Solving a decades-long science fiction mystery via the blog

The New Neo Posted on by

Isn’t the internet wonderful? Through this blog, I recently got the answer to a question that’s been tormenting me for close to fifty years.

Well, maybe not tormenting exactly. But I’ve long been troubled by my inability to identify a sci-fi story that had transfixed me when I’d first read it as a youngster. It concerned a society in which people lived for so long that, to counteract their inevitable boredom and ennui, they learned a way to temporarily transfer their consciousness into different creatures, such as animals.

Funny how memory goes. For a long time I thought the author must be Clifford Simak, and I had a vague recollection of the title of the collection as being something with the word “strange” or “strangers” in it. I kept looking for an anthology by Simak entitled Strangers in the Universe, and about two decades ago I’d gone so far as to locate a used copy and to read each story to see if the plot resembled the one I remembered. No dice.

But all I had to do was post this query last December on a thread about memory enhancement and bam!—a couple of hours later, a commenter volunteered the information I’d been seeking for so long.

It turns out the story was actually not so short; it was a Poul Anderson novella known as “The Star Beast,” which had appeared in his 1961 collection Strangers From Earth, although it had first been published in a magazine in 1950.

So I hadn’t been so far off on the title of the correct book after all, although my error had kept me from locating it. Memory (and it was in a thread about memory where the question and its solution first appeared) is a funny thing, and I’m pleased to see that mine wasn’t so faulty.

While I was researching this post, I discovered that, coincidentally, “The Star Beast” is also the name of a later novel by Robert A. Heinlein (1954), strangely enough. And in another odd coincidence, an even earlier short story (1940) by (of all people) Clifford Simak comes very close in title: it’s called “The Space Beasts.”

As I was looking this stuff up I noted two other things. The first is how astoundingly prolific both Anderson and Heinlein were (see this and this). The second is how evocative and poetic many of the great sci-fi short story titles are. I’d sensed that as a child and had responded to it; some of the best titles (which I’d forgotten in the interim) sent little shivers of remembered delight and mystery through me as I saw them again: “All the Traps of Earth,” “The Stars Are Also Fire,” and “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.”

[NOTE: My very favorite sci-fi writer when I was young was Philip K. Dick. His stories had creeped me out mightily—the stuff of nightmares—while simultaneously fascinating.]

Calling all Newt supporters

The New Neo Posted on by

Tell me, what do you think is going on here (please read the link to understand what I’m referring to)?

(1) Gingrich is just being helpful in trying to move Romney to the right, because he knows that Romney will face the same charges at the hands of the Obama crowd come the general.

(2) Gingrich feels a deep moral outrage by Romney’s actions during his tenure at Bain and by all similar business practices, and he thinks the American people ought to be informed, come what may.

(3) Gingrich really thinks the lies in the movie are true; he’s just misinformed.

(4) It’s payback time, and all’s fair in love and campaigns.

(5) Gingrich has gone over to the Dark Side (or maybe he was always there).

(6) Gingrich knows nothing about this film, disapproves of it, has no power to stop it, and will denounce it.

(7) Gingrich is like the drowning man who knows he’s going under and wants to pull Romney down with him (oh, I guess I said something like that yesterday).

(8) Gingrich thinks he will win the Republican nomination this way.

(9) Gingrich thinks Santorum will win the nomination if Romney gets knocked out and that he’ll then pick Gingrich as VP.

Or, if your answer is (10) (none of the above), please let me know what you think is really going on in the cranium of Newt Gingrich.

More spelling confusion

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s time for another grammar rant, to go with my “it’s vs. its” harangue. But this time we will deal with “who’s” and “whose.”

On the face of it there’s no reason to confuse the two—“who’s” follows the classic rule for contractions, short for “who is,” and “whose” is quite clearly the possessive form of “who.” It ought to be much easier than the distinction between “it’s” and “its,” because the it-words are spelled exactly the same except for that apostrophe, whereas the who-words are spelled differently from each other.

And yet I continue to see them used incorrectly. Who’s doing it? People whose education has been sorely lacking, that’s who.

