Eric The Blue

Romney surveys the vice-presidential landscape; journalists crack up Eric the Blue

I don't read every word of the newspaper, even on weekends, but without a doubt the funniest line in today's Star Tribune occurs near the end of an article about how Team Romney is beginning to think about the vice-president question:

In 2008, McCain vetted Romney, so Romney knows how painstaking the vetting process can be.

Ah, yes, the vetting process!  So painstaking that at the end only one woman was standing.  The half-term governor of Alaska who, having endured the painstaking vetting process, fell to pieces when Katie Couric started knocking around the empty chambers of her mind. 

Palin is what she is.  The real disgrace is always going to be that McCain chose her.  Shame, shame.

Mad Men, Season 5, Episode 1

I'm listening to Terry Gross interview Matthew Weiner about--what else?--last night's two-hour season premier of "Mad Men." It ends with SCDP's reception area full of African-American job applicants.  They're there because, in the first scene, some yahoos at a rival agency had dropped paper bags full of water on civil rights protesters marching on the sidewalk below their office windows in a Manhattan skyscraper.  This had resulted in some bad publicity, and SCDP, to pile on, had placed a fake ad in the Times that  dropped the phrase "equal opportunity employer."  The applicants are nicely dressed, polite, dignified, and, of course, not in on the joke.  Do they appear a little too decent, like the Drapers' maid, whom I wrote about here?  I'm addicted, but the rather too obvious contrast between upright African-Americans and the cavorting ad men is one item for the debit column.  Remember Lane's girlfriend at the Playboy club?  When the topic of race comes up, the show emits a faint but distinct whiff of falsity.

The interview with Weiner, in which Terry does not take up the bookends to last night's premier, is here.

Netflix: 50/50

A funny movie about cancer, which necessarily involves giving short shrift to some of the details.  I hope it requires no spoiler alert to note that, in the end, the very likable main character, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, undergoes a successful surgery and gets the girl you'd been hoping he would.  As the patient's best friend, Seth Rogen is as ever hilarious.  Incorporating his friend's illness into his pick-up procedures, he explains to a girl at a club that his mostly silent sidekick suffers from "type 4 back cancer."  It works like the ace of trumps, and two pairs end up back at the patient's house, where there is a large stash of medicinal marijuana.  For some reason, it's more enjoyable than I'm making it sound: maybe a spoonful of irreverence makes the schlock go down.

Across the fence

Here is the text of a letter to the editor printed in Thursday's Star Tribune:

As a political independent, I sometimes shake my head in disbelief by the antics of both the Republican and DFL Parties in our state. However, the most absurd position being taken in Minnesota at this time is the opposition to voter ID by the DFL Party.

Have the Democrats among us forgotten about the numerous examples of voter fraud and expensive and time-consuming election recounts (that we taxpayers pay for)?

Have they forgotten about the millions of illegal aliens and other nonresident transients who are in our state and who could easily sway an election if permitted to vote?

Is there no concern among Democrats of the potential national security risks associated with a lack of voter ID? Or should we all just stick our heads in the sand and "trust" that nothing like that can happen in "Minnesota Nice"?

We have laws on the books that dictate who is allowed to vote in elections. I want this law to be enforced and not just "assumed."

The contention by Democrats that a voter ID law will disadvantage the poor and elderly is an obvious smokescreen, because the law will provide IDs to citizens without a valid driver license and will allow people to use other means to prove their residency.

The voter ID law has a clear fence line. On one side sits those who support voting laws and fair and accurate elections. On the other side sit those who do not.

Corby Pelto
Plymouth

From my side of the fence, it's possible to glimpse another fence, on one side of which sits a herd of morons.  Let us append some comments to each of his paragraphs.

Oh, he's a "political independent" disgusted with both parties! In that case, be prepared to hear the voice of reason! That's paragraph #1.

