Ryan Derangement Syndrome: MoDo’s got it bad

The New Neo Posted on by

Paul Ryan has flummoxed the left. They know he’s evil, and yet he seems like such a nice guy. Therefore he’s doubly evil, because his smiling facade houses a soul so dark.

Witness Maureen Dowd’s latest column on the man, which is a good example of the growing genre that one might call the Picture of Dorian Gray mode of Ryan critique.

Did you know that Ryan’s a hater? Yes indeed, as described by no less an authority than (as Dowd admiringly writes):

…Tom Morello, the Grammy-winning, Harvard-educated guitarist for the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, [who] punctured Paul Ryan’s pretensions to cool in a Rolling Stone essay rejecting R&R (Romney ’n’ Ryan) as R&R (rock ’n’ roll).

Morello’s statements in his role as (Harvard-educated!) political commentator were apparently important enough not only for Rolling Stone to publish, but for Dowd to highlight at the beginning of her NY Times column:

[Ryan] is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Morello writes, adding: “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ”˜rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically, the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.”

Dowd goes on to evoke the many ghosts of hated GOP VP-nominees past. Ryan’s like Sarah Palin because he uses the word “awesome.” He’s like Dan Quayle because he’s young enough to be Romney’s son, as Quayle was to Bush senior. And he’s like Dick Cheney because he sounds reasonable but that’s merely an example of “la belle indifférence, or “the beautiful calm” of hysterical people” (and note that Dowd uses the term in a manner that demonstrates an almost total ignorance of what it actually means; see this].

And then there’s the usual reverse-racist crap du jour about “white guys,” so popular in these enlightened days:

Republicans find the tableau of two rich white guys ”” same shirts, different generations ”” comforting.

Actually, it’s Democrats like Maureen who find it comforting to think so.

It’s often said that conservatives believe liberals are stupid but liberals believe conservatives are evil. If Paul Ryan is one of the most conservative members of Congress, ergo he must be one of the most evil, even if his demeanor and words and personality and history project nothing of the sort. But that’s the beauty of it, according to Dowd, whose last paragraph begins this way:

Beyond the even-keeled Ryan mien lurks full-tilt virulence.

Full-tilt virulence, thy name is Dowd.

Annals of math: how integral calculus did me in

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This fond reminiscence was sparked by a comment on the Periodic Table thread.]

The college I attended had a fairly rigorous set of science requirements for its liberal arts candidates: two (count em, two) year-long lab science sequences, or a year of a lab science and a year of math. Not business math either; math math.

Even though I’d been good at both science and math in high school, this was a daunting prospect. I started out thinking I’d do a year of biology and a year of math. The biology worked out, but not the math; not at all. I somehow managed to slide though the first course, differential calculus, although I can’t say my understanding of it was very deep. But with integral I hit the wall.

The professor was from Turkey and could not speak English in anything but the most rudimentary way. Each class meeting followed the same format: he turned his back on the students and his face to the blackboard, and then covered the board’s entire surface with a faint and squiggly scrawl of numbers and symbols that were virtually unreadable, all the while engaged in nearly-inaudible mumbling.

I tried to keep up by reading the book, but the text (although nominally in English) was impenetrable as well, at least to me. I don’t think I even knew that tutoring might be available—I’d never struggled with a subject before—and by the time I realized I was in deep do-do, I felt helpless to reverse the trend.

It was too late to drop the course, and I managed to pass the midterm. But the final was another matter. Finals at that particular university were three hours long, and this one consisted of five problems. I don’t remember anything about them except that I had no idea how to tackle a single one.

I spent about fifteen minutes staring at test paper and then at the empty bluebook, back and forth and back and forth, as though by sheer concentration and force of will I could figure out some way to respond. But absolutely nothing came to mind and—after looking around at the class of about eighty fellow students, most scratching away diligently, but some immobile and sweating, like me—I closed the pages, stood up, walked resolutely to the front desk, and placed my bluebook there.

The entire class gasped in unison. I never knew whether they were flabbergasted because they mistakenly believed I had completed the test in fifteen minutes, or whether they were stunned because they realized I had given up so very early and dramatically. But I walked out of the room knowing that my grade would be a big fat “F” and I would have to pick up either another entire year of a lab science to make up for it, or another math course that would almost undoubtedly be over my head.

I later discovered that about a third of the students in the class had failed along with me, although not as flamboyantly. I never knew what happened to the professor, because I transferred soon after, to a university that serendipitously required only a single year of a lab science and no math at all, a fact for which I was exceedingly grateful.