And while I’m at it, I might as well tackle another mix-up that puzzles me just as much: the “loose/lose” confusion. There’s no apostrophe there to get in the way and cloud the brain, just straight spelling. And yet, along with “choose/chose,” mistakes are legion.

It’s not that I’m some sort of schoolmarm. But I’m puzzled by the ubiquity of certain errors, when words that seem much more difficult are seldom written incorrectly. Maybe it’s the fact that Spellcheck catches the latter and not the former, which generally involve substitutions of one common word for another. But whatever the reasons for the errors—and if you have any explanations, please offer them—let’s rededicate ourselves to the motto of this blog:

Romney the projected NH winner

The New Neo Posted on by

Fox News projects Romney as the NH winner by double digits, with Ron Paul second, and Huntsman third.

An interesting statistic is that this is the first time since 1976 that the same person has won the Republican primary in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The two states are not similar. And South Carolina, up next, is dissimilar to both of them as well.

[ADDENDUM: Frivolous comment alert: Ann Romney is wearing a white suit. On TV. A brave, brave—and slim—woman, who’s given birth to five children, is in her 60s, and looks smashing.]

[ADDENDUM II: Happy to see that Romney’s speech is mainly focusing on criticizing Obama’s policies. “The president has run out of ideas; now he’s running out of excuses”—and tonight he’s appealing to South Carolina voters to make sure Obama is also “running out of time.”]

Republican candidates against capitalism

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but I’m angry.

I’m used to politics and its dirtiness and hypocrisy, the misrepresentations one candidate routinely makes about the other. They all pretty much do it, especially in their ads. This does not surprise me.

But I can’t recall an attack that’s made me as angry as the one launched by Gingrich, and to a lesser extent Perry and Huntsman, against Romney’s record at Bain Capital. Before I even read this editorial in National Review (with which I agree), I was aghast when I saw some of their statements on the news last night.

Readers of this blog know that my preferred candidate this year is Romney. And not just because he’s more electable (although polls show he’s that), but because I think he’s competent, smart, conservative enough—and, very importantly, has an understanding of the business world that not only prospective opponent Obama lacks, but that Romney’s current Republican rivals lack as well.

As I said, I’ve seen one candidate unfairly misrepresent something about the other before; it happens all the time, although I never like it. But this one is different. I can’t recall a time when the attack featured statements that violated basic principles that the attacker and his/her party were supposed to stand for—such as, for instance, knowledge of what capitalism is and what sometimes happens when companies are failing. Any candidate who wants to run against the bailouts cannot attack Romney for what he did at Bain, which was to try to save failing companies by (among other things) cutting costs, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, and to make money into the bargain. Any candidate who wants to appeal to people who would like a president who actually knows something about how business works cannot attack Romney for what he did at Bain (unless, of course, he was unethical in some way, which is not being alleged).

But that’s what they (especially Gingrich) are doing. Here’s NR on the subject:

Newt Gingrich’s risible super-PAC factotum has gone to the length of producing a feverish little film about Romney’s tenure as a “corporate raider” at Bain. Governor Perry, for his part, told a Republican audience: “If you are the victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it is the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain ”” he caused it.” To appropriate Governor Perry’s favorite adjective, that is the ultimate in populist pandering, or something close to it.

Huntsman’s private-sector experience consists of having served as an executive at the firm owned by his billionaire father. Gingrich and Perry have between them about eleven minutes’ worth of relevant private-sector experience ”” Perry being subsidized by the federal government to farm cotton, Gingrich subsidizing himself by farming his political connections ”” and therefore may not know (or care) what a private-equity firm such as Bain does. (Gingrich might consider asking his friends at leveraged-buyout firm Forstmann Little, where he was on the board.) Bain is involved in, among other things, leveraged buyouts, meaning that the firm and its investors borrow money from banks to acquire companies, usually firms that are in trouble but believed to be salvageable. These firms generally are bought on the theory that they represent fundamentally sound underlying business enterprises that are for one reason or another performing deficiently, usually because of incompetent management. Strong, thriving companies rarely are targets for leveraged-buyout acquisitions ”” if things are going well, there is no incentive to sell the company. If the firms are publicly traded, they often are taken private, their stocks delisted from the exchanges, and then reorganized. Once the company has been returned to profitability, it is taken public again or sold to a private buyer, in the hopes of turning a profit on the deal.