What examples of voter fraud is he talking about? The argument, if that is what you want to call it, is pretty much like the joke about how pink elephants hide in cherry trees.  (Have you never seen a pink elephant in a cherry tree?  That's how well they hide!)  And by what leap of illogic would voter ID prevent close elections? That's the second paragraph.

Minnesota has a population of around 5.3 million.  And, according to Corby's third paragraph, "millions of illegal aliens and other non-resident transients."  Where do they sleep at night?  He's not saying, but I bet he knows who they're voting for.  Not the independents!

We come now to paragraph #4, which concerns an unexplicated national security risk we've been incurring for all these years in which it was too easy to vote.  Is it that all these millions of aliens have been sent by foreign powers to vote for candidates who hate America?  It's hard to say.  When Corby asks whether we should all "just stick our heads in the sand and 'trust' that nothing like that can happen" here, it's impossible to identify the referent of the second "that." Nothing like what?

Paragraph #5: Yes, Corby, "we have laws on the books."  Your side wants to change them.  Since the legislative process won't yield the necessary votes, the state's constitution must be amended. It's a small lesson in the decline of conservatism, a once respectable political philosophy. 

In his sixth paragraph, Corby dismisses as "an obvious smokescreen" the argument that a voter ID law will deter some citizens from voting.  Were he more generous, he'd recognize that we all have our own preferred rhetorical ruses.  His own is the tone of bland self-confidence with which he pronounces each stupid, illogical syllable.

And then, finally, the fence line. It happened that, on the same day Corby's letter was published, I came across this blog post by Charles Simic.

 

 

 

Weather and climate

It's been so warm in Minnesota for so long--we had no winter to speak of--that the only locals not talking about the weather are the global warming deniers.  It should be their turn to explain that there's a difference between weather and climate, but they've disqualified themselves with all the stupid fun they have with a cold snap.  So:

A cold, snowy day in April is like when your light-hitting shortstop goes 2-for-4 with a double and a home run.  That's weather.  It doesn't prove that the shortstop is an all-star or that the Earth isn't warming.  Climate is like when the shortstop bats .190 for the rest of the season and Greenland melts into the sea.

Is it possible to discern a subtle shift in the argument?  It seems to me that the pejorative "global warming alarmist" acknowledges, however grudgingly, that the Earth is indeed warming up.  To do something about it, however--that would ruin the world economy.  But then who is guilty of ringing a false alarm?  Yale economist William Nordhaus answers:

The group of sixteen scientists argues that we should avoid alarm about climate change. I am equally concerned by those who allege that we will incur economic catastrophes if we take steps to slow climate change. The claim that cap-and-trade legislation or carbon taxes would be ruinous or disastrous to our societies does not stand up to serious economic analysis. We need to approach the issues with a cool head and a warm heart. And with respect for sound logic and good science.

That's the last paragraph.  In the rest of the article, published in the current New York Review, he demonstrates pretty clearly that "sound logic and good science" recommend action.

Netflix: True Grit

You won't go wrong with the Coen brothers, and this is another good one.  It's been a frequent subject of redaction criticism, since it's based on a novel (by Charles Portis, published in 1968, bearing the same title) that was in 1969 made into a film of the same name, starring none other than John Wayne.  I know nothing of the novel or the earlier movie but am going to guess that the Coens' version is bleaker and more desolating.  It features Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Jeff Bridges, who was nominated for an Oscar, but the movie really belongs to Hailee Steinfeld, a teen-ager who plays the teen-aged Mattie Ross, who's determined to avenge the murder of her father.  The movie plays up her intelligence, her linguistic prowess (in general, the characters in this movie never have to punish themselves with the thought, I wish I had said that, because they did), her precocious negotiating skills, her ability to climb trees and cut down corpses hanging from high branches, her devotion to her cause, her. . . grit. 

