8^th grade reading comprehension level.

Our president was treating the American people like a bunch of 8^th graders.

Then, on Friday, E. G. Austin, writing on The Economist blog called Johnson, reduced my sentence to a single onomatopoetic word: harrumph. If you go to the Johnson blog and click the hot link on the word harrumph you will arrive at my post.

To say that I am grateful for the attention would be an understatement.

Just so that you do not get any wrong ideas I will mention that the Johnson blog does not have anything to do with anyone’s johnson. It refers, respectfully, to the great 18^th century British man of letters, Samuel Johnson, author of A Dictionary of the English Language among other notable works.

In other words the Johnson blog concerns language and its usages.

Blogger Austin did not merely call my sentence a harrumph. He called it a typical harrumph. (I will note parenthetically that I do not know whether E. G. Austin is male or female. I will use the male pronoun as a default. If E. G. is a she, not a he, I offer my most contrite apologies.)

I have been trying to figure out what an atypical harrumph would sound like, but, alas, to little avail.

Still, an old British adage tells us that one good harrumph deserves another, so here goes.

The dictionary tells us that a harrumph is the sound one makes while clearing one’s throat. It is a non-verbal dismissal uttered by someone of, dare I say, a certain age.

You do not imagine a teenager or young adult dismissing anything with a harrumph. A young person would lack sufficient gravitas to issue a persuasive harrumph.

I will mention, and even underscore, that neither I nor the professors who established the grade level of Obama’s speech, said anything about the presidential IQ. My statement concerned attitude, not intelligence.

Hopefully, you can all see the difference.

You will also understand that those who have manned the ramparts to defend the intellectual superiority of Barack Obama have recently spent eight years happily impugning the intelligence of George W. Bush.

For my part I have warm positive feelings for The Economist. It is a great journalistic endeavor, an extraordinarily successful publication, and worthy of considerable respect.

Thus, I do not want to limit my remarks to the portion of Austin’s post that concerns me. That would be egotistical… not a good thing.

Austin begins his post by creating the category in which he will embed my finely-crafted sentence. He mentions: “the endless stream of non sequitors surrounding America’s 2012 election.”

I ask you, what possible understanding of the meaning of the non sequitor would suggest that the notion that Barack Obama takes Americans, or perhaps his supporters, or perhaps Congress, to have an 8^th grade reading comprehension level is a non sequitor?

What exactly does not follow from what here?

Note that I will not try to ferret out the meaning of the “endless stream.” It feels like bathroom humor and I choose not to go there.

Regardless, Austin quickly changes the subject from attitude to intelligence. Let’s assume that he knows the difference himself but is obfuscating the issue, because otherwise he might have to explain why he thinks that it’s a non sequitor to say that Obama talks down and/or condescends to the American people.

It is, however, a non sequitor to change the subject from attitude to intelligence. No one suggested than talking down to people or even condescending to them was a sign of limited intelligence. Quite the contrary, you cannot talk down to people unless you are intelligent.

Austin writes: “For several years Mr Obama has been repeatedly attacked, from the right, for not being as intelligent as Democrats would have people believe. To be more precise, there are a lot of people who angrily object to the idea that Mr Obama might be reasonably good with words.”

Truth be told, no one really believes that a president writes his own State of the Union address. Neither I nor anyone also who contributed to what Austin saw as an endless stream suggested that Obama wrote his own State of the Union speech.

Presidents are busy people. They employ an army of speechwriters to perform menial tasks like writing speeches.

We were merely pointing out that Obama’s speech showed a man or a presidency that does not respect the intelligence of the American people.

One might have said that the speech itself was filled with mindless and divisive platitudes, phrases and locutions that the president had been using over and over again on the campaign trail.

Everyone knows that Barack Obama used the solemn occasion of the State of the Union to deliver a campaign speech. Again, this does not signal an absence of intelligence. It's a strategy.

To give Austin his due, a fairly large number of Barack Obama’s detractors believe that the claim about his exceptional intelligence is ... a myth.

The mainstream media has chosen to cover up Obama’s stylistic infelicities and egregious errors of fact. They have followed the Obama camp’s party line, stated explicitly by consigliere Valerie Jarrett, that Barack Obama is too good and too smart for America.

Someone whose leading advisor is a flagrant sycophant might very well be expected to talk down to people, even to condescend to people.

Like it or not, this matters. Today’s politics contains the myth that Republicans are stupid while Democrats are smart.

You wouldn’t want to belong to the stupid party, would you? Given a free choice, you would naturally want to belong to the smart party.

Austin should point out that the meme about Democratic intellectual superiority is an important selling point for the Democratic Party. How many people would rethink their political allegiance if they believed that Democrats were less intelligent than Republicans?

Impugning someone’s intelligence is not an idle slander. It’s a way to keep members of a political party in line.

This despite the fact, discovered by no less than the New York Times, that the more ignorant you are the more likely you are to vote Democratic.

Blogger Austin dismisses as ridiculous the claim by certain right-thinking people that Barack Obama did not write the two best sellers that he claims to have authored.

If you do not believe that Obama wrote the two books you are, by Austin’s logic, part of a cabal that is working to disparage the intelligence of this brilliant man.

In truth, this issue has nothing to do with the charge that the State of the Union speech was addressed to 8^th graders. It simply says that a man who is not a writer, who has never published another word, could not possibly have written Dreams of my Father.

It’s as likely as having someone who never wrote a note of music sitting down and writing a symphony.

The notion that an aspiring politician could hire a ghost writer and pass off a manuscript as his own work is not farfetched. John Kennedy did it with Profiles in Courage.

If you want to establish Obama’s brilliance look elsewhere.

As it happens, Obama has never released any of his grade transcripts or test scores. If the objective evidence is so compelling, why have we never seen any of them?

Blogger Austin continues his spirited defense of the presidential intelligence by disparaging the Flesch-Kinkaid test. That test established that Obama’s SOTU was pitched to 8^th graders.

He writes: “However, there's no normative weight to the Flesch-Kincaid grade level. The score is a function of how long the sentences are and how many syllables the words have. It's a weak proxy for accessibility, not substance or value.”

To test the test Austin submitted Economist articles and found that they scored at or above the 10^th grade comprehension level. This is the level that most previous SOTU addresses score at. I'm not sure what this shows about the test, but, as always: I report; you decide.

But then, he discovered that T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” scored at a 5^th grade level. We can easily imagine that Hemingway would also have scored rather low on the test.

This is clever and entertaining, except for the fact that the initial researchers tested SOTU speeches against other SOTU speeches. That feels like a reasonable comparison. Comparing Obama to T. S. Eliot or Hemingway does not seem quite so apposite.

The long and short of sentence construction coupled with a comparison between monosyllabic and polysyllabic words might not tell us everything, but it does tell us something.

Since Austin does not feel that I was being fair when I taxed the Obama White House with talking down and/or condescending to the American people, I feel duty bound to offer an analysis of the substance of the speech.

Was Obama’s speech a towering rhetorical masterpiece or was it a grab bag of empty election-year platitudes?

That feels like a fair question. Austin wants it answered, and he deserves an answer.

Rather than offer yet another harrumph-worthy sentence of my own I will quote the justly famed Lexington column from The Economist.

Here’s Lexington’s take on the Obama State of the Union address:

IT IS becoming hard to remember that Barack Obama’s speeches were once described as inspiring, visionary and transformational. His state-of-the-union message on January 24th was none of those things. Then again, circumstances were against him. He said, as presidents must, that the state of the union was “getting stronger”. But everyone knows that the true state of the union is dire: 13m Americans are unemployed, the recovery is fragile and at any moment the economy could be blown sideways by a new gust of bad economic news from Europe. Nor, frankly, was this speech a useful guide to the administration’s legislative plans for the coming year. Since the mid-term elections of November 2010, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has blocked most of the Democrats’ legislation, and will continue to do so, which means that the president’s plans count for little. To be understood, this speech needs to be seen for what it was: an audition for re-election.

I hope that this clears things up.

Are Men an Appetite Suppressant?

2012-01-28T12:36:00.000-08:00

Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. Whichever which gender you belong to, if you want to eat less, eat with a man. Link here.

That’s right. If you are eating with a real, live breathing manly man, you are naturally going to eat less.

A man eating with a man will eat less than he would if he were eating with a woman. A woman eating with a man will eat less than she would if she were dining with a woman.

One can only conclude that sisterhood makes you fat. Or, at the least, that it makes you eat more. Imagine that!

But, how can we possibly explain this socio-biological phenomenon?

Some believe that women are socialized to eat dainty portions when they are in the company of men. Perhaps this makes them look or feel more feminine, and thus, more attractive.

But, we might also say that a woman does not want to appear to have a ravenous appetite because her male companion might believe that she wants to eat him alive.

Despite rumors to the contrary, most men are not looking to be eaten alive for dessert.

Why then will a man who is eating with a woman eat more than when he is with another man?

Does he want to show her that he is hungry for her love? Does he want to show her that he has enough status and confidence to have a healthy appetite?

Do men know intuitively that higher status means less depressed and that less depressed means a better appetite.

But then again, how many women women are impressed by a gluttonous male stuffing his face throughout a romantic dinner.

Explaining this is not as easy as you think.

On the one hand, it appears that men, by their very being, are civilizing agents. Their manly presence causes all manner of humans to temper their appetites.

But, it might also be true that men have such bad table manners that their mere presence at a dinner functions as an appetite suppressant.

Watching a man pig out at dinner, chew with his mouth open, and dribble gravy onto his tie is enough to suppress anyone’s appetite.

Women Seeking Men

2012-01-28T05:59:00.000-08:00

Women who are either looking for a partner or trying to take the temperature of a current relationship should pay very close attention to Susan Walsh’s valuable advice.

In a recent post on her blog Hooking Up Smart Walsh provides a checklist of the green lights that tell you to move forward. If those signs are absent you would do well to hesitate before getting more involved in a relationship.

The list is especially valuable because it will, when used properly, help women to overcome the tendency, engrained in our culture, to think that true love will solve everything.

If love is blind, Walsh’s list will hopefully open your eyes.

For those who believe that love, in and of itself, is all you need to have a great relationship I will share my own observation. The four scariest words I have ever heard from a woman are: “But I’m in love.”

Here’s a link to Walsh’s post. It is as good a set of relationship guidelines as I have ever seen.

Some Inconvenient Facts about Climate Change

2012-01-28T05:28:00.000-08:00

One day, hopefully sooner than later, America will wake up and see that the “settled science” of climate change is specious.

Ginned up by environmental activists, promoted by that great scientist Al Gore, enshrined as dogma by the courts and regulators, climate change has very little to do with science.

I myself have no qualifications in the field, so I rely, as nearly all of us do, on the opinions of the scientific community.

At the very least, there is a division of opinion on the matter of climate change.

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal sixteen distinguished scientists signed an open letter to politicians.

They began:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

The scientists move on to present us with some inconvenient facts. The first is that for the past ten years there has been no global warming:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

And then there’s the matter of carbon dioxide. Ever since carbon dioxide was declared a pollutant, environmentalists and regulators have been doing their best to shut down industry and the energy grid.

What is the truth about carbon dioxide? The scientists explain it so that even I can understand:

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Later on the scientists consider the policy implications that derive from the fact that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

Greenhouse gas controls stifle economic growth and make it more difficult for underdeveloped countries to emerge from poverty. They damage developing economies and produce more joblessness and poverty.

These are more things for environmentalists to feel proud of.

Primary Incivility

2012-01-28T04:31:00.000-08:00

For some time now I have been commenting on the general nastiness that has enveloped the Republican nomination process. As I see it, the process if awash in negative emotion and incivility.

Victor Davis Hanson tries to move the warring parties toward comity by making it a no-fault situation. Tactically speaking, he can note that both Newt and Mitt are indulging in the same kind of negative campaigning, but, truthfully, Romney bears the greater part of the responsibility.

It does not make sense that a sane and sensible man like Mitt Romney would be leading a scorched earth campaign, but he is. And he should be held accountable.

Certainly, it’s not a winning strategy.

Hanson offers a cogent analysis, coupled with a warning:

But something about this particular spat seems nastier than, say, Romney–McCain or McCain–Bush (and remember, neither of those eventual nominees won the popular vote in the fall), or even Ford–Reagan and Reagan–Bush. Romney supporters are not just for Mitt, but furiously seem to loathe Gingrich; Gingrich’s team equally seems to hate Romney. This is especially odd given that on the issues, there is very little actual difference between the two candidates at all (which might, counterintuitively, explain the animus: personal characteristics, style, comportment, class, and background instead are the main differences between the candidates, hence the clumsily dubbed “Tea Party vs. Country Club” rivalry).

The question then arises whether, in the event Romney wins, Gingrich supporters will get out and support him, or, should Newt get the nomination, Romney people will fall into line. So many op-eds and TV ads are popping up so quickly that it almost seems impossible that any of these critics could ever endorse someone whom they have so thoroughly trashed in print or video — and whose line of argumentation will be drawn upon by Team Obama. At their worst, is not either Romney or Gingrich vastly preferable to Obama? I would think so.

Meanwhile, we are only vaguely aware that 2011 GDP growth did not even crack 2 percent, another puffed-up subsidized green company hit the dirt, and Obama climbs in the polls even as he should be having his worse quarter ever, given the debt, Keystone, recess appointments, and defense cuts. In military terms, strategy would be almost surreal: first, defeat and utterly humiliate a friendly rival, then expect to enlist what survives to form a new unified and harmonious army to defeat the heretofore untouched common enemy.

An Army of Mothers

2012-01-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

If you haven’t see Sophie Robert’s film, The Wall, on the French way of treating autism, you had best hurry. (I linked the entirety of the movie on a previous post.)

Yesterday a court in Lille banned the movie from being shown in France. Or better, the court banned the movie in its current form. Had the producer been willing to censor her film, she might have been able to produce a version that would have been acceptable to the court.

And, No, it’s not pornography.

For now the YouTube link is still active.

In her movie Robert offered French psychoanalysts of all stripes a platform to express their views about autism. They seemed more than happy to do so.

All things considered, their words do not, in and of themselves, have very much interest. They manifest an advanced theoretical confusion, grown malignant from never having entered the international marketplace of ideas.

Initially, the film received a very narrow distribution. It mostly engaged people who were directly involved with autism.

And then, almost miraculously, three of the psychoanalysts in the film, those of the strictest Lacanian persuasion, decided that the movie made them look bad. Suddenly, the story became worthy of the New York Times. See my prior post. (Of course, the analysts had all signed releases allowing their interviews to be part of the film.)

Naturally, they did not consider that they had made fools of themselves. They were more than happy to blame the filmmaker for their own inadequacies. In that they are good Freudians. If psychoanalysis does not teach you how to shift blame it has clearly failed in its primary task.

They did not pretend that they had not said that they said. They did not pretend that they did not believe what they said. They were seriously upset that the movie made them look bad.

So, they objected strenuously to the way their words had been edited.

You may know that I have had considerable experience with French psychoanalysts. In the past I have often witnessed their public lectures.

Trust me… they do not need anyone’s help when it comes to embarrassing themselves in public. They are masters of the game. Editing their public performances should count as an act of mercy.

In any case the aggrieved analysts sued Sophie Robert, demanding that she remove their statements and pay them monetary damages. That is, they were insisting that she censor her movie.

Yesterday, a judge in Lille accepted their claim, and awarded them damages. They had demanded $500,000, but were awarded $50,000.

The judge considered that the damage was so grave that she declared something of an emergency situation. Thus, she ordered that the film be suppressed immediately, that it not be shown on French television, as planned, and that the producer disburse the monetary award even before the decision could be appealed.

It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, for someone with no legal training and no knowledge of the French civil justice system to understand this verdict.

It is obvious enough, as Sophie Robert’s lawyer pointed out yesterday, that this decision would put an end to documentary filmmaking in France. It is fairly obvious that Michael Moore could never function under this regime. Nor could Evan Coyle Maloney, the producer of Indoctrinate U. Nor could very many journalists.

From what I understand it was based on a French law involving a subject’s “droit moral.” This complex legal concept seems to mean that a subject whose image or words are used in, for example, a documentary, has a legal recourse if the presentation makes him look bad and thus, damages is reputation.

To this outside observer, it suggests that the French have extremely thin skin. Now French psychoanalysts seem to have found a new calling as leaders of the army of the thin-skinned.

Of course, American journalists and legal scholars have long debated the question of editing an interview for journalistic presentation.

Journalists who routinely need to edit interviews have explained that if you run a literal transcript of someone’s remarks you often find that the person looks and sounds much worse than he would if his remarks had been edited.

As for the larger issue, that is, whether the editing presented the opinions of the French psychoanalysts correctly, I will offer my own opinion. I heard nothing in their presentations that seems in any way inconsistent with the dogmatic belief system that constitutes their pseudo-professional discourse. One of the analysts who filed suit has declared publicly that he does not regret one word of what he said.

I suspect that they wanted to censor the film because it made psychoanalysis look bad. Not only that, but it made psychoanalysis look like a cabal that was actively conspiring to prevent autistic children from receiving the best possible care. They were reasoning that if the best care comes from America it should not be allowed to enter France. They are willing to fight on the ramparts to prevent their country from being invaded.

The debate over autism in France does not date to Sophie Robert’s film. In 2004 the Council of Europe condemned France for its substandard treatment of autism. Link here.

Sophie Robert refocused the debate by showing that the psychoanalytic understanding of autism had contributed mightily to the mistreatment of autistic children in France.

To place the legal issue in a larger context, I am informed that the judge who decided this case and who insisted that it be enforced immediately had in the past agreed to annul a Muslim marriage on the grounds that the bride was not a virgin.

Until her decision is overturned on appeal the reputation of the French civil justice system will suffer a serious loss of reputation itself.

When it comes to damaging a reputation, French psychoanalysts are masters of the game. They have so thoroughly discredited all behavioral approaches that no French psychologist or psychiatrist would dare to use such an approach on an autistic child. The fact that these approaches are far more effective does not count.

Moreover, the French legal system has a law on the books that allows a court to remove an autistic child from his parents’ home on the grounds that they are not providing proper care—proper care being defined as a psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy.

This despite the fact that, as the film shows, there is no evidence whatever that psychoanalysis helps these children at all.

For their part French psychoanalysts are practicing a form of cultural protectionism or cultural mercantilism. Only rarely do we see this in the marketplace of ideas. It arises from a radical leftist mindset that seeks thought control at the cost of social benefit.

I will underscore the fact that many French neurologists are horrified by the French treatment of autism. The country that gave us Louis Pasteur and Pierre and Marie Curie has long held a distinguished place in scientific research. No French scientist, serious or unserious, has ever imagined judging scientific results by their country of origin. Many neurologists have contacted Sophie Robert to assert their support for her work and their willingness to testify to the latest scientific facts about autism.

Nevertheless, French psychoanalysts have managed to make France look like a nation of cultural troglodytes.

There are approximately 600,000 autistic children in France today. 80% of them receive no schooling at all. The nation has the resources to treat 700 with the newest and most effective therapeutic techniques. Approximately 1000 or so autistic children have been sent by their parents to Belgium. Sophie Robert calls them “medical refugees.”

