Tales from the Concordia

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a rather risky method of marriage therapy. But it seems to have worked—for now:

Australian miner Rob Elcombe and his wife, Tracey Gunn, told Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper they booked a spot on the Concordia as a last ditch effort to save their marriage.

Instead, the couple found themselves trying to save their lives when they boarded the very last lifeboat to leave the ship with survivors.

“This has made our bond much, much stronger,” Elcombe told the paper. “Who needs couples counseling, when you survive a Titanic experience?”

Indeed.

Rosalyn Rincon was an escape artist—for real:

Rosalyn Rincon, a 30-year-old magician’s assistant, found herself stuck inside a magician’s trick box when the Concordia hit the rocks.

“She was in the middle of magic show [when it ran aground], inside a magic box. And then all the lights went out so she struggled to get out of the box,” Rincon’s mother, Claire Rincon, told BBC News.

Rincon, who suffered cuts and bruises but managed to escape both the coffin and the ship safely, called her mom as the ship was keeling over.

“Rosalyn was a bit hysterical, saying the ship was sinking. But seeing she’s a dancer and they do drama, I just thought it was all a bit surreal,” she said. “You don’t hear about big ships sinking like that nowadays”¦”

Twenty-nine people are still missing, however.

Some pretty amazing photos from the disaster can be found here. One that isn’t as obviously dramatic as some of the others, but becomes more so upon reflection, is this one taken by a passenger in the crowd waiting for the lifeboats to be launched:

[UPDATED] Scarlett O’Hara…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is missing some tie-dyed sheets:

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a clip of a classic spoof of the scene in “Gone With the Wind” where Scarlett wears a dress she’s had made from her curtains. Carol Burnett is Scarlett, Vicki Lawrence Sissy, Dinah Shore Melaine, Harvey Corman a great Gable-esque Rhett, and Tim Conway is Ashley:

And here’s the original:

Leigh’s seamstress was considerably better than Burnett’s.]

Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day

The New Neo Posted on by

I have trouble with the hagiography of Martin Luther King. Yes, he was a great man who did a great thing for which he should be duly honored: he was an inspirational figure in the non-violent civil rights movement in this country, as well as a remarkable speaker.

The two, of course, are related. It was his personal qualities of leadership and what George H.W. Bush might rightly call “the vision thing” that enabled King to bring together so many people to peacefully demonstrate in furtherance of a lofty and necessary goal, that of ending discrimination against blacks in this country.

As for the rest of it—well, I think it can be summed up by saying that King was a flawed human being. Perhaps MLK himself would be the first to agree; he was a preacher, after all, and he knew a lot about human sin and error. It’s pretty much certain he was a philanderer as well as a plagiarist, and in later life he seemed to veer ever more leftward (some think that’s a feature, not a bug). Does that diminish his achievements? I don’t think so, if we keep it in perspective. I’ve always been more interested in real human beings who accomplish great things despite their own weaknesses than I am in a pretended (and mostly unachievable) perfection.

[NOTE: One thing that’s long amazed me is that King was so young when he was assassinated. At the time I thought him a man in his 50s, but he was actually a mere 39 years old. If he were alive today, he would only have just turned 83 yesterday.

There’s a lot of speculation on what King would have thought of current trends had he lived. I’m no expert on everything the man wrote and said, but it’s my impression that although he seemed to be in favor of some sort of reparations—which he did not limit to blacks, by the way—he would not have backed affirmative action or gay marriage. However, people do change—as I know only too well.]

The primary primaries: game over?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of comments around the blogosphere from people who feel angry because the present primary system so often leads to the nominee being chosen (de facto, anyway) quite early on. The complaint goes like this: Why should a few stupid little states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina decide the whole shebang?