In the end, though, what does it get her?  Before she was fifteen, she tracked down her father's murderer in Indian country and shot him in the chest.  Twenty-five years later, in the closing frame, she's a grave spinster with an amputated arm who's three days late to a Wild West show.  Suddenly it makes more sense that in this movie it seems always to be night and you have to squint in the darkness to try and tell what unpleasant events are occurring.

Probability and the outcome of games

My sister, a professional geek, meaning in her case that it's her job to teach chemistry to young people, recently let drop that a recent test included the following question:

In the "game" usually called "52 pick-up," what is the probability that 26 of the cards will land face down and 26 face up?

Since I'm an actual geek, meaning I have an interest in mathy problems that is purely recreational, I worked out what I think is the solution.  (It's not 1/2, the popular wrong answer, according to sis.)

It's maybe not the way a professional would think of it, but imagine cards falling one after another, face up or face down: up, down, down, down, up, down, up, up, up, up, etc., etc.--whatever the result is till there have been 52 landings, and therefore 52 results.  How many possible 52-string results are there? This is given by 2⁵².  If you don't believe it, you can try it out with smaller samples that can easily be counted, and perhaps persuade yourself that the pattern holds: for example, if there are two landings, the number of possible results is 2², or 4--up, up; up, down; down, up; and down, down.

So the problem becomes, of the 2⁵² possibilities, how many have 26 ups and 26 downs?  This is the number of different ways that you can choose 26 items out of a group of 52, which is written 52!/26! 26!  In other words, the number of ways you can "choose 26 from 52" is given by:

52x51x50x49x48. . . x3x2 / (26x25x24x23x22. . . x3x2)²

Again, skeptics may possibly persuade themselves by experimenting with smaller numbers.  The number of ways you can "choose 2 from 4" is given by 4!/2! 2! = 4x3/2 = 6.  Does this check?  Well, you could take (1,2), (1,3), (1,4), (2,3), (2,4), or (3,4).  Those are all the ways there are to do it, and there are 6.

The solution to the "52 pickup" problem, then, is the ratio of 52!/26! 26! (the number of results that have 26 ups and 26 downs) to 2⁵² (the number of all possible results).  This involves some number grinding but turns out to be almost exactly 0.11--an eleven per cent chance.

The solution to this problem brings into view others that are more interesting.  You know how, in baseball's World Series, the champion is the first team to win four times.  So suppose that one team is better than the other and has a 3/5 chance of winning any game.  What is the chance this better team will win the Series?  Well, their chance of a sweep is (3/5)⁴.  Their chance of winning in five games is (3/5)⁴ x (2/5) x 4.  Their chance of winning in six games is (3/5)⁴ x (2/5)² x 10.  And their chance of winning in seven games is (3/5)⁴ x (2/5)³ x 20.  (The terms 4, 10, and 20 in the above expressions come, respectively, from the number of ways you can choose 1 from 4, the number of ways you can choose 2 from 5, and the number of ways you can choose 3 from 6.)  Grinding the numbers yields the result that the superior team has about a 71% chance of winning the Series. 

Does that seem counterintuitive?  A team that is plainly inferior still has almost a 30% chance of prevailing. In general, romantic legends of improbable events--upsets made possible only by the hand of God--don't stand up to close scrutiny.  On the other hand, the longer the series, the better the chance that the superior team will win.  In our example, the inferior team's chance of winning goes from 29% to 40% if the championship is decided by the outcome of a single game instead of by a best-of-7 series.  That is why, at this time of year, when #2 seeds are taking on #15 seeds in the NCAA basketball tournament, you hear the commentators talking about how one team is going to try to "shorten the game"--slow it down, use all of the shot clock, hold down the number of times each team gets the ball.  It's like winning a single game instead of a long series.