Worse yet, since psychoanalysis places all the blame on the mother, it contributes to a line of thinking that declares separation from the mother to be a therapeutic benefit. There is a law in France that allows the government to remove autistic children from their homes if their parents refuse to offer them proper care, that is, psychoanalytically-oriented treatment.

This despite the fact that no evidence demonstrates the efficacy of this treatment. In effect, autistic children are warehoused in France.

Parents of autistic children live in terror of their government and the psychiatric establishment. Thus they have been slow to speak up about the way their government had been treating them.

Until now…

Because of the psychoanalysts' lawsuit, an army of mothers has started to mobilize in order to exert political pressure on the French government and to break down the influence that psychoanalysts exercise on it. Link here.

Through Facebook and the blogosphere women across France have been organizing to save their children, and even to give them productive lives. For now the government has begun to respond positively.

Of course, psychoanalysts in France exercise considerable influence. You will be surprised to learn that the French national health system pays generously for psychoanalytic sessions.

American insurance companies had done so in the past, but they ultimately decided that it was not cost efficient to pay for a treatment that could not show consistently positive results.

When you are dealing with a government-run system you do not need to demonstrate results. You need to be able to exercise political influence.

In all fairness we must give the analysts themselves some credit. They have succeeded in using their political influence to dupe the French government into putting them on the national payroll.

Moreover, psychoanalysts have developed techniques for terrorizing and silencing their opposition. They have mixed their anti-Americanism with accusations that anyone who disagrees with their theory is a fascist and an anti-Semite.

Now they have taken their war on free discussion to a new level by having a court ban a film because they find that it makes them look bad.

Those of you who still believe that psychoanalysis is consistent with the principles of free speech should do some serious rethinking.

If it should happen that Sophie Robert’s film is removed from the internet, you can gain some historical context by looking at the well-known biofilm called Temple Grandin.

The film has justly won numerous prizes and awards; it is an exceptional piece of work made extraordinary by the performance of Claire Danes.

If you watch the film through the lens of the current French debate you will see that when Temple Grandin was a child, in early 1950s America, psychoanalysis provided the framework through which autism was treated.

We see one scene where Temple’s mother is discussing her daughter with an eminent psychiatrist. The psychiatrist explains that autism is an infantile schizophrenia caused by the child’s bad relationship with her mother.

These same ideas appear in the mouths of today’s most renowned French psychoanalysts.

The psychiatrist also wanted to institutionalize Temple for life. Her mother refused to accept that verdict and insisted that her daughter receive an education.

Temple Grandin went to college, received a masters and a doctorate, and currently works as a professor at Colorado State University. She has been widely honored for her influential work in cattle ranching.

She is still autistic. There is no doubt that she suffers from this neurological affliction. And yet, she has managed to use her considerable intelligence to make an important contribution to society. Surely, this is far, far better than the kind of institutionalization that her psychiatrist proposed in early 1950s America and that is commonplace in France today.

In the movie Temple she expresses heartfelt gratitude to her mother for not giving up on her and for not acceding to professional opinion. I like to think that people like Temple Grandin’s mother were instrumental in undermining the influence that psychoanalysis had on the treatment of autism in America.

Of course, it is striking that French psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are today in exactly the same place that their American counterparts were in six decades ago. It shows that French psychoanalysts are suffering from arrested moral development.

At the very least they should stay out of the arena of public relations. By trying to defend their own reputations they have made Sophie Robert’s film into a call to arms against psychoanalysts. They have mobilized an army of mothers, a group that, I venture, they will never defeat.

For worse, or perhaps for better, they have thrown their own profession into disrepute.

Romneymania

2012-01-26T10:29:00.000-08:00

Who better to provide us with some clarity on the Republic primary contests than a satirical publication like The Onion. It offers this:

From coast to coast, town to town, and in nearly every public meeting place and private residence across America, millions have been captivated, inspired, and in some cases moved to tears by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who now finds himself campaigning before a nation in the throes of full-scale Romneymania.

"The raw energy and enthusiasm Mitt Romney stirs inside people is like nothing I've ever seen," Youngstown, OH auto mechanic Chris Ritenour said Wednesday. "Everything he says resonates with Americans. His moving story of growing up privileged, his inspiring rise from moderate wealth to overwhelming riches, his thrilling work in the highest echelons of corporate finance—he really speaks to the heart and mind of the common man."

No one says it better than The Onion. Today, Romney’s candidacy is ascending again. InTrade has him a prohibitive favorite. And yet, no one really feels anything for him.

If you are looking for emotion today, you will only find it in the Republican politicians and pundits who are passionately opposed to Newt Gingrich. Politico reports on it here.

Republicans who are passionately opposed to Gingrich seem to have missed Norm Coleman’s telling remarks.

When you allow yourself to be consumed by a negative passion you are not very likely to be thinking very clearly or very well.

Former senator Norm Coleman advises the Romney campaign. He has pointed out that a president Romney will not really be able to repeal all of Obamacare.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized this morning:

The larger point is that the path of least political resistance for the GOP would be to revert to its historic minority role as tax collectors for the welfare state, and this temptation is especially strong for health care. No one doubts that repealing and replacing ObamaCare will be a hard slog if the party does take the White House and Senate in 2012, namely because the American political system is designed to make change hard (even if those controls failed in 2010 amid Democratic abuses). Mr. Coleman's advice is, essentially, why bother trying.

The counselors of despair who want to sign a health-care armistice before the battle lines are even drawn are the sort of people who make the public cynical about politics. The entire GOP establishment claims in public it wants to scotch ObamaCare before the program is entrenched in 2014, because that is what the voters want. But if Mr. Coleman is any indication, some GOP elites will dump this political slogan when a faculty member shows up to vouchsafe her new respect for their moderation and realism.

Is this what it means to run a campaign without emotion, without passion, and without any real feeling? Do people feel disconnected from Romney because they know, in their gut, that a man who has no emotion can only be trusted to maintain the status quo?

Naturally, the Romney campaign has disavowed Coleman’s remarks. But since the campaign and the candidate are nothing but disciplined, what are the odds that Coleman just let it slip.

The Journal tells us what the true test should be:

But if his real ObamaCare convictions are akin to Mr. Coleman's—if Republicans ought to "repeal the bad and keep the good," as Mr. Romney once put it in 2010—then voters should know that now, before he becomes the nominee. If those aren't his convictions, then Mr. Coleman shouldn't be anywhere near his campaign.

Does anyone really believe that that will happen?

Yesterday, Harvard Professor and Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson presented an analysis of the Romney candidacy that closely resembles the one offered by The Onion:

A large part of the appeal of Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate is that he is the quintessential American Technocrat. His educational résumé couldn’t do more to convey managerial competence: the guy has degrees from both Harvard Law and Harvard Business schools. He has ticked every box the United States has to offer a compulsive doer, going forward with laserlike focus on win-win execution (this is how technocrats talk). He has built from scratch a successful private-equity business, Bain Capital. He has turned around a major public event, the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. He has been a state governor. I live in Massachusetts; not even his political opponents question Romney’s aptitude. And despite some recent bad press and months of attacks by his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign is running as smoothly as a McKinsey flow chart crossed with a BMW engine.

To the kind of people who spend their careers inside elite institutions, the technocratic turn is welcome. Decisions about economic policy, they reason, are too difficult to be entrusted to the people’s elected representatives. And if it makes sense to entrust monetary policy to unelected experts at central banks, then why not do something similar for fiscal policy? After all, voters will never back the kind of tough measures that need to be taken to stabilize Western budgets. They want jam today, paid for in 30 years at the earliest. Hence our chronic deficits.

If you trust the experts but not the people, Romney is your guy. If you want a manager, Romney is your guy.

But, if you want someone who knows Washington well enough to effect real change, then Romney will come up short.

Ironically, when Romney charges that Gingrich is a Washington insider he is obfuscating his own lack of experience in the federal government.

Ferguson continues his column by making a point that Newt Gingrich has made: Mitt Romney is a manager and not a leader. He is not judging the candidates as stand-alone figures. He is evaluating them in terms of what a new president will need to do to lead the nation.

Ferguson writes:

The sacrifices we need to make are bound to be painful: just look what Greece and Italy are going through now. Yet people can tolerate job losses, spending cuts, and tax hikes if they believe that a payoff will come in the foreseeable future. How to persuade them of that? The only way is through political leadership. And that means inspirational speeches and fireside chats.

Technocrats suck at these.

Ask yourself: what is Mitt Romney’s biggest weakness as a candidate (apart from his being a multimillionaire who pays an “effective” tax rate of 15 percent)? The answer is that he has all the rhetorical flair of a PowerPoint presentation. Despite years of practice and doubtless the best team of public-speaking coaches on the planet, he simply can’t stand in front of a lectern without turning into an immaculate wooden carving of himself emitting strange prerecorded messages from a human impersonator on Planet Vulcan. And if he’s bad with a script, he’s even worse off the cuff.

It isn’t easy to grasp what is involved in political leadership, but Ferguson explains it clearly and cogently. In one way or another everyone who has been analyzing the Romney candidacy has been saying exactly the same thing.

If you believe that the nation will need a leader who can rally the nation behind a program of fiscal austerity, then, Romney does not seem to be the best candidate.

Why then is everyone so troubled over Mitt Romney’s lack of emotion?

From a moral perspective the absence of emotion is always suspect. Often, on this blog, I have voiced my opposition to therapists who declare that it is good to express all of one’s feelings, to let it all hang out and to wear your heart on your sleeve.

Thereby I join those moral thinkers who value self-control and discipline over emotional intemperance.

This does not mean that I, or Aristotle, with whom this argument originated, am against all expressions of emotion. While it is not a good idea to go around being angry all the time, it is also not a good idea not to feel anger when the occasion merits it.

As the philosopher put it, your goal should be to express the right emotion at the right time in the right place to the right person under the right circumstances.

If you are angry all the time your anger will only reflect on you. If you are never angry you will be acting servile and overly compliant. If do not feel anger when you should you will be showing that you do not really get it. An appropriate emotion demonstrates that you are in touch with reality.

Yesterday James Taranto suggested that the Republican Party is facing a choice between a candidate who is too angry and a candidate who is not angry enough.

He wrote: “Republicans, on the other hand, have to choose between the scrappy Gingrich and the more complaisant Mitt Romney. The contrast between the two is most evident in their descriptions of the president, whom Gingrich calls a dangerous radical and Romney describes as a nice guy in over his head. To our mind, Obama is neither as dangerous as Gingrich suggests nor as nice as Romney says. But the important thing about these statements is what they tell us about the men making them and the character of the campaign each is likely to run.

Obama has long had very poor approval ratings among independent voters, which ought to make him easy to defeat. Obama's angry appeal is not going to win over unhappy independents. The great imponderable is whether Gingrich's anger would put them off and thereby neutralize Obama's--or, to put it another way, whether independent voters are fed up enough with Obama to respond to Gingrich's angry appeal the way Republicans do.

Of course, there’s more to the electorate than independent voters.

Will Republican voters find it in their hearts to back a Romney candidacy that feels wan and dispirited? Will they rally to a campaign whose attacks seem mostly directed against Republicans?

Or, would they turn out in greater numbers for a Gingrich who expresses their anger at Obama and their rage against Obama’s media enablers?

Yesterday, for example, Mitt Romney criticized Gingrich for attacking the media. Isn’t it strange that the presumptive Republican nominee is defending a media establishment that will do everything in its power to re-elect Barack Obama?

It wasn’t very long ago that South Carolina Republicans voted for Gingrich because he has been willing to stand up to the media and to call them out for their unabashed support for Obama. How quickly people forget.

While Gingrich has been attacking Obama and his media enablers, Romney and the Republican establishment have been training their guns on Newt Gingrich.

One assumes that eventually they will train their guns on Obama. But, if there is no passion for the Romney candidacy, and if the candidate himself does not evince any passion, where will the anger come from? Will the Republican base become dispirited?

Will a man without anger be able to channel anger? One doubts it.

For now those who are lining up to support Romney are more anti-Gingrich than pro-Romney. If their main reason for supporting Romney is that he is neither Gingrich nor Obama, he would, were he elected, have no real governing mandate.

Perhaps Norm Coleman was right. Elect Romney and Obamacare is here to stay.

Obama Treats the American People Like 8th Graders

2012-01-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

There’s talking down to people, and then, there’s condescending.

Delivering a speech that is pitched at an 8th grade reading comprehension level must count as both talking down and condescending. Even when the speaker is the President of the United States.

It’s not the first time that Barack Obama took the American people for a bunch of 8th graders. He has always spoken to Americans as though they were prepubescent preteens.

By comparison, his twelve predecessors have pitched their speeches to late 10th grade reading comprehension.

Politico reports the bad news:

President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address again rated at an 8th grade comprehension level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test — the third lowest score of any State of the Union address since 1934.

The University of Minnesota's Smart Politics conducted an analysis on the last 70 State of the Union addresses and found that President Obama's three addresses have the lowest grade average of any modern president. "Obama's average grade-level score of 8.4 is more than two grades lower than the 10.7 grade average for the other 67 addresses written by his 12 predecessors," they conclude.

"The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores," the University of Minnesota's Eric Ostermeier explains.

Either Obama thinks that the American people are not very bright, or he believes that the people who voted for him are poorly educated, or else he himself thinks like an eighth grader.

I report; you decide.

Whatever You Do, Don't Nag

2012-01-25T07:27:00.000-08:00

You know that it’s wrong. You know that it’s hurting your marriage. You know that you are do it much too much. And yet, you can’t stop nagging.

All of your self-awareness seems to be powerless to stop the dreadful habit of nagging. You have gotten totally in touch with your feelings, and still, you keep nagging your husband.

Yes, nagging seems largely to be the province of the distaff spouse. And it most often concerns household chores.

Today Elizabeth Bernstein explains to us that nagging is a leading marriage killer. For the sake of your marriage, stop nagging.

Nagging begins when she asks or tells him to do something. When he does not do it, she asks again, this time with more feeling.

If she keeps asking, more and more stridently, he will continue to ignore her request. She will become more desperate and angry, feeling that she is being disrespected. At that point, nothing on heaven or earth will get him to do what she is telling him to do.

As you know, it is not about the task at hand. It’s about being told what to do. It’s about being told to do something that he might consider to be woman’s work. It’s not about whether or not he can pick up the dry cleaning or vacuum the family room. It’s about male pride.

I would mention that sometimes it’s about false male pride.

Picking up the dry cleaning is not going to damage anyone’s male pride. If he thinks it is his pride is hanging by a rather weak thread.

If a request turns into a nagging jag, then his pride will really be on the line.

Nagging transforms the question. It’s no longer about whether he is going to do what she is telling him but whether he is going to allow himself to be humiliated by her.

His pride will make it impossible to do what she is nagging him to do.

All wives should know that they should never put their husbands in such a position. They should know that once they make it into a struggle they have damaged their marriages.

But, the great unanswered question in Bernstein’s article is: What makes women nag?

Frustration is part of it. Feeling disrespected is another part of it.

And yet, the issue of who does what around the house does not really explain chronic nagging.

For that we need to look beyond toxic communication to cultural toxins.

Influential figures in our culture have told women that marriages are power struggles. They have told women that the kitchen should be a battleground. They have insisted that all household chores be shared equally and that male intransigence is a form of oppression. They have convinced women to assert themselves, no matter the results, because their cause is righteous and just.

While therapists and coaches tell women not to nag feminists have been telling them that they must engage in behaviors that are tantamount to nagging.

Ideological zealotry coupled with righteous anger will make you an inflexible nag.

To change the behavior, start thinking in terms of what you want to accomplish, not how you are going to posture as an aggrieved victim.

If you keep your eye on the goal and are willing to try out different means to achieve it you will have taken a step away from nagging.

Nagging occurs when you keep repeating the same message and keep getting the same answer. It is a communication rut. If you fall in it, don’t keep digging.

It is almost too obvious to say it, but if your earnest entreaties are not producing the results you wish, then try asking in a different way.

You do not have to be too savvy in the art of communication to know that you should not repeat the same thing over and over again. Being more insistent assumes that he did not hear the first time and that he needs to be taxed with failure.

No one is ever motivated by being taken to be a failure.

Let’s say that a woman really does need help around the house. There is a multitude of ways to achieve the goal. Here’s one that you may have missed.

A colleague once explained that she received in consultation a housewife who needed her husband and sons to help around the house.

The more she asked them to help her, the more unwilling they were to do what was needed.

So, her female therapist recommended that she go out and get her hair done and get a new manicure. The therapist recommended that she modify her appearance.

When the woman came home from the hairdresser's she did not have to ask anyone to do anything. The men in her household started volunteering to help out.

The moral of the story, the true solution that the psychologists do not seem to have understood, is that the best way to convince a man to do something around the house is to allow him to think that it’s his own idea.

As Dwight Eisenhower once said: Leadership is getting someone to do what has to be done because he wants to do it.

That takes advanced social skills. What works in one situation may not work in another.

The only thing we know for certain here is that nagging does not work.

To overcome your habit of nagging, begin with an old adage, whose origin escapes me: if you can’t ask nicely, don’t ask at all.

Know that there are many ways to ask the same thing. And there are even more ways to motivate someone to do what you want him to do. A request for assistance is not the same as a demand. Asking for help is not the same as trying to force someone to do something.

If you ask nicely and he does not respond, try doing it yourself or suggest that he hire someone to help you out.

Judge your next step by the response you have received. If he ignores what you are saying then you should try saying it differently. Or perhaps you should try to find another way to show that you need help.

Of course, if his buddies have spent the afternoon watching the game and making a mess of your den, then you might ask them all if they might want to help you to clean up.

Understand that this will be a foreign notion to them, so you might have to provide them with more detailed instructions: the pizza box goes in the garbage can on the back porch. Specifics always work better than generalities.

If they all demur, and if they leave your den a complete mess, then call in the cleaning service and send your husband the bill. Make sure you present it with a smile.

The Arab Spring, American Policy Failure

2012-01-24T12:57:00.000-08:00

One year into the Arab Spring it’s looking like America has come out a loser.

It’s not just that no one is talking about what is going on in our former allies, but those who are seem still to believe that things are turning out well.

Thus, it’s worthwhile taking the measure of the Obama-Clinton approach to foreign policy by reviewing the regress of the Arab Spring.

Our guide in this matter is Caroline Glick. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Glick explains:

TO UNDERSTAND the depth and breadth of America's losses, consider that on January 25, 2011, most Arab states were US allies to a greater or lesser degree. Mubarak was a strategic ally. Saleh was willing to collaborate with the US in combating al- Qaida and other jihadist forces in his country.

Gaddafi was a neutered former enemy who had posed no threat to the US since 2004. Iraq was a protectorate. Jordan and Morocco were stable US clients.

One year later, the elements of the US's alliance structure have either been destroyed or seriously weakened. US allies like Saudi Arabia, which have yet to be seriously threatened by the revolutionary violence, no longer trust the US. As the recently revealed nuclear cooperation between the Saudis and the Chinese makes clear, the Saudis are looking to other global powers to replace the US as their superpower protector.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect to the US's spectacular loss of influence and power in the Arab world is that most of its strategic collapse has been due to its own actions. In Egypt and Libya the US intervened prominently to bring down a US ally and a dictator who constituted no threat to its interests. Indeed, it went to war to bring Gaddafi down.