As you can imagine, companies that are buyout targets often are in very poor shape, and reviving them is no small thing. Many of them go into bankruptcy. Product lines are discontinued, retail locations are closed, assets are sold off, and, almost inevitably, jobs are lost. Some never recover. When the restructuring is successful, reinvigorated firms expand, add locations, develop new products, and create jobs. That is the creative destruction of capitalism…

[T]o abominate Mitt Romney for having been a success at the business of investing in struggling American companies, connecting entrepreneurs with capital and producers with markets, is foolish and destructive. Republicans ought to know better, and the fact that Gingrich et al. apparently do not is the most disturbing commentary on the state of the primary field so far.

This is very different from attacking the attackers for merely attacking; the big problem is the form the attack takes. These people are supposed to be the principled conservatives; you know, the ones who don’t toss out their beliefs when it’s expedient.

So what’s happening here? These guys know that if they don’t raise their poll numbers and lower Romney’s pretty soon it’s going to be curtains for them. As a result, they’ve become the equivalent of the drowning man who, in his desperate efforts to save himself, clutches at people around him and manages to drag them down too. And that includes their own supposedly conservative principles, and may include Republican chances for victory this year as well.

Nice going.

[ADDENDUM: I don’t usually listen to Rush Limbaugh, but today he’s tearing into Gingrich for this. And Limbaugh is hardly a Romney fan.]

[ADDENDUM II: Ron Paul shows some class.]

[ADDENDUM III: Jay Nordlinger nails it:

I fled the Democratic party many years ago. And one of the reasons was, I couldn’t stand the class resentment, the envy, the hostility to wealth, the cries of “Richie Rich!” And I hear them from conservatives, at least when Romney is running.

Go ahead, have your “bloodbath” in South Carolina. Make Romney the little guy in the top hat and tails, from the Monopoly game. Have your Santorum, your Perry, your Newt. They may carry something like four states in the fall, but at least they’ve never sullied their hands with ”” eek! ”” business.]

New Hampshire primary today

The New Neo Posted on by

Unless you’ve been under a rock for quite some time, you’re no doubt aware that today is the New Hampshire primary. New Hampshire’s small, but it has a traditional day in the sun in choosing the nominee, although New Hampshire voters also tend to be rather quirky in their picks.

Here’s a thread to discuss the primary and its results.

[UPDATE 8:11 PM: Romney is projected to win New Hampshire by double digits, with Ron Paul second.]

Compare and contrast

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Walter Shapiro in TNR on the most boring primary ever, this one (which he thinks Romney will win):

Romney inspires all the enthusiasm of “Vegetables Are Our Friends” week in an elementary school cafeteria. My nominee for the typical New Hampshire Romney voter is Dwight Corning, a recent transplant from Connecticut who moved to Dover after he retired from an electronic firm. “I think Romney’s reliable,” Corning said after the rally in Rochester. “I don’t think he’ll do anything crazy when he gets in.” A vote is a vote, but Corning sounded about as passionate as if he had been asked to recommend a CPA.

And here’s Michael Gerson in the WaPo on Romney:

Romney is temperamentally conservative but not particularly ideological. He reserves his enthusiasm for quantitative analysis and organizational discipline. He seems to view the cultural and philosophic debates that drive others as distractions from the real task of governing — making systems work.

His competitors have attempted to portray Romney’s ideological inconsistency over time as a character failure. It hasn’t worked, mainly because Romney is a man of exemplary character — deeply loyal to his faith, his family and his country. But he clearly places political ideology in a different category of fidelity. Like Dwight Eisenhower, Romney is a man of vague ideology and deep values. In political matters, he is empirical and pragmatic. He studies problems, assesses risks, calculates likely outcomes. Those expecting Romney to be a philosophic leader will be disappointed. He is a management consultant, and a good one.