Hamlet talks with the king

You've heard of the nice lady who loved Hamlet because it has so many famous sayings.  I've been re-reading it and came today to a passage that the nice lady may have forgotten about.  It's in the third scene of the fourth act.  Hamlet, having killed Polonius, is called before the king, who asks, a little plaintively, "Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?"  Hamlet answers, "At supper."  That Hamlet!  He doesn't mean that Polonius is eating supper.  It's the worms who are eating.  The king really wants to know where the body is but Hamlet riffs on how a beggar may fish with a worm that has supped upon a king, in which case royalty is obliged to make its way through the beggar's digestive tract.

It's not all famous soliloquies, "To be or not to be" perfectly enunciated and accompanied by graceful gestures.  Speaking of that, however: what exactly is going on?  Hamlet's problem is whether or not to believe the ghost, whether or not to take revenge upon the new king, his uncle, right?  But then, pretty much without warning, he assumes a position alone on the stage and declares that the question is not why he doesn't kill his uncle but why he doesn't kill himself.  He's got death on his mind.  It's possible he wasn't altogether healthy back in the days before the play began and his dad the king was taking those daily constitutionals in the orchard.

Obama v. Romney?

As Republican voters head to the polls on Super Tuesday, it appears that Mitt Romney may finally be about to bury his remaining opponents beneath piles of cash and the waves of negative advertising that they pay for.  (I am not one of those opposed to ending sentences with prepositions, a "rule" that has been properly satirized by the retort, "That is the kind of English up with which I will not put.")  If that happens, he will start responding to and attacking the president instead of responding to and attacking the likes of Santorum and Gingrich.  The roving media strobe light will begin to shine upon the general election campaign.

What's it going to look like?  I know we are all supposed to be focussed on The Issues, but Romney has been on at least two sides of most of them, and what he says while purporting to address them now is often wispy cirrus.  What is all this talk about, "The economy is what I do"?  Presumably, he doesn't think Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz should be president.  He thinks he should, and there's not much evidence he has many opinions besides that one.

So let us consider "the horse race."  We don't know what's going to happen in the next months with the domestic economy, let alone the European one, and anyway events even more unforeseen will have their effect.  But from 50,000 feet, in early March, what does it look like?

I think it looks like Obama will probably win.  A couple months ago, he was a fifty-fifty bet (at most), but his chances have since then improved significantly.  The Republican primary campaign has been a disaster--Barbara Bush recently called it the worst she's ever seen.  The candidates have been so awful that Mrs Bush is not the only Republican who can tell.  Perhaps it could have been different, but I'm afraid these clods are representative specimens of the modern Republican party.  By "these clods" I mean the three besides Romney, who is a wooden trimmer, still standing, as well as the haircuts who've dropped out.  Michele Bachmann!  Herman Cain!  Remember when Rick Perry, the sheriff of Texas, rode in on a white horse?  Uff duh!

A few months ago, Obama had two chances: that by Election Day the economy would be perceived as on the mend, or that the public would deem his Republican challenger unacceptable.  The latter appeared more promising, and has by no means dissipated, but the former is now even more likely.  Then there is the Electoral College.  I think it should be abolished, but, notwithstanding the election of 2000, it's  existence does not necessarily harm a Democrat's chances.  There are eighteen states (plus the District of Columbia), possessing 242 electoral votes, that have been carried by the Democratic presidential candidate for five elections in a row.  For the record, they are, alphabetically: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.  Geographically, it's essentially the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Maryland, the western Great Lakes region, and the Pacific rim.  It's possible to win without any of these states--Bush did twice, obviously--but it's a little like drawing to an inside straight.  For example, the "blue eighteen" plus Florida is sufficient to win. 

Unless Romney (or whomever the Republicans end up nominating) can break the Democrats' winning streak in the blue eighteen, the best they can hope for is barely to eke it out.  They have to have Ohio, they have to win not just Florida but everything in Dixie (Obama carried Virginia and North Carolina four years ago), and they probably need the blue-trending Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada as well.  Where can they break through in the blue eighteen?  Romney probably thought Michigan, for sure, but I doubt he still thinks so.  He's going to win Michigan by insisting he was right about the auto bailout?  The things you have to say to be the Republican nominee are killers in the general election.

