…a case to follow with interest.
Obama approval down
Obama’s approval was up a fair amount after the election, but now it’s down again somewhat. I can’t get too excited about it one way or the other.
This election only served to underscore something that was already becoming apparent, which is that Obama’s approval rating would hover close to 50% even if he brought a brace of cocker spaniel puppies onto a stage and strangled them to death with his bare hands in front of the audience. Yes, every now and then his rating has dipped down to somewhere in the 40s, but that seems to represent liberals and/or leftists thinking he’s done something that’s too right-wing for them, or not left-wing enough.
Perhaps the left is angry at him now because he didn’t completely wipe the floor with Republicans during the fiscal cliff negotiations, although he did his level best to diss and demonize them. Perhaps some people are a bit miffed at the expense of his Hawaii vacation. At any rate, these up and downs no longer really interest me, except as a reflection of the state of mind of the American public, because in his second term Obama is no longer shackled by any need to be re-elected. So if he wants to he can completely ignore these ratings and do whatever he pleases.
Those of you who think he will try to run for a third term will disagree with that assessment, no doubt. I don’t think he’ll try to do that, although if he or his supporters did, I would not be surprised in the least. However, I would be very surprised if they succeeded by the means outlined in the Constitution. They simply do not have the majorities to do it, either in Congress or in the states.
Extra-constitutional means? I don’t doubt that some on the left would dearly love to. I’ll leave it at that.
If you think you need to gain weight…
…and or if you’re feeling suicidal, Chili’s Onion String and Crispy Jalapeno Stack would be a good place to start:
No, I’m not really recommending it (don’t want to be sued). I was just astounded at the calorie count. Even though I knew it had to be high, I wouldn’t have estimated it would be this high: 2,130 calories; 213g fat, 31g saturated. If I’m not mistaken (and I’m not), a gram of fat equals 9 calories. So this little treat would derive 1917 of its calories from fat, which would be 90%.
And I don’t even like fried jalapenos.
I’ve long been astounded at the astronomical calorie content of certain foods (often the most yummy ones, although cantaloupe is a big exception, being both extraordinarily delicious and awfully good for you, as well as fairly low in calories). A wee bag of potato chips packs an enormous wallop, for example. Even seemingly innocuous treats such as this are surprisingly dense in calories and fat:
I must stay completely away from the little buggers, because once I taste one they release the beast in me and I must finish them. Must.
I see from the Amazon comments that I am not alone in this surprising vice. The first review there, by someone called “CleffedUP,” is entitled “Evil” and reads as follows:
These pretzels are evil. When my snacking comes to an end, I see flashes of myself laying on the unkempt wooden floor of an abandoned house. Scant beams of light burn between the cracks in the boards on the lone window frame, illuminating my tattered and orange-stained clothes. The sound of my body writhing over a pool of empty yellow aluminum bags, a half foot high up the empty broken walls, is quieted only by the echo of my cries of longing and despair.
And the second, by “T. Yoder,” is not far behind:
These little pretzel pieces are totally addictive, which is probably not a good thing because they’re a lot worse for you than you’d think pretzels should be. They have around 60 fat calories and 3 grams of saturated fat in ONE ounce, which equals out to be 15% of your daily sat fat intake per serving (one ounce).
The reason they’re so good AND so fatty is that the mustard/onion seasoning is in an oil that permeates through the shell of the pretzel, making them extra flavorful and not dry at all. They’re a little sweet, have good mustard flavor, and the onion flavor even comes through a little (they taste like they’re supposed to). I try to just grab a handful at snack time and quit while I’m ahead, but I usually end up going back for more later.
I see that, contrary to my intent—which was to warn you off these vile (anagram for “evil”) concoctions, that I may have only succeeded in whetting your appetite. Apologies.
Gun control in the Phillipines…
…doesn’t seem to be working out so well:
While the United States has the highest per-person percentage of gun ownership in the world, according to Reuters, the Philippines has a much lower gun-ownership ratio. There are a mere 4.7 guns for every 100 Filipinos and there are 3.9 million privately licensed firearms in the Philippines. In the United States, there are 88.8 guns per 100 people and 270 million in the country, reports GunPolicy.org, a web site hosted by the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney.
Despite those numbers, the Philippines has a much higher gun-related homicide rate than the United States.