Moreover, the US acted to bring about their fall at the same time it knew that they would be replaced by forces inimical to American national security interests. In Egypt, it was clear that the Muslim Brotherhood would emerge as the strongest political force in the country. In Libya, it was clear at the outset of the NATO campaign against Gaddafi that al-Qaida was prominently represented in the anti-regime coalition. And just as the Islamists won the Egyptian election, shortly after Gaddafi was overthrown, al-Qaida forces raised their flag over Benghazi's courthouse.”

She continues: “In sharp contrast to his active interventionism against US-allied regimes, President Barack Obama has prominently refused to intervene in Syria, where the fate of a US foe hangs in the balance.

Obama has sat back as Turkey has fashioned a Syrian opposition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab League has intervened in a manner that increases the prospect that Syria will descend into chaos in the event that the Assad regime is overthrown.

Obama continues to speak grandly about his vision for the Middle East and his dedication to America's regional allies. And his supporters in the media continue to applaud his great success in foreign policy. But outside of their echo chamber, he and the country he leads are looked upon with increasing contempt and disgust throughout the Arab world.

Obama's behavior since last January 25 has made clear to US friend and foe alike that under Obama, the US is more likely to attack you if you display weakness towards it than if you adopt a confrontational posture against it. As Assad survives to kill another day; as Iran expands its spheres of influence and gallops towards the nuclear bomb; as al- Qaida and its allies rise from the Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal; and as Mubarak continues to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher, the US's rapid fall from regional power is everywhere in evidence.

Mitt Romney: The Last of the Patricians

2012-01-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

Those who have been looking for just the right concept to describe Mitt Romney’s strengths and weaknesses have received some help from Joel Kotkin.

Mitt Romney, Kotkin explains, is the last of an American patrician class.

In his words: “Romney’s Mormonism may be a departure from the old Protestant aristocracy, but the former Massachusetts governor epitomizes both the traditional strengths (a sense of modesty and self-control, a pristine personal life and lack of ostentation) and the weaknesses (an inability to personally connect with those less fortunate, less able or less educated) of the patricians. Perhaps nothing illustrates those weaknesses better than the inability of the richest major party candidate in a generation to comprehend how his scandalously low personal income tax rate and his use of offshore tax havens might offend voters, particularly in an economically ravaged state like South Carolina.”

In that Romney resembles John Kerry and George Bush more than Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Today’s patrician class seems woefully out of touch with the nation and its people. In many ways it is living off nostalgia for a past when its efforts helped build America.

Kotkin writes: “In the country’s first two centuries, some common ground joined the traditional conservatives who made up the bulk of the moneyed class and who spearheaded the quest for national power and economic expansion with the muscular progressivism epitomized by the two President Roosevelts. The forgers of American preeminence in the business world—Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, the Rockefellers, Thomas J. Watson of IBM, David Packard and Bill Hewlett—embraced the ideal of growth where enriching themselves meant creating unprecedented opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Americans. These men built and financed things—from oil wells and high-tech instruments to autos and suburban tract houses—essential to the prosperity of the working and middle classes they employed and depended on to purchase their products.”

Great American patricians in the past built and managed businesses: automobiles, oil wells and computers. When all is said and done they did much more than invest in America’s future.

Perhaps it’s a distinction without a difference, but surely one of Mitt Romney’s problems is that he operated at a safe patrician distance from the businesses he invested in and turned around.

Having functioned at a distance from the concerns of the workers on the line, he is too detached and disconnected from their concerns.

But, what are the alternatives to rule by the last patrician? Kotkin does not see the emergence of a politician who can articulate the interests of the middle class or working class. He does not see a new Reagan or Clinton coming on to the political scene today.

He is seeing the Democratic party being captured by a new political class, a clerisy. In other words, by a secular clergy.

In my view Kotkin does not give enough weight to the fact that today’s Democratic party, ruled as it is by a clerisy, is still doing the bidding of labor unions.

In any event, here is the way Kotkin describes what is taking the place of a declining patrician class: “… the real winners here are not likely to be the largely suburban masses but a new, heavily urban littoral ruling class. Of course, the politically potent liberals who populate these urban areas live amidst far greater income inequality than the non-coastal, red-state “rubes.” Epitomized by Barack Obama, this ascendant force draws its strength largely from high reaches of academia, the media, the environmental lobby and, increasingly, the digital billionaires of Silicon Valley.”

He continues: “Like the old patricians, this new group shares a basic ideology. Indeed they can be seen as something of a clerisy—members of a secular congregation whose shared faith is in a society run by experts such as themselves according to the dictates of accepted science. That those experts would profit from their own advice is seen as merely part of a virtuous circle, scarcely worth the notice of the high-minded citizens scientifically calculating the common good. For the most part, the clerisy believes not so much in economic growth but in enforcing an agenda of ever-increasing urban density, racial redress, cultural experimentation and ‘green’ energy. Obama reigns largely as high priest of this class.”

What differentiates the old patricians from the new secular clergy? Kotkin explains that the old patricians showed more concerned for the well-being of their workers and customers.

In his words: “Most important, as employers, the old patricians understood the need for basic education and training for their workers. In contrast, the clerisy has little needed for the basically educated, but only an approving claque and faithful servants. Many members of the rising new elite and their well-off employees depends on non-profits or family trusts for income so that their economic interests lie primarily in asset inflation, whether in real estate or equities. No surprise then that the businesses with which they most identify are media and social media companies that outside of the odd receptionist employ largely the best educated and affluent. Significantly, these companies’ stocks provide huge increases in wealth without causing any direct harm to their holders’ delicate environmental and aesthetic sensibilities. After all, the environmental impact of a computer company can easily be shifted out of the view of the Bay Area, as for instance Apple functions as an ideas company in the United States, and a manufacturer in China.”

If the election becomes a choice between the last of the patricians and the champion of the secular clergy, Kotkin believes that the clerical class will win. For his part he seems to favor the last of the patricians.

Kotkin suggests that the middle and working classes are so thoroughly “divided by social and cultural issues with no credible champion for their economic concerns,” that power may shift to the clerics and their “media enablers.”

Strangely enough, Kotkin is making the case for anyone but Mitt. He seems to be saying that if the American people are given the choice between Romney and Obama they will vote for Obama because they will never be able to connect with the last of the patricians.

Last Saturday, of course, South Carolina Republicans voiced their opinion on the issue. They want someone who can represent the middle and working class, someone who is more like Reagan and Clinton than like Bush and Kerry.

Given the alternatives and given their belief that Romney will not fare well in a general election, they voted for Newt Gingrich. In many ways Gingrich is a flawed candidate, but he does represent the class of voters that will not be represented by either Obama or Romney.

Maureen Dowd: Not Good Enough for Obama

2012-01-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it’s too much to say that Maureen Dowd is writing as a woman scorned, but she has surely been disappointed by Barack Obama.

Having allowed herself to be “seduced” by the man from Illinois she has been chagrined by his failure to perform as promised.

Dowd is describing a love affair gone bad. She speaks for a goodly number of honorable Americans who got caught up in the Obama rapture, only to discover that their love had been abused.

Sunday was not the first time that Dowd expressed her disappointment with Obama, but she is now offering one of the better profiles of the flawed man who is currently President of the United States.

With the political world abuzz over Newt Gingrich’s infidelities we would do well to spend some time contemplating Barack Obama’s deficiencies as a lover.

In Dowd’s words: “Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician who ruefully jokes that his talent is hitting the ‘sweet spot’ where he makes no one happy, neither allies nor opponents.

“The man who became famous with a speech declaring that we were one America, not opposing teams of red and blue states, presides over an America more riven by blue and red than ever.

“The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal, dragged down by W.’s recklessness and his own inability to read America’s panic and its thirst for a strong leader.”

Disregarding the gratuitous swipe at W., Dowd describes a man who has deceived the public and who does not know what he is doing.

And then, Dowd quotes a statement by Obama that she calls “maddeningly naïve.”

In a Time Magazine interview Obama had this to say: “You know, the truth is, actually, when it comes to Congress, the issue is not personal relationships. My suspicion is that this whole critique has to do with the fact that I don’t go to a lot of Washington parties. And as a consequence, the Washington press corps maybe just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix enough with them, and they figure, well, if I’m not spending time with them, I must be cold and aloof. The fact is, I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter.”

In the past the press has allowed Obama to get away with this kind of mindless drivel. Now, Dowd is refusing to play along.

Effortlessly, she refutes Obama’s empty premise: “Reagan didn’t socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.”

What makes Obama such a bad lover? Why has the love that Maureen Dowd and many others invested in Obama been unrequited?

Simply put, Barack Obama is a monster of narcissism, an arrogant man who blames everyone else for his own faults.

What went wrong with Obama’s presidency? According to Obama and his sycophantic advisers, the fault lies with the American people. We all—you, me, and Maureen Dowd—are not good enough for the great Obama.

Dowd sees Michelle Obama as enabler in chief. She explains the Obama arrogance thusly: “Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.

“We disappointed them.

“As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: ‘I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves’.”

Pity the poor Obamas . They expected better of the American people.

Look at it this way. In the first flush of love, any man or woman will idealize the object of his or her affections.

There’s a reason they say that love is blind.

Now, Dowd is describing what happens when a woman discovers that her hero, the man she loved, the man to whom she plight her troth, cannot love her in return. How does she feel when she learns that he is so completely in love with himself that he has nothing left to give to anyone else?

You do not have to be a master of the art of romance to understand that if your love relationship is not working out you definitely do not want to hear your lover tell you that the problem is that you are just not good enough for him.

When Women Are Few

2012-01-23T11:05:00.000-08:00

A lot of women take offense when behavioral economists declare that are a “resource.”

Not unreasonably, we should say.

Yet, researchers in this field claim that men who are courting women behave differently depending on whether women are a scarce or an abundant resource. Links here and here.

It should not come as too much of a surprise. On college campuses today, where there is often a surfeit of women to men, men feel no real need to spend a lot of money to court a woman.

For their part women are willing to do what it takes to please men, regardless of the man’s attention.

Many women consider these behaviors to smack of desperation.

Recent studies have claimed that the opposite is also true. When there are fewer women than men, men are obliged to work harder to impress women. When women are scarce each one is less apt to settle for the first man who comes along. She will be more choosy, will demand and receive more respect and better treatment.

When women are scarce men will compete compete for young women's favors by spending more money on them. They will even go into debt to shower women with gifts, the better to convince these women of their serious intent.

Fewer women translates into male profligacy while more women means male parsimony. A culture where there are more women than men is a culture that presumably has no problem going into serious debt.

American universities notwithstanding very few cultures have more women than men. Today, in many parts of the world, especially in Asia, the balance between men and women is skewed by the practice of sex-selection abortion. That would suggest, according to the behavioral economics model, that men in those cultures are profligate spenders.

But this is not quite what happens. In China a one-child policy accompanied by sex-selection abortion has produced a demographic where eligible young men seriously outnumber eligible young women.

The researchers dutifully note that this does not cause young Chinese men to spend more on courtship. They do not throw money at women; they do not borrow money to take women to fancy clubs.

Not at all. In truth, the relative paucity of available females makes these men more likely to save their money than to spend it.

If we were being rational here, we would be saying that the behavior of Chinese men disproves the initial hypothesis, namely that a scarcity of women causes men to become more profligate.

At the least, we need to modify it.

Putting behavioral economics aside it seems that the men who tend to borrow and spend in order to impress women are more show than substance while Chinese men are more substance than show.

To some extent these different attitudes have something to do with the way women value themselves. A woman who lives in a community where there are many more women than men might be induced to behave in a certain way. But she is not obliged to do so.

Community values certainly have an influence here.

And then there is this issue. Let's say that American college men tend to be parsimonious because women are in abundant supply. They are also not saving their money to attract a better wife.

It may be the case that an abundance of women discourages marriage. If there are so many wonderful available women around, why settle for just one.

So, these men do not need to spend money on women. Are they saving and investing? Not at all. I if they do not need to accumulate wealth in order to attract a wife, they are going out and spending the money on themselves.

Mitt Romney's Flawed Candidacy

2012-01-23T07:06:00.000-08:00

Last week the political discourse, as intellectuals like to call it, centered on how Mitt Romney was both inevitable and electable.

As the new week and the Year of the Dragon arrive professional pundits are beginning to see the flaws in the Romney candidacy. It’s a good day and a good morning when serious thinkers heed the voice of the people.

Of course, some bloggers—humility prevents me from naming any—have been trying to point out the problems with the Romney candidacy for some time now.

This morning the Wall Street Journal editorialized: “This is in contrast to Mr. Romney, who is cautious at his most tenacious but in the last week has seemed befuddled by questions he surely knew were coming. The demand to release his tax returns was inevitable, especially with Mr. Obama preparing to attack him as "Mr. 1%." Mr. Romney said Sunday he will release his 2010 tax return on Tuesday, but blowing that layup suggests either personal stubbornness or the lack of an adviser who can tell him when he's wrong.

“The more serious flaw exposed by the tax debate is Mr. Romney's inability, or unwillingness, to make a larger and persuasive case for free-market economic growth and lower tax rates. Before last week, he seemed to believe he could dodge a class-war battle by not proposing a cut in tax rates. This was always implausible given Mr. Obama's campaign, but it is impossible now that he has disclosed that his own effective tax rate is 15%.”

Later it adds a note about the Republican establishment: “As for the GOP establishment, such as it still is, Mr. Gingrich's re-emergence is likely to cause a panic attack. They don't believe he is electable. Our advice would be to relax and let the voters decide. If Mr. Romney can't marshal the wit and nerve to defeat the speaker, then he isn't likely to defeat Mr. Obama.”

In his own inimitable way Mark Steyn takes the measure of the Romney candidacy and finds it lacking. Steyn sees Romney as the best candidate that money can buy, but still, all the money in the world cannot compensate for Romney’s obvious failings.

In Steyn’s words: “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.

“And what’s with the wind up? The ‘shining city on the hill’? That’s another guy’s line — a guy with whom you have had hitherto little connection other than your public repudiation of him back in the Nineties. Can’t any of his highly paid honchos write him a campaign slogan that’s his own and doesn’t sound in his mouth so cheesily anodyne, as if some guy ran a focus-group and this phrase came up with the lowest negatives?”

He adds: “And where, among all the dough he’s handing out, is the rapid-response team? Newt’s ‘spontaneous’ indignation at John King was carefully crafted by Gingrich himself. By contrast, 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.”

In Romney’s latest foray into the world of high concept he declared Gingrich to be a “Washington insider.” By apparent contrast, Romney is an outsider.

His surrogate, Chris Christie, declared that Gingrich had embarrassed the Republican Party.

Of course, this remark highlights Romney’s lack of experience in the federal government. Only a Washington insider would be sufficiently familiar with the workings of the federal government to make his mark on it from the first day of his tenure.

As a number of people have pointed out, Romney’s experience in business qualifies him to be CEO more than POTUS.

As for Gingrich’s having embarrassed the Republican party, Christie should have noted that the Republican party is not all that popular nowadays.

Gingrich will easily take this idea and use it to show that even though he has been a Washington insider he is perfectly capable of confronting the interest groups that currently reign there.

Turnout in the South Carolina Primary

2012-01-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

Republican primary voters are seriously questioning the electability of each candidate.

Should Republicans nominate a moderate who can appeal to independents or a conservative who will motivate more people to come out and vote?

No party can really do both, so we look for evidence to point us toward a correct conclusion.

Today the Washington Times reports on turnout in yesterday’s South Carolina primary:

“South Carolina's Republican voters set a new primary turnout record Saturday when more than 600,000 of them went to the polls, shattering the previous mark set in 2000.

“With 13 precincts still uncounted Sunday morning, 601,166 votes already were recorded, topping 2000's turnout of 537,101 and well ahead of 2008's 445,499 voters. Earlier in the week, officials had projected a moderate turnout about equivalent to the 2008 primary.”

Roughly 33% more voters went to the polls yesterday than when John McCain won the primary in 2008. We recall how well McCain did in the general election.

Lack of enthusiasm among primary voters translated into an Obama victory.

So, score one for those who believe that a milquetoast moderate will stifle Republican turnout.

By the way, the weather was not very good in South Carolina yesterday.

The South Carolina Primary: Enter the Dragon

2012-01-22T05:47:00.000-08:00

Something happened on the way to the coronation. The Republican political establishment had all but crowned Mitt Romney their champion.

But then, South Carolina Republicans had their say and they declared loudly and clearly that they did not see it that way.

The non-Romney candidates won a very large majority of the votes yesterday in South Carolina.

As the old saying goes, vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. Ignore it at your peril.

Given a choice between a milquetoast moderate and a fire-breathing dragon South Carolina Republican voters chose the latter. Maybe they knew what many of us have not yet fully grasped. According to Chinese astrology the Year of the Dragon will soon be upon us.

If there is anything to this astrology, the pundits should have been asking themselves which candidate is more like a dragon. That would be Newt Gingrich.

Jay Cost writes in the Weekly Standard that Gingrich won because he spoke truth to power. He spoke what was on the mind of conservative voters.

In Cost’s words: “Conservatives are very frustrated, and rightfully so. Their feeling is that they play by the rules – they work hard, pay their taxes, raise their kids right – but what do they get for it? Their values are mocked on television and the movies, the media castigates them as a bunch of extremists, they pay taxes while half of the country does not, and the Obama administration took to demagoguing them virtually from day one of his tenure.”

Gingrich has a lot of baggage; he has expressed opinions that have been decidedly unconserative. Yet, he won decisively because he took the fight to Barack Obama, to the Obamaphile media and to the Republican establishment.

The South Carolina results show us that Republican voters are not married to ideology. They voted for an ideological non-conformist.

They rejected the idea that only a moderate can win over the independent voters who are said to be the deciding factor in national elections. They are fed up with being tarred as racists. And they are even more fed up with the pseudo-intellectuals who call them stupid.

They want someone to walk on a stage and breathe fire. They saw that quality in Newt Gingrich and they rallied to his candidacy.

If you want to know why Romney lost, just listen to his concession speech. It showed the tinniest of tin ears. Showing a singular lack of grace Romney returned to the old idea that when Newt Gingrich criticized Bain Capital he was attacking capitalism.

It makes sense that Romney would say this. The Republican establishment has been attacking Gingrich on these grounds for the past two weeks. To little avail.

Unfortunately, when you say what everyone else is saying you sound more like an echo than a choice.

Newt Gingrich won because he went on the offensive. When he started criticizing Mitt Romney he showed that he had the strength and the energy and the fire to champion the Republican Party.

I mentioned a while back that when I saw Romney’s first interview with Brett Baier I thought that he had a glass jaw. His failure to respond to the criticisms coming at him from Gingrich and Santorum proved the point... for now, at least.

For all of the analysis of the election people have overlooked a crucial factor. The election will be decided by who best captures the spirit of the time.