Has the moment of the management consultant arrived in American politics? In our desperate drought of public competence, Romney has a strong case to make.

The two quotes highlight, among other things, some of the differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals were wowed by Obama during the 2008 campaign; he excited and inspired them. Shapiro considers Romney dull, and perhaps he is in many ways. But although conservatives like a charismatic candidate as well (Ronald Reagan, for example), they tend to be less focused on that sort of emotional reaction. And perhaps the entire nation is less interested in such a thing now, A.O. (after Obama).

Shapiro interprets New Hampshirite Corning’s statements as a lack of enthusiasm. But it could just as easily be relief. Maybe we don’t need an inspirational, charismatic, president. Maybe—as Gerson indicates—we need someone who is competent and who can lead.

I’m a bit surprised at Rush Limbaugh

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that Limbaugh lets his disapproval of a Romney nomination blind him to the other possibilities here when he offers the following exchange as support for his thesis that “the Democrats want Romney [as Republican nominee] — and you all know it”:

BRAZILE: Mitt Romney won tonight because no one touched him — and for Democrats, you know what? It was good news for us.

KARL: Why is that?

BRAZILE: Because we believe that the weakest candidate is the candidate that the Republicans are not attackin’, and that’s Mitt Romney.

KARL: Oh, come on.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No, you don’t believe that, Donna.

RUSH: That’s Stephanopoulos. What Stephanopoulos is saying is, “Shut up, Donna! What the hell are you doing, Donna? Did you not take your meds?”

I think Limbaugh is underestimating the degree of possible game-playing here. Maybe he’s even correct, but I doubt it; there’s absolutely no reason to suppose that it’s Brazile who’s being straightforward.

The New Hampshire Romney/Christie show—or is it the Christie/Romney show?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I decided, New England being the small place it is, that I would go to one New Hampshire primary event.

I had a few basic criteria. The first was that it not be a breakfast meeting (not a morning person, moi). The second was that it feature more than one candidate, ex-candidate, or future candidate. That made it a no-brainer to go to the Exeter High School rally starring the unusual duo of Mitt Romney and Chris Cristie.

The place was packed, and it wasn’t just with the press or the Occupiers, although they both were there in locust-like droves (the press quieter than the Occupiers, although more numerous). In fact, there were so many regular folks there that even though I arrived way ahead of time, I ended up in an overflow room rather than the one featuring the main event. We outliers were assured that Mitt and Chris would come in to personally address our gym crowd of several hundred, and that their speeches would be piped in (the audio, not the video).

Thus I missed seeing Romney’s sons, who were present at the main event. But because I was one of the first people turned away, I had a front row stand (no chairs, no seat) immediately behind the ropes that the advance men set up to clear a little square footage where the speakers were going to stand on a wooden box (not all that different from the proverbial soapbox) and address our crowd.

The people around me seemed happy to be there but calm and willing to wait. A very civilized group; even the Occupiers were willing to bide their time, although they milled around a bit restlessly in the back of the room.

And then the stars came in. I was about three feet from Romney and Christie with a completely unobstructed view, and if I were better at working my cell phone camera I’d have gotten a ton of photos and video too. But unfortunately I am not, so the following two will have to do (and in the Romney one I unfortunately caught what was probably his single most unattractive moment):

From my perch just a few feet from each man as they spoke, I observed that they look like themselves only different. Christie, for example, (how shall I put this delicately?) is heavier than I’d previously thought, and I already knew he was heavy. But maybe anyone would look heavier next to the slender Romney.

It was Romney who was most surprising. It’s often been remarked (by me, for example, here) that Romney is a handsome man who looks pretty good for his age. But now that I’ve seen him up-close and personal I would like to correct that: he looks better than his photos, and much younger. Except for the graying temples, he could pass for a man nearly half his age.