Onward and upward with the Muslim Brotherhood

The New Neo Posted on by

The Muslim Brotherhood is tightening its control over Egypt, and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it.

Dennis Ross seems to believe, though, that Obama could arrest the slide with some toughlove:

Egypt’s president and people should…know that we are prepared to mobilize the international community, and global financial institutions, to help Egypt ”” but that we will only do so if Egypt’s government is prepared to play by a set of rules grounded in reality and key principles. They must respect the rights of minorities and women; they must accept political pluralism and the space for open political competition; and they must respect their international obligations, including the terms of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

I’m not sure what dream world Ross is living in. But I’m cynically amused by the notion that our threats might induce Egypt’s government to “respect the rights of minorities and women” and “accept political pluralism” as well as make nice to Israel. I’m also cynically amused by the idea that the Obama administration has any notion of making such demands of Egypt and/or following through on them.

Obama thought attacking Romney/Ryan on Medicare was a winner…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it turned out maybe not so much.

Here’s more on how that came to be.

Author Mark Mackinnon writes:

…[A]ll of this could have been avoided had President Obama simply led and acted on the 2010 Simpson-Bowles plan.

Simply? Simply? Hardly; Obama was never going to do something so relatively reasonable and so at odds with his agenda.

The periodic table

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I came across this post from 2006 the other day and thought it could bear a recycling.]

When I was in junior high there was a large poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements that hung in the science classroom in front of a little-used blackboard spanning the right side of the room, next to where I sat.

I’m not sure whether anybody in the junior high learned what the chart was about—we certainly didn’t. But it was a grim reminder of what awaited us in high school, when we’d be required to take Chemistry and Physics and Geometry and Trigonometry and a bunch of other subjects that sounded Hard, and sounded like An Awful Lot of Work.

I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. In my more bored moments in class (and I had quite a few of them) I would glance at that chart on the wall and idly ponder its arcane mysteries. It looked like a more old-fashioned and slightly yellowing version of this:


That chart was the sort of thing that made me nearly sick to my stomach whenever I looked at it, something like slide rules and drawings of the innards of the internal combustion engine, and the long rows of monotonous monochromatic law books in my father’s office.

But then time passed—as time often does—and I found myself a junior in high school, sitting in chemistry class and finally (and reluctantly) about to penetrate the secrets of the Periodic Table. The teacher, a small, elderly (oh, he must have been at least fifty), enthusiastic, spry man, explained it to us.

I sat awestruck as I took in what he was saying. That chart may have looked boring, but it demonstrated something so absolutely astounding that I could hardly believe it was true. The world of the elements at the atomic level was spectacularly orderly, with such grandeur, power, and rightness that I could only think of one term for it, and that was “beautiful.”

I did very well in chemistry, and even thought of majoring in it in college, although in the end I stuck to psychology and anthropology. But I never forgot the lesson of the Periodic Table (actually, it taught many lessons, although some of them I did forget). But the one I remembered most was that appearances can be deceptive, and that what lies beneath a bland and stark exterior can be a world of magic.

And now I’ve finally discovered a Periodic Table worth its salt—or, rather, its sodium chloride. Take a look at this, a Periodic Table nearly as lovely as the elemental wonders it illustrates:


If you follow the link to the poster at its source, you can click on parts of it to enlarge them and see more of the detail. And then you might say with Keats:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,””that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

I know there’s some deep meaning lurking in here somewhere, if only we could find it:

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Mario and Luigi?

The WASP-less election

The New Neo Posted on by

I hadn’t thought of this before, but it’s an interesting point that Peter Shrag makes:

For the first time in the 236-year history of the Republic, no one on either presidential ticket belongs to the once-prototypical American group, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Until 2008, when black Protestant Barack Obama ran with Catholic Joe Biden, we’d never had even one party offer a non-WASP ticket.

But that’s not all:

Looking past the presidential contenders, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, is Catholic, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader is Mormon. There’s not a WASP to be found among the nine justices of the Supreme Court (one black, five Catholic, three Jewish). That’s a clean sweep of all three branches of government.

Shrag goes on to add a lot of horse manure about how the voter ID laws are a backlash to all this, and an example of xenophobia. He conveniently ignores the fact that the same people who champion that movement are supporters of Catholic Paul Ryan, and black men such as Herman Cain and Allen West, as well as Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal and many others of varied ethnicities.

And funny thing, Obama seems to be the most WASP-like of the foursome, since that’s the predominant ethnic group on his mother’s side.

By the way, I can’t say I care much about the issue. I think of it more as a historical curiosity.