As of today, it seems that Newt Gingrich is embodying the spirit of the Year of the Dragon.

Autism and French Psychoanalysis

2012-01-21T07:35:00.000-08:00

In America Freudian psychoanalysis is on life support. At best, it is a charming relic of a bygone age.

In France psychoanalysis is alive and well. Thanks to Jacques Lacan nearly all French psychiatrists have suffered the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis.

While France has never stinted on psychiatric medication the dominant modes of psychological treatment for mental illness all involve some version of Freudian psychoanalysis.

French psychoanalysis is a hermeneutically sealed world where presumably intelligent people spin out narratives that pretend to tell you all you ever wanted to know about human behavior.

Most of the time the analysts do not pretend that their theoretical fabulations produce good clinical results. The more sophisticated among them do not even believe in clinical results.

Some of you may know that I have more than a passing familiarity with the French psychoanalytic scene. I was a part of it for many years. Two decades ago I departed from it. I have been warning people away from it ever since. I make no claim to objectivity here.

I mention this to preface an amazing story, one that shows the dark side of French psychoanalysis. It has caused considerable chagrin in the French psychoanalytic community.

Two days ago the New York Times reported on the controversy that has erupted around a documentary film produced by one Sophie Robert. See also Robert’s website here.

Robert decided to examine the way autistic children are treated by the psychiatric establishment in France. She compared the clinical results achieved by one child whose parents chose an American behavioral technique called PECS and another child who had been treated with psychoanalytically-inspired methods as a day patient in a psychiatric clinic.

For the record: PECS stands for Picture Exchange Communication System. It works to help autistic children learn to use language.

The film notes at the beginning that autism is generally considered a neurological condition. In the distant American past Bruno Bettleheim attempted to treat autistic children with a variant of psychoanalysis, to little avail. His work has long since been discredited on this side of the Atlantic.

He still has a following in France, and his work, coupled with Freudian theory, has caused French psychoanalysts to believe that, even if autism is a neurological condition, its root cause is psychogenic.

In everyday language, this means that mothers are to blame. If you watch Robert’s film and listen to the various French psychoanalysts proudly offer up their theoretical narratives about autism we discover that they believe it is either caused in utero by a mother’s depression, or by bad mothering.

The psychoanalysts indict mothers for being too close or too distant, too warm or too cold. In any case a mother's bad parenting skills or psychological defects are the root cause of her child’s autism.

For the record some of the psychoanalysts belong to the Lacanian School where I trained. Others belong to French psychoanalytic groups that are part of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the IPA. Most of the important psychoanalytic societies in America belong to the IPA.

When it comes to treating autism the psychoanalysts do not seem to have very much to offer. It is difficult to conduct a talking cure with a child who cannot talk.

But they do not seem to be especially bothered by the inconvenience. A couple of them seem to think that a silent patient constitutes a special challenge to their fortitude as psychoanalysts. They see themselves being challenged to listen attentively to a patient who is incapable of talking.

When the interviewer asks these psychoanalysts what they would consider to be a good treatment result, they themselves are rendered speechless. They act as though the question has never crossed their minds.

French psychoanalysts have been cured of any obligation to provide treatment for their patients.

The film has caused more than a scandal in France. It has provoked a lawsuit.

The French psychoanalysts come across in the film as blithering fools and they are none too happy about. Most of them speak at length about their theories of autism. They offer what I consider to be a fair rendering of their bizarre belief system.

And yet, three of them, the more Lacanian analysts, are suing the filmmaker for making them look like fools. They want their interviews removed from the film. They also want monetary damages.

I am not surprised. Free and open debate and discussion has never been permitted in the world of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Take my word for it.

I will tell you that Robert did not select a bunch of psychoanalytic cranks. Many of those she interviewed are pillars of the French psychoanalytic community, both from the Lacanian School and the IPA.

One might surmise that they were unaware of how foolish they looked until they saw themselves on film. Once they saw what they looked like they ran screaming into the night and decided to blame to the filmmaker.

In reality, they had agreed to be interviewed; they all signed releases. Most of them seemed to thrill to the opportunity to present their grand ideas to a larger public.

It’s one thing to sound like a fool. It’s quite another to be actively militating against effective treatment for autistic children. That is the charge that Sophie Robert levels against the psychoanalytic establishment.

In her film Robert shows that the French approach to psychotherapy is actively preventing autistic French children from receiving the most advanced and most effective current forms of treatment.

That, dare I say, is the rub. And it is not a theoretical rub.

Here is the way the New York Times presents the case:

“Le Mur,” or “The Wall,” a small documentary film about autism released online last year, might normally not have attracted much attention.

But an effort by French psychoanalysts to keep it from public eyes has helped to make it into a minor cause and shone a spotlight on the way children in France are treated for mental health problems.

The documentary, the first film by Sophie Robert, follows two autistic boys: Guillaume, who has been treated with the behavioral, or “American,” approach; and Julien, who has been kept in an asylum for six years and treated with psychoanalysis. Guillaume, though challenged, is functioning at a high level in school. Julien is essentially silent, locked out of society.

Since Sept. 8, when the film first became available on the Web, it and Ms. Robert, 44, have been the targets of criticism from both the analysts who appear in the film and from within the country’s psychoanalytic establishment. Three of the psychoanalysts whom Ms. Robert interviewed for the film have sued her, claiming she misrepresented them in the 52-minute documentary, which has not yet been screened in cinemas or on television.

Since the documentary is on Youtube I am offering it for your interest. It is in French with subtitles.

I will mention that the boy named Julien was not kept in an asylum. As I understood it, he was treated in a psychiatric clinic in a program where he spent his days in the clinic and his evenings at home.

If you watch the film you will see that Guillaume, while still autistic, is functioning reasonably well. He goes to school, gets fairly good grades, and requires only a minimum of extra consideration.

Thanks to the American “behavioral” approach, which his mother discovered on the internet, he will have a good chance to lead a productive life.

If you watch the film you should also pay close attention to Guillaume’s mother. If you keep in mind the psychoanalytic mania about blaming mothers you will be surprised to see how good a mother Guillaume has.

But, if it is so well established that the American approach provides better treatment why don’t all French children undergo it?

That is the real story here. And that is why Robert’s film has been so viciously attacked.

The film claims that the behavioral approach is simply not available to most autistic French children.

It is not available because it bears what French intellectuals consider to be a stigma: it comes from America. Therefore, it offends the cultural sensibilities of French psychoanalysts.

Since upwards of 80% of French psychiatrists learn psychoanalytic therapy, their influence is considerable.

Given the stigma attached to behavioral approaches to therapy, very, very few therapists are willing to risk their careers by learning it.

For French psychoanalysts it is not about effective treatment. It is about cultural purity. Lacanian psychoanalysis is a purely French production. Thus it must be preferred over the American behavioral approach that does not blame mothers and that actually works.

One French analyst even mentions with considerable pride that he and his cohorts have saved France from an “invasion” of alien American cultural influences.

It is a truly amazing statement, one made all the more amazing by the fact that the man who speaks it is oblivious to what he seems to be saying.

A psychoanalyst trained in a school that places special value on speech and language ought to weigh the implications of his words. He ought to know that when you say that you are actively fighting off an American invasion you are evoking an historical antecedent.

As everyone knows in 1944 allied armies did invade France. On D Day they invaded occupied France in order to liberate the nation from its Nazi occupiers.

Why Frenchmen would fear an American “invasion” is almost beyond comprehension. One day I will explain it, but not today.

Now, faced with the threat of an alien American invasion French psychoanalysts are fighting to prevent autistic children from receiving the best treatment available.

That they are doing it in the name of French honor and integrity renders us speechless.

Worse yet, Sophie Robert’s film has exposed them as fabulators, as perpetrating an intellectual con. In good French one might say that they come across in the moving looking like cons. (The word has an altogether different meaning and implication in French.)

Newt and Marianne

2012-01-21T05:03:00.000-08:00

Normally, discretion requires that we look away from the intimate affairs of other people.

But once a woman decides to dispense with discretion in order to hurt an ex-husband, we all will want to take a close look at her own conduct and character.

How credible is Marianne Gingrich? Who was really at fault for her failed marriage to the former House Speaker.

Yesterday, in National Review Online, Robert Costa shares this Associated Press story from 1999.

Newt and Marianne Gingrich were married in 1981. From 1987 to 1993, at the initiative of Marianne Gingrich, they were separated.

The AP reports: “Documents related to the divorce filed Friday in Cobb County Superior Court include a separation agreement signed by the couple and notarized in December 1987. There is no indication it was ever filed.

“Browning said Marianne Gingrich called her husband on his birthday in June 1987 to tell him she was leaving him. Gingrich, he said, came back to Georgia to find his home emptied out.

“Browning said the pair maintained separate residences for six years before reconciling in late 1993 or early 1994.”

The Browning in question here is Newt Gingrich’s divorce attorney.

Browning also reports that Marianne Gingrich called her husband on his birthday in 1987 to announce that she was leaving. When he returned home he discovered that she had cleaned out the house, leaving only a television and a guest bed.

Apparently, the Gingrich marriage had long been troubled. There are many ways for couples to separate. Marianne Gingrich chose a way that was designed to inflict psychological pain.

We do not know the whole story of New Gingrich's second marriage, but, it looks to be considerably more complicated than the story of a wife scorned.

"How to Spot a Sociopath"

2012-01-20T08:37:00.000-08:00

I hope that you never have to use the information, but here's how to spot a sociopath.

Dr. Annabelle Charbit will guide us through the steps.

A sociopath is a user. He sees people as instruments who will help him attain his own ends. He has no sense of responsibility for his actions and no feelings for the feelings of other people.

If sociopaths need to lie and cheat, they will, habitually. They do not care about how their behavior affects anyone else.

Sociopaths, Charbit says, act impulsively. They do not plan ahead. They do not foresee consequences.

If they happen to see what might happen, they do not care.

She writes: “Sociopathic individuals rarely plan ahead. They undertake actions on the basis of momentary whims, often devious ones. Every act seems isolated in its own amoral universe. Thus, they cannot keep promises or repair the damage they've caused to others. When they lie, cheat or steal, the act exists solely for them; they believe it should have no repercussions or real world effects. They often appear to have ‘forgotten’ they did something shortly after it happened. Their need for excitement encourages them to get involved in one night stands, shady deals and ill-advised engagements.

“Sociopaths have no sense of commitment to their spouses, any children they may have together or the future.”

Some of a sociopath’s qualities can be very appealing.

They can be charming and witty, very attentive, and sexually magnetic. They can be very quick to proclaim true love or to asking for a lifetime commitment.

All of these can easily be interpreted as signs of deep affection.

Coupled with these qualities, Charbit continues, is an intense egotism, a Jekyll and Hyde personality, overly intense eye contact, and a will to blame others for everything.

Sociopaths never admit that they are at fault. They tend to blame everyone else. If that fails they appeal to your pity and compassion. They will want you to understand how difficult their life has been.

Open Marriage

2012-01-20T07:08:00.000-08:00

Rightly or wrongly, Americans admired Hillary Clinton for standing by her man. She may have protested loudly that she would never do it, but when the time came, she remained loyal to her husband.

Whether she was following her personal ethic or political expediency, she demonstrated good character.

Now that we are tall talking about “open marriage,” it is fair to say that Bill and Hillary had an open marriage. We can reasonably say the same about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, though, less flamboyantly so.

In these cases the women in question maintained their loyalty to their husbands. And they remained discreet.

In our therapy-addled age discretion is out of fashion. It should not be. Speaking about the Clinton marriage, James Taranto notes: “But what saved Bill and Hillary Clinton's political careers was their discretion about their own relationship.”

We cannot say the same about Marianne Gingrich. Whatever her motives—and they are surely not good—Marianne Gingrich has betrayed marital confidences.

Since these confidences were shared by only two people, it is difficult to know who is and is not telling the truth.

Of course, we should not speak ill of the ill, but there is nothing noble or honorable about betraying a confidence.

It was not noble when Princess Diana did it; it is not honorable when Marianne Gingrich does it.

Marriage requires an extremely high level of trust. Even if you have lived a life of utter probity your spouse will know things about you that can easily embarrass you.

They need not be criminal acts. They might simply be personal peccadillos. When revealed in public they will cause embarrassment. Anyone who reveals them will be taxed with indiscretion and disloyalty.

When a society accepts as a matter of course that a spouse can and should reveal sordid details of a marriage, it damages the institution of marriage.

Won’t more people think twice about that marital commitment when they see how many people praise marital disloyalty?

As it happened, Newt Gingrich also betrayed his wife by going back on his vows. He has admitted as much.

Was his responsibility mitigated by the fact that Marianne Gingrich was voluntarily spending more and more of her time apart from her husband when it happened? Does it matter that she seemed to want to be living a separate life? I will leave that for you to decide.

When a marriage breaks up, it is never very clear who is at fault.

If Marianne Gingrich is acting out of a righteous sense that she was betrayed, her own public pronouncement makes her look embittered and vindictive.

Regardless of her motives, hers is a political action. It has political significance, and perhaps political consequences. It is designed to damage her ex-husband’s presidential campaign.

And now, inevitably, Marianne Gingrich’s credibility is also at issue.

James Taranto noted yesterday that while she claimed on a couple of occasions that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998, thus, a year before her divorce from Newt Gingrich, an AP story from July, 2000 offers a different picture:

The AP reported: “Marianne Gingrich disclosed Tuesday that she has suffered from neurological problems that could be a precursor to multiple sclerosis.

The ex-wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sought treatment in September 1998 at the Emory Clinic for tingling in her right hand, said a statement released by Emory with her permission. Tests showed an inflammation in her brain.

"Such an episode could represent a single event, perhaps related to a viral infection, or be a forerunner of multiple sclerosis," said her neurologist, Dr. Barney Stern.

She was treated with a two-week supply of steroids but did not begin long-term drug therapy, which is sometimes recommended in such cases.

"We hope that as more and more time elapses, the possibility that she will develop definite multiple sclerosis becomes less and less," Stern said.

One understands why her memory might be faulty. She remembered the first time that MS was mentioned as a possible diagnosis; therefore she dates the onset of her illness from that moment.

Since her physician, an objective third party tells a different story he casts doubt on her credibility.

Emotional intemperance can easily undermine objectivity.

Autophagy

2012-01-20T06:02:00.000-08:00

Today, scientists are hard at work trying to find the latest miracle drug. Our culture has put its faith in science, to the point where we do not worry about getting sick. We are persuaded that whatever we come down with, medical science will ride to the rescue.

Yet, The Economist explains this week, there is something out there already that comes very close to being a panacea. It is… exercise.

The Economist says: “One sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.”

Of course, this might tell us why more people don’t exercise. Having heard about the benefits of exercise, they might have concluded that they are too grandiose to be credible.

Besides, if exercise costs so little, how can it be so good for you?

Strictly speaking, exercise does not cure as much as it prevents you from falling ill. But that has certain disadvantages. The healthier you are the lesser your role in the great medical drama that is unfolding around us every day.

People like to see their lives become part of a great story, and exercise will make that less likely. Some people, I would imagine, think that their life only has meaning if it becomes part of a story… like the story of an intrepid physician fighting your horrific disease.

Exercise poses another problem. It is not enough to believe in it; you have to do it. .

Most medical treatments require little more than your passive acceptance.

None of this is news. Nowadays, all physicians worthy of their degrees counsel their patients to add an exercise regimen to their daily routines.

At a time when the nation is drowning in health care expenditures good citizens should be working to solve the problem, by working out.

Until recently, however, we have not really known why exercise confers so many benefits on us.

Recent research has found the answer in the concept of autophagy.

The concept comes to us from cell biology, so I will not even try to summarize it.

The Economist explains autophagy: “This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for ‘self-eating’, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.”

It continues: “Autophagy is an ancient mechanism, shared by all eukaryotic organisms (those which, unlike bacteria, keep their DNA in a membrane-bound nucleus within their cells). It probably arose as an adaptation to scarcity of nutrients. Critters that can recycle parts of themselves for fuel are better able to cope with lean times than those that cannot. But over the past couple of decades, autophagy has also been shown to be involved in things as diverse as fighting bacterial infections and slowing the onset of neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.”

Hopefully, this research will chip away at the indolence and sloth that is preventing people from exercising.

The Two Americas

2012-01-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

It looks like John Edwards was right about something. It seems that there are two Americas.

They may not have been the two that Edwards saw, but still, the nation is clearly divided against itself.

Edwards saw America divided between the overprivileged and the underprivileged. Of late, a more pertinent distinction has emerged. The America of the coasts is increasingly separated from the America of the interior.

One America prefers clean jobs and clean energy. The other is willing to do the dirty jobs, the better to feed and power the nation.

In one America you shut down farming in California’s Central Valley to save a smelt. In the other America you work the land to feed the world and to create prosperity.

The two Americas just clashed over the Obama administration’s decision to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

Joel Kotkin explains the decision in terms of the two Americas: “America has two basic economies, and the division increasingly defines its politics. One, concentrated on the coasts and in college towns, focuses on the business of images, digits and transactions.

"The other, located largely in the southeast, Texas and the Heartland, makes its living in more traditional industries, from agriculture and manufacturing to fossil fuel development.”

In the past, Kotkin explains, the two Americas coexisted in peace and harmony. With its Keystone decision the Obama administration has introduced yet another division into our nation.

Kotkin writes: “Traditionally these two economies coexisted without interfering with the progress of the other. Wealthier gentry-dominated regions generally eschewed getting their hands dirty so that they could maintain the amenities that draw the so-called creative class and affluent trustifarians. The more traditionally based regions focused, largely uninhibited, on their core businesses, and often used the income to diversify their economies into higher-value added fields.

“The Obama administration has altered this tolerant regime, generating intensifying conflict between the NIMBY America and its more blue-collar counterpart. The administration’s move to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico represents a classic expression of this conflict. To appease largely urban environmentalists, the Obama team has squandered the potential for thousands of blue-collar jobs in the Heartland and the Gulf of Mexico.”

Those who favor a clean America insist that they create jobs too. Kotkin debunks their claims: “Of course, the apologists for the NIMBY regions can claim that they, too, create economic value. And to be sure, Silicon Valley — now in a midst of one of its periodic boom periods — Wall Street and Hollywood constitute some of the country’s prime economic assets. Similarly, highly regulated cities such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston and Chicago offer a quality of life, at least for the well-heeled, that draws talent and capital from the rest of the world.

“But the NIMBY model suffers severe limitations. For one thing, these high cost areas generally lag in creating middle-skilled jobs; New York and San Francisco, for example, have suffered the largest percentage declines in manufacturing employment of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas. Indeed with the exception of Seattle, the NIMBY regions have all underperformed the national average in job creation for well over a decade.

“These areas are becoming increasingly toxic to the middle class, especially families who are now fleeing to places like Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina and even Oklahoma. NIMBY land use regulations — designed to limit single-family houses — usually end up creating housing costs that range up to six times annual income; in more basic regions, the ratio is around three or lower.”

This demonstrates, yet again, why clean America, the America of the coasts, creates more income inequality than does dirty America, the America of the heartland.