Is it clean-living (Romney the Mormon does not smoke or drink of even ingest coffee)? I don’t know, but whatever it is if he could bottle it he would make another gazillion dollars to add to his first fortune. What’s more, in this particular venue both men eschewed jackets for more casual wear, and thus it was possible to see that Romney is in great shape—and not just great shape for a 64-year-old man, either; great shape for anyone, although of a type more suited to the occupations of outfielder or runner or even dancer than linebacker or first baseman.

But enough of the pulchritude. Although the physicality was one of the first things I noticed (call me shallow, call me frivolous), the other thing I saw in their most-standard of campaign speeches was that both men seemed genuinely relaxed and happy (not surprising for Christie; surprising to me for Romney) and Romney was very energized. How he does this—or how any of the candidates do it, for that matter—with such a punishing schedule is a mystery to me. He did not seem like a windup doll or automaton, but a flesh and blood human who meant what he said. Make of that what you will.

Christie was more hard-hitting, of course, giving the hecklers a taste of their own medicine. But perhaps the best line of the evening (for me at least) was when Ann Romney said that after their campaign for the presidency in 2008 she told Mitt that never again would she be part of a presidential run. And he reminded her that she’d said something similar about having another child after each pregnancy. So, here she was.

[NOTE: In the photos, the woman in the black boots, jeans, and red sweater is Kelly Ayotte, Republican senator from New Hampshire. The other legs with the black boots and black pants, and then the gray sweater above, belong to Ann Romney, who looked almost as good as her husband. Almost, but not quite.

Here’s some local coverage of the event, with more about the speeches themselves. It states that the crowd was approximately 1000, although I believe that may have been just in the main room. But the estimate of the number of press was 100. I’d say both estimates were low.]

The biology of politics

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve grown very very tired of research that purports to study conservatives and liberals. It seems that most of it is constructed to prove that the former are bad guys and the latter good guys.

But this one seems to be a rare exception—although I’m sure someone can interpret the results in the usual conservatives-bad/liberals-good manner. At the very least, though, I find the results interesting:

Conservatives reacted more strongly to, fixated more quickly on, and looked longer at the unpleasant images; liberals had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the pleasant images compared with conservatives…While liberals’ gazes tended to fall upon the pleasant images, such as a beach ball or a bunny rabbit, conservatives clearly focused on the negative images ”“ of an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet, for example…

[C]onservatives also exhibited a stronger physiological response to images of Democratic politicians ”“ presumed to be a negative to them ”“ than they did on pictures of well-known Republicans. Liberals, on the other hand, had a stronger physiological response to the Democrats ”“ presumed to be a positive stimulus to them ”“ than they did to images of the Republicans.

Conservatives often criticize liberals for believing, against all evidence, that basic societal problems can be “fixed” if only we have enough goodwill (beachballs and bunnies, anyone?). And liberals often criticize conservatives for being fear-based (as in the so-called War on Terror, for example) or pessimistic about the possibilities of human improvement.

Not that this sort of research proves much of anything at all, or closely ties into any of that. But still, it’s interesting to someone like me, who puzzles over these differences and who’s looked at the clouds of politics from both sides now. Of course, I tend to also reject any physiological or innate explanations of political differences, because (among other things) how would they account for changers?

Romney: defense vs. offense

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day the following metaphor came to me about the Republican race and the antipathy to Romney’s candidacy:

In football (a sport about which I know next to nothing of the fine points), one thing I do know is that each side has two lines, defensive and offensive (we can ignore the special teams for now). The former goes into the game when the opponents have the ball, and the latter when the team itself has possession.

So, here’s the comparison (not a perfect one, I freely admit): Tea Partiers and many other conservatives are convinced that this is the moment for the Republican offensive line to be in there. Obama is incredibly weak, they think (he doesn’t have possession, as it were, even though he’s the incumbent), and they want their strongest conservative candidate in there to score, and score relatively easily.

So when they look at Romney they say, why’s the defense in there? And a weak one at that?

Those conservatives who support Romney despite their reservations about his conservatism think Obama will remain a formidable candidate: i.e., Obama’s still on offense. Romney may not be an ideological purist, but he can block Obama most effectively.

Moderates, of course, support him for other reasons.