According to the most recently available data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, there were 8.9 homicides per 100,000 people in the Pacific island archipelago in 2003, while in the United States there were 3.3 homicides per 100,000 people.
Illegal gun ownership and gun trade in the Philippines are also problems.
Filipinos are required by law to be licensed to possess a firearm, and civilians are restricted to a single pistol and either a rifle or shotgun. Even so, there are an estimated 160,750 illegal guns in the Philippines, according to GunPolicy.org, which did not have comparable U.S. data available.
Tighter gun restrictions actually encourage illegal gun trade, Reuters notes. “With legal access denied, Filipinos simply turn to the many illegal gunsmiths who ply their trade in back alleys and on the edge of rice fields despite government crackdowns.” In addition, gun laws are not vigorously enforced, and availability is as easy as visiting a gun shop in a Manila shopping mall.
On The Closing of the American Mind
Several years ago I read the first third of Allan Bloom’s great work The Closing of the American Mind. The other day I picked it up where I had left off, and was struck simultaneously by how relevant it still is and how much worse things have gotten since 1987, when it was first published.
The subtitle is “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” We are seeing the ripening fruits of those efforts—which I can’t really call “failed,” because I believe they were deliberate on the part of at least some of the academics Bloom deplores.
Bloom himself was no conservative, although his book was embraced by conservatives and hated by most liberals (despite getting a good initial review in the NY Times). It was deeply critical of the collapse of the great universities of this country to the sway of PC thinking and cultural relativism, and mourned what we have lost along the way. Bloom was a champion of teaching the great works of Western literature, and was criticized as a booster of dead old white men (sound familiar?)
Pick up his book and read almost any page and you will find something to savor and to contemplate—very much food for thought. For example, here’s where I left off and started up again [emphasis mine]:
I believe that the most interesting students are those…who are still young, even look young for their age, who think there is much to look forward to and much they must yet grow up to, fresh and naive, excited by the mysteries to which they have not yet been fully initiated. There are some who are men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about the erotic. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competent specialists, but they are flat-souled. The world is for them what it presents itself to the senses to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the sexual wisdom of our time conspires to make universal.
Bloom died just a few years later, in 1992, of AIDS. I mention this to underscore the complexity of human life. His final book, dictated from his hospital bed while very ill, was on Love and Friendship.
There is little question that Bloom had a gift for friendship, if his good friend Saul Bellow is any guide. Bellow’s highly-praised work Ravelstein is a fictionalized ode to his great friendship with Bloom, who was the template for the title character. The book (which I have not yet read) deals with Bloom/Ravelstein’s homosexuality, which was news to most of the public at the time, but the novel is mostly a testament to Bloom himself. In Bellow’s words:
“Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air… People only want the factual truth. Well, the truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When critics proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about.” But “Allan was certainly one.”
Bloom’s book defies easy characterization. It is not a conservative screed, although it is sometimes regarded as one. It’s a book whose every page—perhaps every sentence—contains something that makes the reader think more deeply about the largest questions of life. Isn’t that what a liberal (in the older sense of the world) education is for?
A huge Amazonian “thank-you”
Is “huge Amazonian” redundant?
Not when it’s a pun.
I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to every single person who ordered from Amazon through my portal for the holidays. It’s a way of sendng me a lovely present, while giving gifts to others (or even yourself) at no extra cost whatsoever. A win-win situation.
And now that the holidays are over, it’s still possible to order Amazon products through neo-neocon, although I probably won’t be doing as much reminding about it.
Overweight good, thin bad?
Those who study and/or write about overweight and health are reeling from the news that it seems to be a wee bit healthier to be a wee bit overweight.
They’re spinning it for all they’re worth, trying to explain the results away. But the results are not isolated; many other large studies have found similar trends.
Being grossly obese is not healthy. But being thin appears to be not all that good for a person, either—at least, if you take the group as a whole.
The thing is, we are individuals, and therefore these results don’t really tell us much about our own situation. I know I tend to feel better at a slightly lower weight, and when I don’t eat tons of heavy, rich food. I also feel better when I do some exercise on a daily basis. So I try to go by that, knowing there are no guarantees of anything.