Kotkin writes: “Ironically, America’s most ardently ‘progressive’ areas turn out to be the most socially regressive, with the largest gaps between rich and poor. Even the current tech bubble has not been of much help to heavily Latino working-class areas like San Jose, where unemployment ranges around 10%, nor across the Bay in devastated Oakland, where the jobless rate surpasses 15%.”

Is Progress Inevitable?

2012-01-19T08:51:00.000-08:00

Today Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of a deceptively simple idea. One hesitates even to mention something so easy, but Hanson is correct to bring it to our attention.

The idea: things do not always to get better. There is no universal law that naturally propels human civilization forward.

Civilization can go forward, but it can also regress. As Hanson asks, would you rather live in Detroit in 1941 or Detroit in 2011?

Some years ago Francis Fukuyama had a vision and saw that Hegel was right: history moves inexorably toward liberal democracy.

The vision told him that the moment had arrived. Fukuyama saw a universal consensus being reached. Everyone around the world now knows that liberal democracy is the only right way for people to govern themselves.

All attempts to govern despotically have failed, so the people of the world now recognize the greatness of liberal democracy. Therefore, the world is now well on its way toward a glorious democratic future.

Fukuyama made these claims before Islamic governance swept across North Africa. If anything, democratic elections in that region of the world are not bringing anything like the kind of liberal democracy that Fukuyama sees ascendant.

They are bringing a special kind of theocratic oppression.

Also, today’s most dynamic economy is in China, not in countries that are practicing liberal democracy.

Hegelian philosophers who look at contemporary China see a contradiction. They see a free market economic system co-existing with Communist Party rule.

Through the lens of their philosophy, this contradiction is inherently unstable. It will inevitably lead to the overthrow of the ruling class.

Of course, historians have been saying this for decades now. They remain confident in their prediction because they believe that history must follow a script and that the script leads to a happy ending.

Liberal democracy is a grand idea: it involves peoples who govern themselves by electing representatives in democratic elections.

Liberal democrats are something else. Nowadays they call themselves progressives, even though their policies consistently undermine progress.

If you think that progress is inevitable or if you believe that liberal policies will ensure the advance of civilization, you need but look at today’s California, a laboratory where liberal Democrats have had their way for decades now.

I continue to be amazed by the reality of everyday life in today’s California. Hanson describes it well:

“In my state, Californians for 40 years have hiked taxes; grown their government; vastly expanded entitlements; put farmland, timberland, and oil and gas lands off limits; and opened their borders to millions of illegal aliens. They apparently assumed that they had inherited so much wealth from prior generations and that their state was so naturally rich, that a continually better life was their natural birthright.

“It wasn’t. Now, as in Greece, the veneer of civilization is proving pretty thin in California. Hospitals no longer have the money to offer sophisticated long-term medical care to the indigent. Cities no longer have the funds to self-insure themselves from the accustomed barrage of monthly lawsuits. When thieves rip copper wire out of street lights, the streets stay dark. Most state residents would rather go to the dentist these days than queue up and take a number at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Hospital emergency rooms neither have room nor act as if there’s much of an emergency.

“Traffic flows no better on most of the state’s freeways than it did 40 years ago — and often much worse, given the crumbling infrastructure and increased traffic. Once-excellent K–12 public schools now score near the bottom in nationwide tests. The California state-university system keeps adding administrators to the point where they have almost matched the number of faculty, though half of the students who enter CSU need remedial reading and math. Despite millions of dollars in tutoring, half the students still don’t graduate. The taxpayer is blamed in constant harangues for not ponying up more money, rather than administrators being faulted for a lack of reform.

“In 1960, there were far fewer government officials, far fewer prisons, far fewer laws, and far fewer lawyers — and yet the state was a far safer place than it is a half-century later. Technological progress — whether iPhones or Xboxes — can often accompany moral regress.”

Anyone who believes that progress is inevitable will tell you that regression is simply a step on the way to progress. In his eyes, world history takes two steps forward and one step back.

Anyone who believes this is never wrong. He will also be able to claim that he can do what he pleases and can count on history to bail out failed liberal policies.

Thus, it’s worth point out that things can get worse and that they can get a lot worse. They can even stay bad for extended periods of time.

Without the right kind of political leadership, the right kind of policies, and the right moral character, regression can take up near-permanent residence.

Do Opposites Attract?

2012-01-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has the most elementary knowledge of human social groupings knows that people tend to get along better with people who are just like them.

When friends have a lot in common they are likely to find their interactions easier and more harmonious.

When people are offered the choice between people who are just like them or people who are decidedly unlike them most will choose the former. It isn’t mysterious. It’s human nature.

Familiarity breeds contentment and ease of communication. Strangeness often feels threatening. When you are involved in a social interaction with someone who is very different from you, you will have more difficulty reading social cues. The more you differ the more you will fear being inadvertently offensive or unwittingly offended.

When people choose to socialize with others who are like them they are not discriminating. They are simply following human social instincts.

I applaud Jonah Lehrer for bringing the point to our attention and for showing, courageously, that it makes a hash out of the arguments for diversity.

Of course, our culture does not want us to think this way.

When you watch a television sitcom or drama you will notice that the characters often have little to nothing in common. Naturally, they all get along just fine. They work together in law offices, emergency rooms, crime labs, glee clubs, or management consulting firms.

The producers who put these groupings together believe that they are doing God’s diversity work. They imagine that diversity is a good thing for everyone and that, given a free and open choice most people would choose diversity over homogeneity.

If people do not make that choice it must mean that they have watched too many sitcoms showing homogeneous communities.

Television producers seem to believe that their purpose in life is to promote diversity by showing people from different cultural, social, ethic, and religious backgrounds working together in harmony.

They imagine that life imitates art, or better, that life imitates sitcoms and teledramas.

As Lehrer reports, the research tells a different story. In a large university more diversity produces fewer interactions between members of different groups.

If there are enough members of subgroup A to form a community apart, then that is what its members will do.

In a small college, however, it is less likely that there will be enough members of subgroup A to form a community apart, so there will be more interactions between different members of different groups.

Strangely enough, Lehrer then decides to pick a fight with human nature: “Despite such findings, our ancient social instincts lead us in the wrong direction, so that we end up trapped within a bubble of homogeneity.”

Why is it wrong to associate with the people around whom you feel more comfortable? You might well live in a relatively homogeneous community and still conduct business with different people around the world.

It may well be that the security provided by your homogeneous community is necessary to anchor your identity and make you more open to interactions with a diverse population of business colleagues and associates.

Then, for reasons that escape me, Lehrer or his editors chose to apply the issue of homogeneity vs. diversity to the question of whether opposites attract.

In doing so he is comparing apples and oranges. If, at a party, bankers tend to gravitate toward other bankers while marketing executives tend to converse with other marketers, it is absurd to say that bankers are “attracted” to bankers but not to marketing executives.

First, bankers and marketers are not opposites. More often than not they complement each other; they do not oppose each other. They might well work together on projects, with each of them assuming a different area of expertise and responsibility.

In common parlance, when we say that opposites attract we are referring to erotic interest. It is somewhat ironic to say so, but the opposites in question are men and women.

The phrase means that members of different sexes are very often attracted by qualities that they themselves do not have.

But then, if, as is normally the case bankers tend more often to be male and marketers tend more often to be female, then it is more reasonable to say that if you invite a group of young single men and single women to a party, the bankers will most likely find the marketers attractive, and vice versa.

To find a situation where the boys congregate with the boys and the girls with the girls at a mixer you have to go back to elementary school.

Sarah Palin's Advice to South Carolina Republicans

2012-01-18T06:48:00.000-08:00

After Monday night’s presidential debate, a wave of queasiness washed over establishment Republicans.

Mitt Romney came to Myrtle Beach expecting to be anointed. He had been told, by everyone who mattered, that the nomination was his to claim.

Many Republicans had already decided that the nominating process was over. Confident that they had chosen a winning candidate they were fast making their peace with someone they considered less than perfect.

Their reason may yet prove to be sound: Romney might well have locked it up.

And then there was Myrtle Beach.

For perhaps the first time on the debate stage Romney was the target. He was under attack, and he reacted defensively.

It is not very surprising. As I have been trying to point out, when you are being assaulted, physically or verbally, your first impulse is to be defensive. We saw Rick Perry thrown off his game by attacks during earlier debates. And we saw Newt Gingrich make a number of missteps after suffering a barrage of criticism and attack ads.

One imagines that Romney did not expect to come under attack. He reacted tentatively, almost becoming tongue-tied. And he boxed himself into an untenable position about releasing his tax returns.

He told Republican voters that they would not be able to see his tax returns until after they had chosen him their nominee.

Why wasn’t he better prepared? I assume that he was suffering from overconfidence. He was prepared for a coronation; he ran into a mugging.

He will surely improve his performance in the next debate.

It is also true that Newt Gingrich performed exceptionally well. He was, the saying goes, on his game.

After the debate we began hearing hints of buyer’s remorse from Romney supporters, but we have also been hearing seller’s remorse by those who had previously dismissed Gingrich.

Now, a wild card just entered the fray. Last night Sarah Palin said that if she were a South Carolina primary voter, she would vote for Newt.

If conservative Republicans are going to slow down Romney’s momentum, they will need to unify behind a single candidate. Palin has now told them that it should be Newt. We will soon know how much influence she still has.

Note well that Palin offered a carefully formulated position, one that was decidedly nuanced and highly diplomatic.

Those who have impugned the intelligence of Sarah Palin should spend some serious time analyzing her brilliantly crafted statement last night.

She did not throw her support behind Gingrich; she did not even declare him to be the best candidate. She did not say that Romney was a flawed candidate or that she could not support him.

She stated her belief that it was too soon to end the nomination process. She sees the debates making the candidates better. The crucible of debates, she says, has improved the performance of the candidates. They are becoming better at presenting their arguments and clearer in articulating policy.

The Romney campaign wants to lock down the nomination by the end of January. Now, Sarah Palin is telling her fellow Republicans that they are being too precipitous, that they should step back, take a deep breath, and think things through before they decide to walk down the aisle with Mitt Romney.

A Chicago Way of Thinking

2012-01-18T05:54:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday a 17-year-old boy was beaten and robbed by a group of five boys in Chicago.

After taping the assault, the attackers posted the tape on YouTube.

NBC News Chicago looked at the video and reported the incident as follows:

“The video shows five males kicking and punching the victim while taunting him with racial slurs.

“Police said Tuesday in a statement the incident does not appear racially motivated.”

The news report provides no information about the race of the attackers or the victim. Make of that what you will.

It does however offer a perfect absurdity. Even though the attackers were taunting the victim with “racial slurs,” the police department declared that the incident did not appear to be “racially motivated.”

That’s life in Chicagoland.

Not only have the police blinded themselves to reality, but they are assuming, perhaps with reason, that no one is going to call them out on their failure to look reality in the eye.

It should not come as a suprise. In a politically correct world if you don’t call it a racial incident then it isn’t a racial incident. Even if it is.

The corollary is also true. If you call it a racial incident then it is a racial incident. Even if it isn’t.

To Spend Or To Save

2012-01-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

Robert Shiller informs us that behavioral economists are beginning to study the psychology of spending and saving.

What makes people spend money and what makes them save it? What cultural and historical factors cause a group of people to value spending or to value saving?

Shiller recommends the preliminary study offered by Princeton historian Prof. Sheldon Garon, Its title is: Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the Rest of the World Saves.

Shiller summarizes Garon’s thesis: “Professor Garon says that our willingness to spend is driven most prominently by our reaction to major events in our collective memory, including wars and depressions, and that it also depends on national character, which differs across countries and through time. Spending, of course, is shaped by deliberate government policies. Notably, during wartime, governments all over the world often start huge public-information campaigns to promote saving.

“The United States, however, is something of an exception. More than any other country, Professor Garon argues, it elevates consumer spending to a virtue, sometimes minimizing saving. There is even an idea here that it is patriotic to spend, rather than to save.”

Shiller adds: “Professor Garon details an attitude that Americans, more than people in any other country, have usually had about spending: we tend to think it’s O.K. for people to go into debt to buy gadgets or take vacations. According to this view, such activity will stimulate everyone’s imaginations, and ensure a vibrant economy with plenty of fresh enterprises and innovations. Americans even tend to think that debt burdens may not be so bad — that people in debt work harder to pay it off, again keeping the economic engine humming. We are relatively forgiving of personal bankruptcies, too: they provide a fresh start to allow spending all over again.

“In much of the rest of the world, Professor Garon documents, this approach has traditionally seemed morally repugnant — though until the current crisis, many people worldwide were slowly coming around to the American view.”

It is fair to say that this attitude toward spending is relatively new in American culture.

If we think back to the origin of the republic we recall Benjamin Franklin’s well-known adage: “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

You may not recall another statement, equally germane to our discussion: “The way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; i.e. waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. He that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary expenses excepted), will certainly become rich.”

If we seek clarity we should distinguish between the man who spends everything that he earns and the other man who spends more than he has earned.

Neither of them is thrifty. The first one, however, is more virtuous than the second. The second will accumulate more debt and, since he will be less industrious, will be less likely to pay it off.

Cultures may value thrift or spending. Shiller and Garon want to know that our attitude toward government spending significantly influences our attitude toward personal consumer spending.

If the government acts as though it has a divine right to spend more than it receives in tax revenues, not merely as a stopgap measure in time of crisis, but as a way of life, then citizens will also come to believe that it is better to consume today and let the next generation worry about paying off the debt.

Some economists, especially followers of Keynes, believe that massive government spending will cure an economic contraction. Others warn that a government might arrive at the point where it is no longer able to borrow the money needed to fund its obligations.

Keynsians like Paul Krugman are horrified by the prospect of austerity. Of course, a government may choose austerity as a policy, but, if it runs out of money and credit, the markets will impose austerity, whether the people like it or not.

Why do so many people believe in the virtue of government spending? The source seems to lie in the commonly held belief that the New Deal spent us out of the Great Depression.

For his part Shiller, a Democrat, wants to disabuse us of the notion that America spent its way out of the Great Depression.

He explains: “The truth is that stimulus packages never entirely lifted the economy out of the Great Depression. In the United States, unemployment didn’t drop below 12 percent until World War II changed the picture.”

By now the question has provoked some very serious debate among economists and historians.

Yet, for decades journalists and historians have spun out a narrative in which capitalism was nearly destroyed by the Hoover administration, only to be saved by liberal policies implemented by FDR.

Americans were sold the narrative that the New Deal worked and that Roosevelt was the greatest of presidents. Once that happened, New Deal-like policies—as in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—became the gold standard for American politicians.

When you ask its supporters why the Obama administration chose to fight the Great Recession with a gigantic stimulus bill in early 2009 they will tell you that Obama was merely following the example set by FDR. If it worked for FDR why wouldn’t it work for Obama.

In this historical narrative spending was a virtue. Herbert Hoover’s efforts to balance the budget were an error.

During a time of war, however, people were told to be thrifty, not to waste resources that could be used for the troops, and, to save their money… meaning, loan it to the government by buying government bonds.

After World War II it took time for America to rebuild what it had lost during the Great Depression. Once it did, and once it achieved prosperity, saving seemed to be less important.

When the country was no longer on a wartime footing it elected a younger, more charismatic president and began to address lingering social problems by using what had “worked” during the New Deal.

The Great Society was a massive government spending program. Many citizens joined the party by placing more and more value on consumption.

Thanks to the Vietnam era counterculture young people participated, not just by spending their parents’ money, but by spending their creative and rebellious energies in protest marches and free love.

If government spending is a good thing, then consumers could do their patriotic duty by buying as much as they could, regardless of whether or not they could afford it.

Spending could save the world. Thrift would destroy it.

If we want to broaden our perspective, we should point out that people are more likely to spend money they do not have when they expect inflation. If the Federal Reserve is implementing an easy money policy then most people will correctly see that it is trying to inflate the currency.

If people assume that prices will decline, as they have in the recent economic crisis, they will be less likely to spend and more likely to save.

When an individual or a nation has accumulated a great deal of debt, inflation becomes highly desirable and deflation becomes a mortal threat.

If central banks are trying to save the world from the debt crisis by printing money they are saying that they dread deflation.

Since inflation makes prices and wages rise while your debt service remains the same it will make it easier pay down debt.

If prices and wages decline while your debt service remains constant, your hitherto manageable debt will become the monster that ate your paycheck.

Stable prices or deflationary expectations will promote the habit of thrift. Inflation will promote the habit of spending. If you expect that it will be more expensive tomorrow you will be more likely to but it today, even, or more especially, when you have to borrow to do so.

Not only does inflation make the shoes cheaper today, but the money you borrow to do it today will be devalued by the same inflation.

To fill out this outline of the way a culture values or devalues thrift, I want to show how the therapy culture has aggravated the problem.

Keep in mind that thrift involves discipline and self-control. It does not necessarily mean putting off until tomorrow what you want today. It concerns accumulating wealth more than deferring gratification.

In the world of therapy, especially as Freud set its foundations, thrift is bad. It is associated with repression, with the unhealthy effort to tamp down impulses.

Curiously, in Victorian England spending had a slightly different slang connotation.

When Victorian writers of erotic literature used the verb “to spend” they meant "having an orgasm. In their vocabulary, "spend" was the term that corresponded to our contemporary colloquialism: “to come.”

Strangely enough, saying that someone was spent by sex makes more sense than to say that he came.

If Freudian values make sex a good thing and orgasms a form of hygiene, then it is good to spend and bad to save. We will mention in passing, but only in passing, that Wilhelm Reich took this idea to an absurd extreme.

A culture that values hookups is opting for profligate spending. If you have to get drunk in order to hook up then obviously you are spending something that you do not have.

At some point you will have to pay it back.

If the culture makes sexual spending a virtue, and if it makes government spending a virtue, then clearly it will be encouraging consumers to spend.

Empty Praise

2012-01-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

More and more educators are falling out of love with self-esteem. Years of experience have taught them that empty praise does not enhance performance. It detracts from it.

None will admit that they are following in the footsteps of the Tiger Mom, but they are.

The Washington Post reports: “For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates — but few, if any, academic gains.

“Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments.”

Happily, this new trend also aims at building character by inculcating better values: “A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities. As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are ‘persistence,’ ‘risk-taking’ and ‘resilience’ — each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.”

It’s a good day when therapy culture values are being overthrown in America’s schools.

The cultural transformation has been fueled by the free market. Increasingly, parents and teachers are seeing that American children are falling behind children from other countries.

Self-esteemism has been reality-tested. Now, more and more people are seeing that it has failed.

The Post writes: “Underlying the praise backlash is a hard seed of anxiety — a sense that American students are not working hard enough to compete with students from overseas for future jobs.”

Empty praise is a lie. Young children will accept it uncritically but adolescents know that it is patronizing. They know when they are being lied to.

Moreover, if you are being told that you are great when you aren’t, why bother to strive to do better. Worse yet, if you know that you are being lied to you will be less likely to take a risk that might show the world the truth.

We must, however, temper our optimism. Today, one of the major recipients of empty praise, a veritable monster of high self-esteem, is residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

He will be there for at least another year, and, perhaps even for four more years. If that does not cause you to temper your optimism, nothing will.