I read somewhere that a political scientist said he could predict who you'd vote for if you would just answer three simple questions.  Are you white?  Are you married?  Did you go to church last Sunday?  Three ayes make a Republican, a single nay makes a Democrat.  Exceptions prove the rule.  It's been that way for awhile now, and it's obvious that more and more the formula favors the Dems, but the Republicans act as if they haven't noticed.  Instead of moderating their views, they want campaigns awash in corporate money and all voters to present ID.  I doubt it will be enough for Romney, and it's a horrible long-term plan. 

Ann Romney's reading

In a post entitled "Woe is Mitt: Contraception, Tolstoy, and Taxes," John Cassidy takes up the kerfuffle surrounding Ann Romney having indicated, on the social media site Pinterest, that one of her favorite books is Anna Karenina.  Not wise, some say, since the plot concerns the marital straying of a generally sympathetic character who is married to a boring government official--a sort of 19th-century, Russian version of Mitt Romney.  Besides, it's a great novel, one of the best ever written, and therefore probably qualifies Mrs Romney as a "snob" and member of the "culural elite." 

Cassidy doesn't say so, but Tolstoy himself might have had some sympathy for Republicans who think his book was immoral.  He thought so himself.  In late midlife, the famous, wealthy, esteemed author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina fell into a depression, the principle source of which seems to have been an unusually acute consciousness of mortality.  He might have achieved more than almost anyone else, and been of enviable status, but what finally was the good of that if in the long run he was consigned to the same oblivion as everyone else?  The resulting reflection, self-examination, and study bred intense disgust with all that he had done up to that time, which of course included the compositon of two of the greatest works of fiction ever published.  He renounced his copyrights, stopped eating meat, moved into the servants' quarters, and adopted a brand of Christianity that caused him to be excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.  His wife was understandably perplexed. The fictions that he now wrote were explicitly didactic.  They included tales for children ("God Sees the Truth, but Waits"), the justly famous "Kreutzer Sonata" (evinces disgust with sexuality), "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (title character endures slowly advancing terminal illness and realizes at the end that his career and marriage and all other traditional pursuits were useless frauds), and "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (title question answered by last sentence, wherein the main character, having dropped dead of cupidity, is buried by his servant: "Six feet from head to toe was all he needed").

I don't know how the total picture plays with Republicans.  Santorum's voters probably approve of the late Tolstoy, though they may think it's snobbish to know about him.  Mitt Romney's country-club set probably thinks the older Tolstoy could have organized the first OWS rally.  My own conclusion isn't overtly political.  It's an error to suppose that somewhere, among the rich and famous living in penthouse apartments or in gated communities filled with things advertised on television during golf tournaments, people are content.

Two poems about the sea

Here's the text of the Frost poem, "Once by the Pacific," that I recently called the best ever written about the Pacific Ocean as seen from the shore:

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the light was spoken.

It's a traditional form, a sonnet, with the ostensible subject of "nature," and moreover rhymes chimingly, all characteristics that align it with a million other poems concerning how the mind of God is expressed in nature.  Yes, says Frost, but it's not the good news that you think.  I love the way in which, close to the end, a single sentence fills out a single line: "Somebody had better be prepared for rage."  It's a way of highlighting.  You have to know too that in the Book of Genesis all of history begins with God declaring, "Let there be light." 

And will end, according to this poem, with Him angry, disgusted, and admitting His act of creation was a mistake.  Put out the light.

Frost has this reputation for being a practical Yankee poet who espoused the virtues of work, patriotism, and faith.  Actually, his recurring subjects are madness, the distance (or silence, or absence) of God, the blank indifference (or malignity) of nature, and the end of the world.  Here's another of my favorites, a savage rebuke of the idea behind a lot of "creationist" bunk. 

As to poems about the sea, one of the few rivals to "Once by the Pacific" is by Housman:

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.