It seems to me that the biggest besetting sin of medical researchers, doctors, and diet gurus on the topic of weight is that they pretend to know much more than they do. People are so different in this regard there are no universal (and certainly no easy) answers, although we’re always searching for them.
Another thing to remember is that a lot of people have become invested in the idea that we must counter an epidemic of obesity, preferably through the mechanism of governmental intervention (they’re the same people who think the government should intervene in almost everything). But how many people are involved in this “epidemic”?:
Whatever factors explain these mortality rates, it is increasingly clear that the definition of obesity as problem, let alone an “epidemic” requiring government intervention, hinges on official standards with little basis in reality. If the share of American adults whose weight poses a life-threatening danger is closer to 6 percent (the share classified as extremely obese) than to 69 percent (the share deemed “overweight”), that makes a huge difference, whether or not you think trying to move those numbers is an appropriate function of government.
And then, of course, there’s vanity. Don’t sell vanity short. Unless we go back to some older (and more zaftig) standard of beauty, most people will want to be thinner because they think it makes them look better.
So…
…will this be blamed on Republicans, Obama, Democrats, all three, Bush, or the Jews?
Cheer up! Maybe we will…
…have Barney Frank to kick around some more.
Being a member of Congress must be addictive.
A modest vacation
Seven million? Chump change.
Richard Fernandez on Seidman and liberty
Here’s what Fernandez has to say about that Seidman op-ed (the one I previously wrote about here):
The United States was founded on an extraordinary wager upon the nature of the human spirit; predicated on the belief that men valued life and liberty above all; that in order to preserve their individual awareness in order to pursue happiness they would take risks. But let’s face the truth, as Seidel [sic] says, people don’t want the anxiety of liberty. The Founders lost the bet. “Perhaps the dream of a country ruled by ”˜We the people’ is impossibly utopian.”
Maybe it was. Maybe the Founding Fathers were wrong after all to imagine that men craved freedom. In reality what men craved was Kings; whether in person or in parliament made no difference, for so long as it was some agency to which they could hand over all responsibility for their daily lives. And in exchange they would receive food in the Hall or its modern equivalent, the Mall, till it ran out. Free food till Grendel comes to Heorot ”” their sole concern being how near or far to the raised table and fire they were in the interim. If Seidel’s [sic] right that’s all there is to history: a kind of temporary gaiety with one ear open to the approaching sounds of the night. That’s all it will ever be.
Which brings me once more to a quotation from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I first encountered it long ago in high school, when we were assigned to read the Grand Inquisitor chapter from that book (something I find hard to believe; do public high schools require such reading today?).
It made a very deep impression on me back then. Although I don’t think I understood it all that well, it seemed very important. Fortunately or unfortunately, I understand it better today, and it still seems very important:
Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?
There are more things…
…in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy:
The Milky Way contains at least 100 billion planets, or enough to have one for each of its stars, and many of them are likely to be capable of supporting conditions favorable to life, according to a new estimate from scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California (Caltech).
That specific figure of 100 billion planets has been suggested by earlier, separate studies, but the new analysis corroborates the earlier numbers and may even add to them…
“There’s room for these numbers to really grow,” said Jonathan Swift, a Caltech astronomer who is the lead author on a paper on the new findings, in a phone interview…
…[O]verall, the chances of life on such planets are good, because they and their parent stars are likely to be much older and longer-lasting than Earth’s Sun, between two and 10 billion years. That’s because they sip less fuel over time.
So in the future, when Earth’s Sun begins to run out of fuel after another 4 billion years, any intelligent life still on the planet would do well to migrate to a system like Kepler 32.
“This star will be there when the last Sun-like stars die,” [co-author of the study] Johnson concluded.
Note that the lead author of the Caltech study is named Jonathan Swift. As for the earlier, literary Swift, see this:
Swift made reference to the moons of Mars about 150 years before their actual discovery by Asaph Hall, detailing reasonably accurate descriptions of their orbits, in the 19th chapter of [Gulliver’s Travels] (that is, in Part 3, Chapter 3)…
Voltaire was presumably influenced by Swift: his 1750 short story Micromégas, about an alien visitor to Earth, also refers to two moons of Mars.
Swift crater, a crater on Mars’s moon Deimos, is named after Jonathan Swift.
[ADDENDUM: This seems related.]