This morning Newsweek reminded us how far Barack Obama has gotten on empty praise. Apparently desperate to create buzz, the newsweekly published a cover story in which Andrew Sullivan showering Barack Obama with empty praise.

Sullivan does not think the praise is empty, but, in truth, his article is more campaign literature than serious essay. It has no place on the cover of a so-called news magazine.

In many ways Barack Obama is the product of a culture that tried to run on empty praise. He was elected president on the grounds that he was too smart to have ever accomplished anything.

Now, after three years of watching Obama flounder in his job and do everything in his power to divide the American people, most of his supporters have come to their senses and offered their mea culpas.

You do not need exceptional intelligence to see that the Obama administration has failed. You do need a modicum of integrity.

Having long since overdosed on therapy, Sullivan has none left. So, he falls back on his love for Obama.

Only someone who has been blinded by love could claim that Obama’s failures are successes, that his inadequacies are tactical, and that he is smarter than everyone else.

In order to support his claim that Obama is smart, Sullivan is obliged to claim that all of Obama’s critics are “dumb.”

Inadvertently, Sullivan is revealing one of the more appalling consequences of the self-esteem, i.e. empty praise, movement.

When you praise mediocrity, what happens when you encounter true intelligence? Sullivan shows us that you will need to dismiss it, disparage it, or demean it.

The victims of the self-esteem movement have been those children who really are exceptional.

Take a classroom. If everyone is called brilliant or if everyone’s answers are declared to be insightful, regardless of whether they are right or wrong, the child who is truly brilliant will decide that working hard is not worth the trouble.

If his effort or his talent is not recognized, why bother.

When teachers fail to differentiate between brilliance and mediocrity they are demoralizing those children who have real brilliance.

In addition, a teacher who wants to raise the self-esteem of mediocre children might well be led to demean the achievements of the bright children.

If a teacher knows that Johnny will always have the right answer, she might decide not to call on Johnny. She might keep calling on Jimmy even though Jimmy rarely has the right answer. She might even make it her mission to praise Jimmy regardless of whether his answer is right or wrong.

Clearly, the tactic will tell Johnny that he is being punished for being smarter. He will figure out that having the right answer is wrong because it makes Jimmy feel bad for being a dolt.

The self-esteem movement punishes people harshly for making others feel bad.

The teacher might believe that she is leveling the playing field and producing greater classroom equality. She will, in fact, be victimizing the children who have true talent, teaching them that the system is rigged against them. .

If you want to make Obama look smart, you can skew the evidence, as Sullivan does. But you also need to label all of his critics as dumb, because if you compared his intelligence to theirs, his would not withstand judgment.

Mitt Romney's Character Flaw

2012-01-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

No one has questioned Mitt Romney’s moral character. Everyone is persuaded that Romney has the perfect marriage and the perfect family.

No one has any reason to doubt the appearance of a happy, loving marriage and a solid family life.

Yet, for someone whose moral credentials are beyond impeccable, Romney still provokes misgivings among Republicans.

Some people may find it difficult to grasp but there’s a great deal more to moral character than sexual behavior.

Lust is but one of the deadly sins. It isn’t even the deadliest. Pride stands out as the deadliest of the deadly sins and one would be hard put to ignore the fact that one holier-than-thou candidate, namely Rick Santorum, is running his campaign on vanity.

Of late Newt Gingrich has been trying to put Mitt Romney’s moral character into question by depicting him as a heartless and ruthless corporate raider, a man whose avarice—another of the deadly sins—caused him to destroy companies and lives in order to enrich himself and his partners.

As of now the attack has proven rather flaccid indeed. It has elicited many counterarguments to the effect that private equity investing is intrinsic to the capitalist system. It has made Gingrich appear to be the enemy of capitalism, not a good position for a Republican to occupy.

Most of those who have misgivings about Mitt Romney have had great difficulty articulating them. The Gingrich attack on Bain Capital has not helped them to do so.

Admittedly, the Gingrich campaign needed a visually compelling and dramatically engaging picture of Romney’s avarice. Unfortunately, its supporters have undermined their own cause with exaggerations and misrepresentations.

By now most Romney supporters have gotten beyond the flip-flopper charge. It is not a crime to change your mind. It is not a character flaw to become more conservative as you grow older. Many conservative voters have had some doubts, but now, facing the seemingly inevitable choice between Romney and Obama, they are more than happy to put their misgivings in a lock box.

And yet, there’s flip-flopping and there’s flip-flopping. If a candidate has changed his mind, that’s one thing. If he is dissimulating his position in order to trick you into supporting him, only to reveal after he is nominated or elected that he intends to govern differently, that is quite something else.

The former represents a change of heart or mind. The latter involves an old game called bait-and-switch.

Among those who are most discomfited by a Romney candidacy I suspect that the real reason is that they feel somehow that they are being played. Thus, that they are going to be seduced by a mirage only to be abandoned later on.

Investigative journalist William Cohan raised the issue yesterday in the Washington Post.

Before he was a journalist Cohan was an investment banker. In that role he directed auctions where distressed companies were sold to private equity investors. Among the private equity firms he dealt with was Bain Capital.

Cohan did not deal directly with Mitt Romney, but he had dealings with senior Bain officials at a time when Romney was running the company.

It is worth noting that private equity investors do not swoop into a community to buy up a company and throw everyone out to work. They buy the companies at auctions conducted by investment bankers.

Cohan does not question the value of private equity investments. He does not question the creative destruction that inheres in capitalism.

He brings a much harsher charge against Mitt Romney. From his dealings with Bain executives Cohan concluded that Mitt Romney could not be trusted, that Mitt Romney was not a man of his word. Being untrustworthy is not one of the seven deadly sins.

Apparently, the conduct of Bain executives during Romney's tenure was so reprehensible that eventually the investment bankers refused to allow them to bid on distressed company assets.

Experience told Cohan and his colleagues that Mitt Romney was not the kind of man you wanted to do business with.

If he is right, then Romney’s flip-flops are really a sign of a fundamental character flaw. If that is true, it would give substance to the misgivings so many people have about Mitt Romney.

You know from personal experience that you are not likely to feel warmth and affection toward someone you cannot trust. Perhaps we are indulging a bit of moral reverse engineering, but Cohan’s charge, if true, would explain the emotional reaction to Romney.

Since he is reporting about his own personal experience, his account has added credibility. If it is being distorted then surely a large group of investment bankers will soon come forth to defend the honor and good name of Mitt Romney.

Understanding the bait-and-switch is difficult. Cohan tries to explain it in detail, so I will quote extensively from his description. As you read it keep in mind that the two stage process of auctioning off companies might correspond to the two stage process whereby a party selects a candidate for office and the candidate presents himself for the general election. Or else it might correspond to the two stage process of running for office and governing.

Cohan begins by explaining the way private equity works. He emphasizes that Bain was unique among private equity firms in its dishonorable behavior: “Seemingly alone among private-equity firms, Romney’s Bain Capital was a master at bait-and-switching Wall Street bankers to get its hands on the companies that provided the raw material for its financial alchemy. Other private-equity firms I worked with extensively over the years — Forstmann Little, KKR, TPG and the Carlyle Group, among them — never dared attempt the audacious strategy that Bain partners employed with great alacrity and little shame. Call it the real Bain way.”

The first round of an auction eliminates the pretenders and settles on the private equity firms that are offering the highest bids. In that round Bain tended to offer the highest price.

Once it had eliminated the competition, Bain began lowering its offer in the next round.

Cohan writes: “I never negotiated directly with Romney; he was too high-level for any interaction with me. Rather, I dealt often with other Bain senior partners, who were very much in his mold. In my experience, Bain Capital did all that it could to game the system by consistently offering the highest prices during the early rounds of bidding — only to try to low-ball the price after it had weeded out competitors.”

He continues: “By bidding high early, Bain would win a coveted spot in the later rounds of the auction, when greater information about the company for sale is shared and the number of competitors is reduced. (A banker and his client generally allow only the potential buyers with the highest bids into the later rounds; after all, you can’t have an endless procession of Savile Row-suited businessmen traipsing through a manufacturing plant if you want to keep a possible sale under wraps.)”

Cohan adds: “In my experience — which I heard echoed often by my colleagues around Wall Street — Bain would seek to be the highest bidder at the end of the formal process in order to be the firm selected to negotiate alone with the seller, putting itself in the exclusive, competition-free zone. Then, when all other competitors had been essentially vanquished and the purchase contract was under negotiation, Bain would suddenly begin finding all sorts of warts, bruises and faults with the company being sold. Soon enough, that near-final Bain bid — the one that got the firm into its exclusive negotiating position — would begin to fall, often significantly.”

Consider a candidate who says everything his party wants to hear during the nominating process, only to change his mind once he has become the nominee.

Or else, consider a president who promises one thing while he is running for office but who then, once he takes office, claims that he has discovered new information that prevents him from keeping his word to those who elected him.

Recall the time when George H. W. Bush reneged on his No-new-taxes pledge.

In the world of private equity, the final stage of the auction looks like this: “At such a late date, of course, the seller is more than a little pregnant with the buyer. Attempting to pivot and find a new buyer — which knew it had not been selected in the first place, but was now being called back — would be devastating to the carefully constructed process designed to generate the highest price. Once Bain’s real thoughts about the price were revealed, the seller either had to suck it up and accept the lower price, or negotiate with a new buyer, but with far less leverage.”

Cohan correctly states that it is a character issue: “Bain’s behavior also reveals something about the values it brings to bear in a process that requires honor and character to work properly. If a firm’s word is not worth the paper it is printed on, then its reputation for bad behavior will impair its ability to function in an honorable and productive way.”

In conclusion, Cohan applies his insight into Romney’s character to the current election: “This win-at-any-cost approach makes me wonder how a President Romney would negotiate with Congress, or with China, or with anyone else — and what a promise, pledge or endorsement from him would actually mean.

“Would a President Romney, along with a Republican Congress, cut taxes for the wealthy even more than he has pledged to do? Would he not try to balance the federal budget, even though he has said he would? Would he protect defense spending, as he has indicated he would?

“I have no idea how Romney might behave in office. I do believe, however, that when he was running Bain Capital, his word was not his bond.”

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for a political ad to look at the issue of a candidate’s trustworthiness, but Cohan has provided us with a look at Mitt Romney's business practices that makes everyone’s qualms about him seem perfectly rational.

Mitt's Weakness

2012-01-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

For the first time in the campaign Mitt Romney is on the defensive. Coming under attack from Gingrich and Perry—though, strangely, never from Ron Paul— Romney is being provided with a golden opportunity to show off his political skills.

As of now the attacks have barely drawn blood. They have been effectively parried by Romney’s legions of media admirers, most of whom have made it their raison d'etre to disparage and diminish the Gingrich campaign. It is fair to mention that Gingrich has been lobbing a lot more spit balls than live ammunition.

Romney's supporters have not had to expend very much effort to deflect them.

As of now, if you believe InTrade, Romney’s nomination is a lock. Republicans of all stripes are reconciling themselves to candidate Romney.

And yet, some few voices are still raising doubts about the viability of candidate Romney. They have thrown serious doubt on the question of Romney’s electability.

I have been reporting on some of them, and am happy today to share the comments offered by Quin Hillyer.

Hillyer describes himself as: “a political activist/political professional/presidential campaign state executive director/presidential caucus organizer/leadership Hill staffer … a PR executive, [and]a journalist/columnist for 15 years.”

That means that he speaks with some authority.

Yesterday Hillyer addressed the current spate of attacks on Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

Clearly, they have been riddled with untruths and distortions. Yet, the political issue is not the virtue of private equity investments, but whether Romney’s old job, in particular, is sufficient qualification for the presidency.

Politically, we should ask how the idea of private equity resonates in the mind of the average voter. Fair or unfair, the average voter does not have good feelings about anything that looks like financial manipulation.

Hillyer issues the following warning to Republicans.

In his words: “Then there's the attacks on his tenure at Bain Capital. The attacks are over-the-top and unfair. But coming from the left in a general election campaign, they will work. That's how a weakened Ted Kennedy in a Republican year blew open a tight race against Romney and won by a landslide -- by attacking Bain (and by some subtle but effective exploitation of anti-Mormon bigotry, which unfortunately and unfairly and sickeningly will probably cost Romney a point and a half from otherwise GOP voters this year as well). What's particularly devastating here is when a candidate's big vulnerability is in the very area he tried to, and expected to, make his biggest political strength. Romney's main selling point has been that he is a good businessman who proved himself in the private sector; if that gets taken away, he's toast, because his record as governor was nothing to write home about, with his only significant 'achievement' being the execrable one of Romneycare. This is very much akin to what happened to John Kerry, who tried to make his major selling point his supposed military ‘heroism,’ when the highly on-target Swift Boat attacks made that same military service into a slight net liability. You can't win when your biggest selling point is actually a vulnerability.”

And he adds a point that deserves special emphasis. Romney, like many recent Republican candidates looks like he’s being anointed because he’s heir to the throne.

Romney was born rich and he made himself a lot richer.

Hillyer explains the risk: “Romney, indeed, is the perfect foil for the Obama campaign, first because he is the very epitome of a Republican born rich who got richer by moving money around -- a millionaire plutocrat who just can't relate to ‘ordinary’ Americans, and second because he is yet another Republican political/dynastic legatee. Think about it: We've gone from one Bush trying to outdo his Senate father by becoming president, to another Bush trying to outdo his president father by winning two terms as president, to a McCain trying to outdo his admiral father and admiral grandfather by becoming president... and now to a Romney trying to outdo his Michigan governor father and failed presidential front-runner by this time succeeding as a presidential front-runner. In the hands of the $800 million Obama campaign, this can easily be portrayed as a rather creepy and anti-American reliance on dynasticism.”

A last point, one that I have already suggested, concerns the political price of Romneycare.

Hillyer writes: “Finally, but perhaps most importantly, Romney just can't campaign against Obama's single biggest vulnerability, Obamacare. There are just too many similarities between Obamacare and Romneycare, too many bad results from Romneycare (busting the budget, etc.), and too many video clips of Romney from six years ago saying that he hoped that even the individual insurance mandate would become a ‘national model.’ This will absolutely hobble Romney's campaign. In fact, it might be an insurmountable problem.”

He concludes: “All of which is to say that Willard Mitt Romney has very low growth potential in a general-election campaign against Obama. His downside might be not as low as John McCain's was, four years ago, but his upside is negligible. As Larry Lindsey's analysis (mentioned above) explains, this can be an easy recipe for what I call a ‘respectable loss.’ But a loss is a loss is a loss. Romney is a weak general-election candidate who isn't likely to get any better.”

Charting the Course of Your Life

2012-01-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

What principles should guide you when you are planning out the course of your life? If you are young and American you have been told, ad nauseam, to follow your passion.

Some tell young people to follow their bliss; some say that they should do what they love; still others tell them to follow their dreams.

The message is part of their education. It is part of their upbringing. And it is not just being peddled by therapists and schoolteachers. Rarely does a day pass when some billionaire explains to the young generation that he amassed his fortune by following his passion, his dreams, or his bliss.

From time to time I have denounced this value system. I believe that it is useless to the point where it will make lives more difficult and more complicated.

Writing on the Harvard Business Review blog, twenty-something entrepreneur Oliver Segovia explains to his generation that following your passion is a bad idea.

He opens with an anecdote about what happened to one young woman who set out to follow her passion. This woman searched her soul until she discovered her true passion. (It sounds just like the kind of introspection prescribed by therapists.) She then set out to realize it.

Segovia describes the process: “Several years ago, a friend decided she wanted to follow her passion. She loved the liberal arts and the academe. She was a talented graphic designer, a great writer, and was the president of a student club. But the prospect of working a nine-to-five job was never interesting. I can't blame her. After all, ours is a millennial generation, proselytized to pursue our dreams. So she spent seven years getting a PhD, writing an award-winning dissertation in the process. It was a wonderful ride while it lasted, and she was among the happiest people I knew.

“Then the recession hit. The value of university endowments crashed. Teaching and research positions were cut. She moved back in with her family, stopped paying off her student loans, and waited two years before getting a minor teaching role in a small research center. Throughout this time, she suffered the anguish of an uncertain future, became socially withdrawn, and felt a sense of betrayal.”

Segovia recognizes, more clearly than most, that his generation has been induced to worship the “false idols of passion.” His generation has been betrayed by those who would proselytize the values of the therapy culture.

If you have a job and have discovered that you also have a passion, I would also recommend that you do not bring it into your workplace.

Passion can easily consume your good character. Passion will make you insufferable. Passion will make you uncompromising. Passion will tell you that negotiating means selling out. Passion will make a poor team player and an ineffective leader.

If you are consumed by passion you will become self-righteous and self-absorbed. Be assured, if you allow yourself to be driven by your passion, it will definitely consume you.

When you set the course of your life by following an impulse that you discovered by introspecting, you are more likely to try to navigate your way through life’s difficulties by ignoring reality and consulting your gut.

Segovia does not limit his column to a critique of the therapy culture. He recommends an antidote. First, he suggests that you forget about your almighty Self. In other words, stop tormenting yourself about your lack of self-esteem.

Instead of rummaging through your mind, try addressing your attention to real problems in the real world. Ask yourself how you might solve them or how you might contribute to their solution. Then you can ask yourself what you bring to a job, how you add value to a product.

Ask yourself what you are good at. Where does your talent lie?

Do a strict and objective inventory of what you are good at. You might add a list of those things you are not very good at.

See how your skills correlate with the problems you are trying to address. Then, try to evaluate the futures market for those skills.

The more you think about how to correlate your skills with the market’s needs the more you will overcome the negative influence of those who told you to follow your passion.

Prostitution and the Law in France

2012-01-14T05:51:00.000-08:00

Remember Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Charged with rape in New York the former head of the International Monetary Fund was forced to remain in New York under house arrest until his eventual exoneration.

In the meantime French authorities were informed that the now-infamous DSK used to participate in what are being called sex parties or swinger sessions.

Now, prosecutors are investigating these sordid casual encounters. They do not care whether or not DSK or anyone else paid for sex. It is legal in France to pay for sex.

It is not, however, legal to procure prostitutes.

I will grant that French law has reached a level of sophistication unknown on our side of the Atlantic.

French lawyers, too, have surpassed their American counterparts in legal logic.

DSK’s lawyer, one Henri Leclerc, went above and beyond the call of reason when he tried to explain how his client could have participated in these sessions without knowing that the girls were being paid for their “services.”

Insisting that his client could have been "totally unaware" of the fact that the women were being paid, Leclerc explained: “At these parties, people were not necessarily dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman."

What more can anyone say….

Home Alone, For Better or For Worse

2012-01-13T10:09:00.000-08:00

Fewer Americans are marrying today. Fewer people want to get married. Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart surveys the data here.

Beginning in the 1970s a tidal wave of divorces hit the nation. We were told that it was for the best.

We were assured that separated, self-fulfilled, happy, autonomous, independent, liberated parents were better for children than a couple that stayed together out of habit.

If your marriage did not make you happy and fulfilled, you needed to reconsider your commitment. At the least, you needed to engage in an ongoing struggle against your spouse, the better to bring the war home, as the saying went.

Families were destabilized; couples started playing by different sets of rules; children suffered.

Back then people were justly concerned about the anomie that was being produced by the divorces. Children saw their lives disrupted, their routines discarded, their emotional stability undermined.

Now, the children of the divorcing generation are choosing not to marry at all.

Ironically, a young generation that considers the struggle for same-sex marriage the civil rights struggle of its day is choosing to avoid the marital estate.

Young people fiercely desire that the marital institution become more inclusive. They insist that this will strengthen the institution.

At the same time, more and more of them are scrupulously avoiding it.

Marriage is a commitment affirmed in public by sacred vows. Fewer marriages mean fewer commitments and fewer sacred vows.

If good character involves being trustworthy, and if being trustworthy means being good to your word, then fewer marriages mean fewer people being willing to give their word.

The decline in marriage accompanies a loss of moral character.

Men have many good reasons why they do not want to marry. Women do too. Yet, when it comes to divorce, women seem mostly to be leading the way. See Walsh's essay here.

Apparently, marriage is not good for women. Many of them are happier on their own.

As though she were trying to prove marriage to be a patriarchal institution, Dominique Browning declared recently, based on a few random anecdotes, that men need marriage more than women do.

If so, then marriage exploits women and they are best liberated from it.

Obviously, Browning’s message is feminist dogma.

When faced with the question of why divorced men marry more often than divorced women Browning responds that men are the needier sex and are more afraid to be alone. Thus they like to be married because marriage provides them with a caregiver and nursemaid.

Browning has been criticized for demeaning and degrading men. Unfortunately, the critique is well-founded.

She grants no real credence to the idea that divorced men remarry more than divorced women because of certain biological and socio-economic realities.

In Browning’s feminist theater, divorced women thrill to the freedom to get up when they please, to have breakfast when they please, and to do as they please with whom they please when they please. Other women would find this vision of a life without family bleak and depressing.

Browning believes that her freedom largely compensates for the loneliness and the feelings of rejection.

She argues that when a woman retreats to the shelter and sanctuary of her home she feels happy and contented. If no one else is there, if she does not have to answer to anyone else, and if she has no responsibilities to anyone else she feels especially happy.

A man alone, she imagines, feels endangered, insecure, and miserable.

Browning has no sense that a man might be contributing something to a marriage, that he might feel obliged to make his wife happy and contented, or even that he may want to protect her.

To her women are invulnerable. They need no protection. Unfortunately, this is an illusion, a dangerous one at that.

Looking at the decline in marriage from this angle we find another reason why men might not want to marry. Why would a man want to marry a woman who considers his presence to be an extra chore that, were it not for certain biological imperatives, his wife would not bother with at all.

Browning herself was a successful magazine editor; she was, presumably, a woman who could support herself. Perhaps she is speaking for herself when she says that there is precious little a man can do that she cannot do for herself.

For the vast majority of women, a protective masculine presence makes a home a sanctuary. For Browning, this is not the case. I would call her experience an anomalous, rather than indicative.

In fact, Browning is not talking about marriage per se. She is talking about a kind of modern marriage where a woman is the breadwinner. In such a marriage the traditional roles will either be reversed or skewed.

It reminds us of famed author Elizabeth Gilbert.

Gilbert, the world knows, walked out of her seemingly happy marriage to undertake a round-the-world therapeutic journey of self-discovery.

Look closely at the way she describes her mental state at the moment when she decided that she did not want to be married any more.

In Eat Pray Love she wrote: “Why did I feel so overwhelmed with duty, tired of being the primary breadwinner and the housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog walker and the wife and the soon-to-be-mother, and – somewhere in my stolen moments – a writer?”

Why did she leave her marriage? Because it felt like she was married to herself. She was husband and wife, breadwinner and homemaker. She did everything by herself and for herself.

She did not need an extra burden in the person of her husband, a man who was not making any concrete contribution to the marriage.

It seems that Browning was in a similar position. If the examples of Browning and Gilbert tell us anything, they tell us that when a woman is completely self-sufficient, to the point where she does not need a man to provide for her or to protect her, the man in her life will feel and act diminished.

A man who meets a woman who can take care of herself will tend not to want to marry her. If she encroaches on his role and diminishes him as a man, he will do better to look elsewhere for a wife.

Perhaps the men that Browning finds to be so needy are simply men who no longer want to be married to such dynamic feminists.

Their second wives might be younger, but these women might also respect them for the real contributions they are making to the family.

The Thrill of the New

2012-01-12T10:05:00.000-08:00

Do you thrill to the new or are you mired in the old?

Do you seek out the newest thing or do you retreat into the familiar and comfortable?

Of course, it might matter whether you are young or old. The younger you are the more of life’s experiences are new. The older you are the more you will find human experience familiar.

Cognitive psychologists are now addressing the question. They have, unfortunately, forgotten that science and ethics are not the same thing, so they seem to want to use their “science” to “prove” that it is better to be a moderate neophile than to respect tradition. In their lexicon the latter makes you a neophobe.

As might be expected, the same neuroscientists have discovered, on pseudo-scientific grounds that liberals seek out the new while conservatives are mired in the past. Thus, pretend science has discovered that normal people are liberal. What a surprise!

Speaking of surprises, there is nothing surprising about scientists skewing their research to promote leftist ideas. Today we discover that they need but indulge in sloppy thinking to achieve the same result.

Yesterday, I posted about Diederick Stapel, a master of the game of falsifying data, who was just found out and fired.

Even if we assume that the research on newness has been honestly, it also appears to have been done mindlessly.

Eric Felten suggests as much in the Wall Street Journal. I find his point well taken.

Let’s try to apply some serious thought to the question.

If you are offered a choice between a new car and an old car, you would most likely choose the new one. Actually, people no longer even call old cars old cars. They don’t even call them used cars. Now they use the term pre-owned, exactly the term that Ebay sellers use to describe used clothing.

Of course, if you are given a choice between a brand new sweater and one that has been already worn, you will most likely prefer the new sweater.

The same would probably apply to most articles of clothing.

If you are in the market for a home and you have a choice between a new home and one that has already been lived in, you might prefer the new home because there are fewer risks: of bad plumbing, termites, mold, and faulty wiring.

In these circumstances, people prefer the new to the old because the new is presumed to be cleaner, safer, and therefore, more hygienic.

Nonetheless, neuroscientists seem to want to emphasize the notion that neophiles are better able to adapt to changing circumstances. They want us to think that neophiles are best prepared to face an uncertain future.

If young people are most apt to encounter new experiences, this does not mean that they are best prepared to face an uncertain future. Having the least experience, they will be least capable of using the wisdom gained from experience when facing a new challenge or opportunity.

If you see the world in terms of clean and dirty, there is much to say in favor of new as clean. Your survival depends on it.

People are attracted to the new because it is safer. To me, this is self-evident. If it has escaped the purview of the neuroscientists they need to take off their ideological blinders.

And yet, let’s take a second look at some of our examples.

If you are offered a choice between a new Kia and an old Ferrari, all things being equal, which would you be more likely to choose?

If you have to choose between a new house and an old house and your aesthetic prefers the older Victorian manse over the new suburban split-level, are you hopelessly retrograde if you choose the manse?

If you prefer Bach to Justin Bieber does that make you a fuddy-duddy or does it make you discerning?

Amazingly, neophile neuroscientists feel that they have to critique your or my taste in music. They see something wrong with listening to old music and watching revivals of 1950s musicals.

Perhaps they have forgotten that art is more or less timeless? Perhaps they do not know that truly great art has withstood what is called the test of time.

Besides, what if yesterday’s musicals and movies are simply better than today’s.

If you have discerning taste, does that make you a neophobe?

If you become too enthralled with the new and too afraid of being a neophobe you will end up re-inventing the wheel.

Anyone who refuses to draw instruction from the past and who refuses to build on what works will waste a considerable amount of his resources.

And then there’s another problem.

Living for the thrill of the new will aim you toward chaos. If you fail to organize your life around routines you will be facing a constant barrage of surprises. You will also become unpredictable and unreliable to friends and family.

Despite what the researchers think, the failure to have an organized life, one that is filled with meaningful routines, will make it less likely that you will be able to face a surprise effectively.

Should you bow to the evidence of experience, the evidence of what has worked, or should you ignore the past in order to try something new for the sake of trying something new? If you do not have a record of success, built on experience, you will most likely be defeated by the new.

Naturally, the researchers want to convince you that liberals are neophiles who are fearlessly looking in to the future. By their lights, liberals are willing and able to confront new challenges and to find new solutions.

Then, they declare that conservatives are mired in the past, enamored of tradition, clinging to what is familiar, and afraid to face the future.

After all, today’s liberals prefer to call themselves progressives and the term suggests a belief in progress.

Considering that most progressives support the kind of environmental activism that would, if taken to an extreme, repeal the Industrial Revolution, this seems a bit of a misnomer.

People who want to return to a pristine, natural, pre-industrial state are not progressives; they are reactionaries.

Felten examines an example offered by neophile Winifred Gallagher.

Trying to promote the virtue of neophilia Gallagher offers the example of Kate Lucas, a woman who left a job in New York to move out west and to become a ranch hand.

Felten comments: “No doubt the experience was a novel one for Ms. Lucas, but the plot line was already tired when Mickey Rooney filmed ‘Girl Crazy’ in 1943. It is a measure of the muddle that is Ms. Gallagher's book that she doesn't find anything odd about describing the lure of a rural life redolent of 19th-century America as a type of ‘neophilia.’"

She Coughed Up a Tumor

2012-01-12T05:29:00.000-08:00

If you don’t believe in miracles, you will have a tough time with this one.

A woman in England, a mother of six, had a coughing fit one day and coughed up a tumor. She thought little of it.

The next day Claire Osborn had another coughing fit and coughed up another, larger tumor. This time she was sufficiently intrigued to take the tumor to a physician for testing.

Tests showed that she had coughed up a metastatic adenocarcinoma, an especially nasty throat cancer. Her doctor gave her a 50% chance of surviving.

If discovered early enough, this kind of tumor can be removed surgically. Still, patients are required to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatment to remove any cancerous cells that had metastasized throughout the body. Such is usually the case.

Physicians tested Osborn for other traces of the cancer. They did not find any tumors but discovered a few errant cells in the back of her throat. A mild surgical procedure removed the cells.

Now, Osborn is cancer-free. With surgical precision her miracle cough cured her of a cancer that would likely have killed her.

Social Psychology as Pseudo-Science

2012-01-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago famed Dutch social psychologist Prof. Diederik Stapel was revealed to be a fraud, a pseudo-scientist who made up his data

Stapel has since apologized, relinquished his doctorate, and resigned his position.

The incident has led social psychologists to do some serious soul-searching and hand-wringing. After all, their credibility and authority rests on the assumption that their research is hard science. Everyone knows, when you call something hard science the world bows down in servile obeisance.

Now, it appears that some social psychologists are providing something other than scientific knowledge about human behavior.

Writing in the Weekly Standard Andrew Ferguson claims that lay people, especially media writers, are far too willing to accept social psychological research as hard science. In his word, they are chumps.

Ferguson explains: “Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that ‘scientists say’ or ‘a new study finds’ or ‘research shows’ or ‘data suggest.’ Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue.”

Apologists for social psychology try to explain it away by invoking the pressure to publish. Unfortunately, there seems to be more to it. And there is more to journalistic gullibility.

Journalists are not just innocent dupes. They have allowed the Stapels of this world to get away with shoddy and even faked research because the conclusions coincide with what they journalists really believe.

It isn’t just the mantle of science. Social psychologists tell opinion makers what they want to hear. It allows them to present their opinions as fact.

You might have guessed that the pseudo-research invariably arrives at politically correct and culturally leftist conclusions. It “proves” that we are all racists, sexists, and homophobes, beset with unconscious prejudices that only the trained eye of the social psychologist can reveal.

Also, fake science has “proven” that advertising directed at women, especially the kind that involves cosmetics and shoes, lowers women’s self-esteem.

If this research is fake, then we can kiss Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth good-bye.

Stapel also conducted fake research “proving” that people who eat meat are more boorish and anti-social than vegetarians.

And then there was the study “proving” that people who had more power were more likely to be hypocrites.

Since this study appeared in 2009, it was timely. Ferguson reports: “Stapel and his colleagues’ research revealed that powerful people were more likely to be ‘moral hypocrites.’ And which powerful people did the researchers have in mind? ‘Politicians [who] use public funds for private benefits while calling for smaller government’ and CEOs ‘accepting executive bonuses while simultaneously asking for government bailouts’.”

Stapel was allowed to get away with his fraud because he helped promote a political and cultural agenda.

He is surely not the only social psychologist who plays fast and loose with data.

Prof. Erik-Jan Wagenmakers of the University of Amsterdam has proposed a list of studies that he considers dubious, at best.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports: “Unlike most other critics, [Wagenmakers is] not afraid to call out specific papers that he thinks are bogus: ‘Through prestigious publications and extensive media coverage,’ he writes in a draft of a new paper, ‘the general public has been informed that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters, ... that people choose spouses, places to live, and professions because they share letters with their name (e.g., Jenny marries Jim, Phil moves to Philadelphia, and Dennis becomes a dentist, ... that people make better decisions when their bladder is full, ... that ovulation makes it easier for women to distinguish heterosexual from homosexual men, ... and that brief exposure to an image of the American flag can push people toward the Republican end of the U.S. political spectrum, even when the flag image was presented eight months earlier’."

It continues: “[Wagenmakers] can't swear all those studies are wrong. ‘But even using common sense, a lot of these hypotheses are unlikely, a priori, and you should collect a lot more evidence in order for them to be accepted’."

Romney, by Default

2012-01-11T06:42:00.000-08:00

The Gingrich campaign is imploding. Santorum is fading fast. Perry is not rising from the political dead. And Ron Paul is a wild card, a potential troublemaker, who is not going to be the nominee.

As of today, it looks like Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, by default.

Of course, South Carolina is still to come. Gingrich and Perry have bought millions of dollars of negative ads attacking Romney. Some will call it an expression of anger; others will see it as returning the favor.

The conventional wisdom says that the ads will make Gingrich and Perry look bad, but will not touch Romney.

A while back some of us thought that the attack ads directed by Romney and Paul against Gingrich would not be effective.

How wrong we were.

Today, Republican pundits are out in force proclaiming the inevitability of Romney. He is their candidate, the one they wanted, and they are so confident about their victory that they have shifted into uniting-the-party-behind-Mitt mode.

They want the nominating process to be over so that they have enough time to heal the wounds that were inflicted, first, by the Romney campaign.

As an interesting sidelight to the Romney euphoria, Quinnipiac just released a poll from Florida where Romney and Santorum were matched against Barack Obama.

True enough, Romney polled better than Santorum. Romney is up by three percentage points over Obama while Santorum trails Obama by two. Both are within the margin of error.

How electable is Mitt Romney when a far weaker and less known candidate like Rick Santorum does nearly as well against Barack Obama?

In the meantime, some Republican pundits have tried to offer a more thoughtful analysis of the Republican race.

While everyone is thrilling to Romney’s victory in New Hampshire, John Podhoretz casts a colder eye on the results.

In his words: “…Romney has been the only serious candidate in the race.

“But nobody loves him. No one is inspired by him. He cuts an impressive figure and is clearly very intelligent, but he is a man without an ideological core.

“Claiming he should be president because he knows how to run a business may be the least stirring message any candidate has seized upon since Michael Dukakis foundered in 1988 by claiming he could bring “competence” to the White House.

“And his liabilities are undeniable. Even though Gingrich’s assault on Romney’s record of laying off workers when he was running Bain Capital is breathtaking in its disingenuousness, that record does happen to be one of a dozen glaring weaknesses in Romney’s biography, political history and approach that President Obama and his team will be able to use to their advantage.

“So he will win the nomination in a walk. But he will be beaten and battered by the time he crosses the finish line in November — though he may well do so in first place.”

Jonah Goldberg sounds an alarm that we have heard before: “[Romney’s] authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file. The turnout in Iowa was disastrously low, barely higher than the turnout in 2008 — and if Ron Paul hadn’t brought thousands of non-Republicans to the caucus sites, it would have been decidedly lower than in 2008. That’s an ominous sign given how much enthusiasm there should be for making Obama a one-term president. It’s almost as if Romney’s banality is infectious.”

Yesterday, William Kristol made an important point that Thomas Sowell and your humble blogger have also noted. I find Kristol's analysis especially cogent.

In Kristol’s words: “… Mitt Romney’s claim throughout his campaign that his private sector experience almost uniquely qualifies him to be president is also silly. Does he really think that having done well in private equity, venture capital, and business consulting—or even in the private sector more broadly—is a self-evident qualification for public office? One assumes Mitt Romney would agree that Chris Christie is a better chief executive of New Jersey than Jon Corzine, and that Rudy Giuliani was a better mayor of New York than Mike Bloomberg. But Romney’s biography looks a lot more like Bloomberg's or Corzine's (leaving aside Corzine's recent misadventures) than like that of Giuliani (pre-mayoralty) or Christie. Past business success does not guarantee performance in public office. Indeed, Romney sometimes seems to go so far as to suggest that succeeding in the private sector is intrinsically more admirable than, e.g., serving as a teacher or a soldier or even in Congress. This is not a sensible proposition, or a defensible one.”

Pundits like to shape public opinion. They want to be players in the game of politics. Today they are doing their best to generate a wave of positive emotion for Romney. More power to them.

And yet, I reserve my greatest admiration for the writers I just quoted, who are not caught up in the euphoria, but are offering level-headed analysis.

What Is Childism?

2012-01-10T11:11:00.000-08:00

Are you ready for some good news?

Suppose that cultural liberals claimed that they had found a new oppressed group and everyone laughed.

As you know, cultural liberals are working hard to find new groups that have been persecuted and oppressed by rich white males. Their politics involves enlisting these groups in a grand struggle against the white males who are presumably oppressing them.

Considering the burgeoning number of oppressed groups by now they amount to something like 99% of the population.

First it was the proletariat. Then it was minority groups. After that women were told that they were the vanguard of the revolution. Next there were illegal immigrants and the unemployed and labor union members. Now we also have homosexuals, transsexuals and lovers of BDSM.

Obviously, some members of some of these groups have suffered discrimination. Yet, culture warriors want all members of all these groups to identify with their cause: overthrowing the white male patriarchy.

If you belong to an aggrieved group you owe your life to the cause.

Cultural revolutionaries want to see world history and world politics in terms of a mythic grand struggle between capitalists and workers, plutocrats and employees, imperialists and the poor, colonialists and third world peoples, heteronormals and everyone else. They want more and more and more people to live their lives within the parameters defined by this myth.

Now the late Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, a fearless culture warrior and psychoanalyst, has nominated a new candidate for oppressed group: children.

In a book that is being published today she declared that our nation is suffering from what she calls “childism.”

Young-Bruehl wants us all to know that we are being too hard on children, that we are making them do too much homework, that we oppressing their creative spirits by burdening them with rules and discipline.

In her world children would be allowed to do as they please. Parents would abrogate all parental authority and children would be allowed to run wild.

This sounds like a caricature. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s a reductio ad absurdum of liberal cultural politics.

You will not be surprised to discover that Young-Bruehl feels a strong antipathy for the Tiger Mom. As a trained psychoanalyst Young-Bruehl expresses her antipathy by declaring that the Tiger Mom suffers from an unanalyzed pathology.

Pretending to be offering scientific fact, Young-Bruehl suggests that the only way we can save the country is to allow children to do what they want.

Clearly, she is grievously wrong. She fails to see that, if anything, American parents are too holistic. They want their children to grow up to be wholesome, healthy, well-rounded, high spirited, popular and in tune with the natural world.

When your competitors are insisting that their children master higher mathematics, to the exclusion of many of the fun aspects of childhood, you are not doing your children any favors.

Your well-rounded fun-loving creative child will not be able to compete against a cohort that has mastered multivariable calculus and convex optimization.

Now, for the good news. Young-Bruehl’s book has elicited exasperation and ridicule, even from more liberal journalists.

Writing in New York Magazine Lisa Miller calls out Young-Bruehl for her mindlessness.

In her words: “To the tally of those requiring protection from the constant, corrosive prejudice of the dominant culture, another group must now be added. It turns out that American children—whose wants and whims support untold industries and whose very existence causes property taxes to rise in the neighborhood of a better-than-average middle school—are victims of a previously unidentified ism: childism, the widespread but unfounded belief in the inferiority of children.”

Miller continues: “Until taught to do so, kids can’t dress themselves, control their emotions, or distinguish between concepts like 'today' and 'tomorrow.' They are, by nature, ‘unreasonable and selfish,’ in the words of Thomas Phelan, author of the parenting classic 1-2-3 Magic. ‘Inferior,’ in fact, seems like a fair word to describe them. Perhaps Young-Bruehl’s got it the wrong way around. Only by seeing themselves for what they are—older and wiser, superior to their offspring—can parents begin to do the job right.”

On the Jezebel site Erin Gloria Ryan also takes Young-Bruehl to task. After granting the point that Baby Boomers have become a rather selfish cohort—largely, as it happens, because they learned to live according to the principles that Young-Bruehl is espousing--Ryan adds that it is absurd to apply this idea to the way we bring up children.

Ryan adds a salient point: “Children are children because they haven't lived long enough to understand how to control their own impulses or developed the motor skills to be trusted with grown up scissors.

“No, Skittles for breakfast is not an idea that warrants consideration. No, not everyone should ride gleaming white horses with pink manes to work instead of cars. No, we shouldn't clone dinosaurs so that all kids can have a pet triceratops. No, scientific resources should not be devoted to developing a nuclear bomb that will kill all the cooties. Yes, bedtime is important. No, you can't watch The Shining, even though there's a kid in it. And no, children should not be given the opportunity to wield kid-sized splitting mauls, no matter how much they wish they could chop firewood like their mommy or daddy.”

Canada Takes on Radical Environmentalists

2012-01-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

Famed investor Jim Rogers has often asserted that the nation’s and the world’s economic future lies in natural resources.

In other words: the future is in dirt.

Fortunately, America is very rich in natural resources. Developing our resources can lead us to a better economy, more jobs, and a brighter tomorrow.

If this is true, then radical environmentalists and their allies in the Obama administration are the enemies of the future. Add to that the court system, and you have a formula for high unemployment and economic stagnation,.

No one has framed the issues better than Joe Oliver, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources. In an open letter yesterday, Oliver explained why he refused to emulate the American example.

It’s well worth everyone’s attention, so I quote it at length.

“Canada is on the edge of an historic choice: to diversify our energy markets away from our traditional trading partner in the United States or to continue with the status quo.

“Virtually all our energy exports go to the US. As a country, we must seek new markets for our products and services and the booming Asia-Pacific economies have shown great interest in our oil, gas, metals and minerals. For our government, the choice is clear: we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country. We must expand our trade with the fast growing Asian economies. We know that increasing trade will help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.

“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work. It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable.

“Anyone looking at the record of approvals for certain major projects across Canada cannot help but come to the conclusion that many of these projects have been delayed too long. In many cases, these projects would create thousands upon thousands of jobs for Canadians, yet they can take years to get started due to the slow, complex and cumbersome regulatory process.”

Fear Factor

2012-01-10T07:24:00.000-08:00

It’s a strange poll question: What do you fear most in the coming year?

Instead of polling about hopes and aspirations, approval and disapproval, this or that politician, the marketing firm Synovate asked people what they were most afraid of.

The winner, at 33%, was the re-election of Barack Obama.

A mere 16% feared that Obama would lose the election.

The second most feared event was a tax increase. It garnered 31% of the vote. Perhaps people believe that Obama’s re-election will cause a tax increase.

Among senior citizens, the Obama fear factor approaches 50%. Nearly half of American seniors are afraid that Obama will be re-elected.

Among the 18-24 year old contingent, a mere 28% feared Obama’s re-election.

What should we make of this?

Here the answer is far from clear, especially for someone like me who does not analyze poll results for a living.

I would guess, however, that when a poll asks a question for which people are not prepared, they are likely to give a more honest answer.

Unfortunately, “fear” is slightly ambiguous. People might have believed that the poll was asking them to predict the future. They might be predicting an event that they consider to be inevitable.

Then again, the poll might be suggesting that a large number of Americans will be especially motivated to vote against Barack Obama in the coming election.

Go figure.

When Elephants Fly

2012-01-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

I don’t want to say that Tom Friedman was hallucinating, so I will merely suggest that he had a vision. He thought he saw a bunch of flying elephants.

He was so enamored of the vision that he wrote a column about it. The column’s title: “Watching Elephants Fly.”

You would never guess that the column is about the current state of political affairs in Egypt. Oh, and by the way, it also addresses Friedman’s own failures to understand the situation.

Friedman wants us to think that the impossible is taking place in Egypt. Since it’s impossible to predict the impossible, Friedman wants to be excused for not having foreseen the current state of Egyptian politics.

When I first saw the title of the column, I thought that perhaps Friedman had confused elephants with pigs. When people want to claim that something cannot possibly happen, they often evoke the adnyaton: when pigs fly.

Further research showed me that I had leapt to the wrong conclusion. While it is true that pigs cannot fly, there is one famous flying elephant, whose name is Dumbo.

Granted, Dumbo is a character in a Walt Disney cartoon or even in a Disney theme park.

To give Friedman full credit, I conclude that he was trying to tell us that he lives in a world where elephants fly. That is to say, he lives in a cartoon.

Perhaps he has missed his calling.

Friedman opens his column with a typically grandiose pronunciamento: “Whenever you see elephants flying, shut up and take notes. The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying. No one predicted it, and no one had seen this before. If you didn’t see it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes.”

Obviously, Friedman has fallen into deep denial. Last year he was cheering the arrival of democracy in Egypt.

Now that the Egyptian people have voted, it turns out that they do not share Friedman’s liberal values. They voted overwhelmingly for radical Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists.

Tom Friedman, if seems was helping to pave the way for an Islamist takeover of Egypt.

Now, he’s in a bind. He might admit that he was wrong and explain how he was so completely duped by the event.

But, we know that he is not going to do that.

He did not attain to his exalted position by admitting to error. He, like more than a few other columnists, got where he is by refusing to admit to error.

In what is certainly not a profile in moral courage Friedman is telling everyone to shut up. If people start talking about what is happening in Egypt, it will make Tom Friedman look bad. It will make him look like he is living in a cartoon.

What is the reasoning behind his insulting demand? Friedman declares that since no one saw what was coming in Egypt no one has any right to analyze the current situation or to look toward the future.

So, Tom Friedman is ordering you all to shut up.

By implication, he does not believe in freedom of speech or in the marketplace of ideas. Nor does he believe that policy analysts should project different future eventualities.

Besides, it’s better for people to shut up than to start talking about how bad Friedman’s columns are.

Right now, anyone who is not preparing for an Egypt run by the Muslim Brotherhood is living in a cartoon.

Of course, Friedman knows who won the elections. He just wants to put his own spin on the issue.

In his words: “To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.”

Let’s see. On the one hand we have the aspirations of the Egyptian people. They want freedom, justice, jobs, and clean government. But, they voted for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists who have no real interest in any of the above.

By Friedman's logic the Egyptian people, nearly half of whom are illiterate, favor peace between their country and Israel. While I hate to predict the future, what would you wager that a referendum renouncing the peace treaty with Israel passes overwhelming in newly liberal democracy Egypt?

Friedman believes that the Islamists will be moderated by the responsibilities of power. If they fail to deliver for the people, they will be voted out of office. Otherwise, there might even be another insurrection.

It’s a thesis. It may come true. At the least, it allows Tom Friedman to avoid facing the stark realities of today’s Egypt.

If we want to put his ideas to the test, we can ask which Islamist regime has moderated its policies by the responsibilities of power.

Is Friedman thinking of Afghanistan under the Taliban? Is he thinking of Iran?

Does he recall 1979 when his liberal soulmates were thrilling to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran? Does he remember when they all claimed that the Ayatollah Khomeni would bring democracy to Iran?

In truth, tyrants, despots and terrorists are not inclined to moderate their policies when their policies are not working. Think of Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Mao’s policies produced a famine that killed tens of millions of people. Did he take responsibility and moderate his ideology? Not at all. He launched a cultural revolution to blame everyone but him and his wife.

If Friedman believes that the aspirations of the people will out, then he should provide us with examples of countries that gave power to a bunch of fanatics and extremists, only to see them moderate their policies.

Amazingly enough, Friedman, like his colleague Nicholas Kristof, never seems to consider that his Egyptian interlocutors are simply telling him what he wants to hear.

Perhaps these Egyptians are so well-versed in the art of media spin or so well-mannered and polite, that they do not tell New York Times reporters how much they hate infidels.

When speaking to liberal reporters they mouth the liberal party line. They do not admit that they hate infidels and want to suppress all the Coptic Christians and Israeli Jews.

And they do not tell Friedman and Kristof that, all things considered, it would be a very bad idea for either of them to move to Egypt today.

Autocrat-in-Chief

2012-01-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

While the Republicans are trying to destroy each other, President Obama has seized the opportunity to govern as an autocrat.

Obama knows a power vacuum when he sees it. He has profited from Republican disarray.

Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin explain it well: “’I refuse to take “No” for an answer,’ said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that ‘where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.’ On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This ‘go it alone’ philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.”

After the 1994 election Bill Clinton read the mood of the electorate and shifted toward the center.

After the 2010 election Barack Obama looked at the results and decided that the American people were too stupid to govern themselves. He has offered a new form of progressive politics: one that allows the enlightened elites to govern at will.

So much for the constitution.

Siegel and Kotkin write: “The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.”

The authors compare today’s Democratic Party to a group of fanatical mullahs. Convinced of the rightness of their dogmas, unwilling to compromise or debate basic principles, they have no problem forcing everyone to live as they want them to live.

Instead of referring to Holy Writ, they invoke the authority of scientific dogma. They consistently fail to notice that scientific dogma is a contradiction in terms.

The authors analyze the situation: “Their authoritarian progressivism—at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism—tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, ‘the priests of the machine.’ Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in ‘progressive legal theory,’ which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin—a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people.”

Most people do not share these ideas, but most people have been cowed into acquiescence.

If Obama wins re-election, the authors posit, the situation will get worse. The authors paint a nightmarish picture: “A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.”

Who, pray tell, is standing up to this new authoritarianism? The authors see today’s Republican Party as “a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership.”

Mitt Romney’s Republican Party is divided and disgruntled. An excellent manager and consultant, Romney is poorly placed to provide political leadership.

What Iowa Tells the GOP

2012-01-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

Among Democratic political strategists Douglas Schoen has been unfailingly critical of the Obama administration. His serious and sober political analysis has generally been non-partisan.

Thus, he is worth taking seriously. It is interesting to see how a good political consultant analyzes the state of the Republican presidential race. Especially Republicans seem ready to nominate a business consultant as their presidential candidate.

In his column today Schoen explains that the Iowa caucuses are not good news for the Republican Party.

Schoen agrees with those on the right and the left who said that the winner of the Republican caucuses was Barack Obama.

In his words: “The Republican Party revealed itself to be irretrievably divided — with no candidate able to garner even 25% of the vote and voters unable to coalesce behind a common message or messenger.”

Schoen emphasizes that a successful political campaign must have a message and a messenger. In 2008, he points out, Democratic candidates all had the same message.

Romney, Santorum, and Paul represent radically different messages. Schoen explains that: “each one’s supporters could well wind up hating the eventual nominee.”

The presumptive candidate Mitt Romney does not have a message that anyone can discern. Romney has based his campaign on his knowledge of how business works. But, he is not running for CEO and has never shown the political skills needed to unite the party behind his agenda.

By the way, what is the Romney agenda? Better management? Better consulting?

After studying the Iowa poll results Schoen has reached conclusions that Republicans would do well to note.

In his words: “Establishment favorite Romney was able to pull off his eight-vote ‘victory’ with the support of traditional, upscale, suburban Republican voters. But Romney, who lacks a message, a mandate or a clear road forward, was not able to improve his standing from four years ago, and was nearly defeated by a candidate with no money.

“Especially puzzling is the fact that Romney did not do particularly well with moderate Republicans and independents. Independents coming in to caucus are the first clear, if imperfect, indication of how these key swing voters will vote in November, and with Obama vulnerable among this critically important group, Romney’s weakness, as the so-called moderate in the race, is particularly telling.

“And while Romney won half of all voters most concerned with beating Obama in November, he was also the strong first choice of those who supported their candidate with reservations. Not a harbinger of good for a prospective nominee.”

Again, why does this make Romney the best candidate in the general election?

Worse yet, for those who would unite the party, Schoen explains: “Romney backers lack passionate commitment to their candidate. And Paul and Santorum backers seem so committed to their candidates’ worldviews, they are unlikely to support anyone else.”

In case you were wondering, Tea Party voters were equally split among the top three candidates.

The dreaded Tea Party juggernaut also seems divided against itself.

The Tea Party was a grass roots organization. It has prided itself on being leaderless. It had a clear message, but it did not have a single messenger.

Now, the Tea Party movement has largely been silent about the Republican nomination battle.

Matched against an organized Republican establishment the Tea Party is flailing. Unable to unite around a viable candidate who expresses its principles the Tea Party is rendering itself obsolescent.

Solve the Problem or Punish the Perpetrator

2012-01-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

When you have a problem you also have a choice.

You can set out to solve the problem. Or else, you can find someone to blame and punish him.

You can’t do both at the same time.

If you have a personal problem, a coach-- whether a life coach or a business coach or a relationship coach-- will work with you on solving the problem.

If you consult with a Freudian psychoanalyst he will not even bother to examine the problem. He will want to look for the root cause. He will help you to find out who is to blame.

Any psychotherapist who suffered Freud’s influence will assume that your problems were caused by current or past abuse. Once your abuser is punished, you will, presumably, feel better.

You will not have solved your problem. You will have learned how to ignore your problems and hope that they solve themselves.

In strictly Freudian therapy you will learn that you are the culprit you are looking for. Think of the unfortunate Oedipus.

Then you will learn that you can only solve your problem by punishing yourself. Think again of the unfortunate Oedipus.

Individuals facing personal problems can choose between solving their problems and finding someone to blame and punish.

The same applies to our political leaders. Faced with a crisis political leaders have a choice. They can try to solve the problem or they can find someone to blame.

The first approach is pragmatic. The second is demagogic, especially when it involves scapegoating.

For the past few years our financial system and our economy have been in crisis. Ask yourself whether our political leaders, especially Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats have been working to solve the problem or have been trying to blame the bankers.

The Schumpeter column in The Economist reminds us that the administration and its foot soldiers in the Occupy movement have been playing a very dangerous game by blaming Wall Street for the financial crisis.

After all, the movement began as Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Rodeo Drive.

The administration’s so-called solutions to the crisis are really efforts to blame bankers and retain power.

As long as he has been in power Obama has been denouncing the fat cat Wall Street bankers. As a seasoned demagogue he is more than happy to scapegoat someone else for problems that he does not know how to solve.

Now, his theory has received support from an academic researcher named Clive Boddy. Previously, people with a background in the psycho sciences have labeled the bankers as narcissists.

Boddy raises the ante by declaring them to be psychopaths.

Supposedly, narcissists are treatable. Psychopaths are not. They are conscience-free criminals who need to be locked up. Pinning the label psychopath on the bankers is not an innocent academic exercise. It lays the groundwork for more direct forms of punishment.

Schumpeter reports: “In the August issue of the Journal of Business Ethics one Clive Boddy argues that the financial sector has been taken over by psychopaths: ‘people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry’, lack a ‘conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings of sympathy or empathy for other people’.”

If you want to set a group of people up for persecution and punishment, you start by defining them as subhuman criminals, as enemies of the human race.

Of course, the exercise bears a very close resemblance to traditional anti-Semitism. Schumpeter grants that the Occupiers are not anti-Semitic, but he also knows that you do not have to be a bigot to propagate bigotry. Typhoid Mary never got typhoid.

In Schumpeter’s words: “Railing against the 1%—particularly when so many of them work for companies with names like Goldman Sachs and N.M. Rothschild—can unleash emotions that are difficult to cage. A survey in the Boston Review in 2009 found that 25% of non-Jewish Americans blamed Jews for the financial crisis, with a higher percentage among Democrats than Republicans.”

Might this explain why more and more American Jews are rethinking their allegiance to the Democratic Party? We can hope that they have finally gotten the message.

For now, the banking industry is being punished with increasingly onerous regulations. Obviously, more regulation means more money spent on compliance. That, in its turn, leaves less money available to lend to businesses and to grow the economy.

The rhetoric of Obama and the Occupiers is fomenting anti-Semitism. It is also endangering the American economy.

In Schumpeter’s words: “This prejudice has proven dangerous. Without money to grease them, the wheels of commerce turn slowly or not at all. Civilisations that have eased the ban on moneylending have grown rich. Those that have retained it have stagnated. Northern Italy boomed in the 15th century when the Medicis and other banking families found ways to bend the rules. Economic leadership passed to Protestant Europe when Luther and Calvin made moneylending acceptable. As Europe pulled ahead, the usury-banning Islamic world remained mired in poverty. In 1000 western Europe’s share of global GDP was 11.1% compared with the Middle East’s 8.6%. By 1700 western Europe had a 13.5% share compared with the Middle East’s 3.4%.”

"The 27 Rules of Conquering the Gym"

2012-01-07T06:43:00.000-08:00

Commenter Tilly Tally-ho just posted a link on the previous post. It offers Jason Gay's rules for conquering the gym. Not only does it offer great advice, but it is very funny. If you need some motivation to continue your exercise regimen or some encouragement to start one, Gay's rules are a must read.

Enjoy them here.

For Your Health

2012-01-07T05:07:00.000-08:00

Here's an animated lecture that reveals the secret to better health. The clip is a bit on the long side-- 9 minutes-- but worth every second. Via Fausta's Blog.