But every New Hampshire (or South Carolina, or to a lesser extent Iowa, because it’s done there by caucuses) voter stands for many thousands more. Each state isn’t typical of the whole, of course; state primaries are not the same as a poll in which the sample is carefully selected (and even those polls and samples are often flawed, sometimes deeply flawed). But I’d bet that when you average out the results of the first three or four or five states to vote, then the results become more and more typical of the entire country. And if the earlier results point pretty powerfully in a single direction to a single winner—which doesn’t always happen, of course—it’s a good bet that this will probably continue to be the trend unless some fresh scandal erupts or some new events emerge to change the picture.

My talk of cumulative representativeness in the early primaries doesn’t mean I like the way the primary system is set up at the moment; I don’t. I think it lends itself to a bandwagon effect, and that having so many primaries on a single day (“Super Tuesday“) favors the candidate with the most money (but then, just about everything about campaigns favors the candidate with the most money). I also think primaries lock in a candidate too soon and make it impossible for a party to retain enough flexibility to react to changing circumstances and events, as well as allowing a less popular candidate to be nominated when the vote is split on the other side by the entry and persistence of a large number of candidates from one faction of the party.

I think the latter is one of the reasons many conservatives are so angry at the growing sense that Romney may run away with this thing. Ah, if only more of the others would drop out, they say. Then the conservative vote would unite behind one candidate who could defeat RINO Romney and be nominated instead. While that argument may have some merit, I’m not at all sure it would work that way. I see all the alternative conservative candidates as having disqualified or marginalized themselves in the eyes of too many voters, and I think a substantial number of their votes would go to Romney.

Wiki lists a number of proposals that have been made in an attempt to improve the primary system. After a quick look, I lean towards one called a “balanced primary system“:

Under this plan, primary contests would be held during 13 out of the 18 weeks, starting in late January and ending in late May. California would vote about halfway through the process. Before California votes, each week’s contest would choose about 12% of the delegates necessary for the nomination, from a single state, or a group of contiguous states. After California votes, the contests would award more delegates in larger groups of states, since the positions of the hopefuls would be better known by then.

To provide balance, diversity in each contest would be maximized. Liberal states would be paired with conservative states; urban areas would be mixed with rural areas. The contests would move around so that each region of the country would award some delegates before California votes. In subsequent years, groups of states could trade off dates, so that the same states did not vote early in every election.

The advantages of this system include the feature that lesser known candidates could still have a chance by using retail politics in small states early, without giving those early small states too much influence. Travel time and advertising cost would be minimized by requiring that groups of states be contiguous, thus saving the hopefuls’ time and money.

Like many election reform ideas, though, I don’t think it’s going to happen. Many states have too vested an interest in being first. What’s more, it’s the sort of proposal that keeps falling by the wayside once the primaries and the election are over and we’ve got a lot of other and seemingly more pressing things on which to focus our attention.

Huntsman to drop out of the race

The New Neo Posted on by

Word is that Huntsman will drop out of the race on Monday and endorse Romney.

Huntsman never really caught on, and I think it was partly a personality thing. It’s hard to define why certain personalities appeal to voters and others don’t, but he seemed especially low-key and had no natural constituency to speak of. Not as conservative as some nor as well-known as others, he didn’t seem to have that fire in the belly. It didn’t help, either, that he was the ambassador to China under Obama.

My guess is that most of Huntsman’s votes will go to Romney. But since he didn’t have that many votes, I doubt it will be of much import.

Bain and the capitalism question

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever since this Bain thing has been dominating the news, a lot of people—both pundits and commenters—have been saying that all Romney has to do is explain what he did at Bain and what Bain’s activities are all about, as though that were a simple thing to accomplish.
I’ve now spent an enormous number of hours (really can’t say how many, but I can safely say it’s more than most American voters are going to be willing to spend) trying to bone up on the subject as best I can, and it’s a daunting endeavor, to say the least.

The difficulty doesn’t just lie in the fact that the general topic is pretty technical and presupposes a fairly high level of intelligence, although both things are true. It’s also that it’s not easy to find an unbiased source. All the writers on the subject seem to have a dog in this race, and we’re not just talking about Romney as that dog.

The situation reminds me a bit of AGW, although the AGW controversy is even more convoluted and requires even more technical knowledge that most people lack. But the issues are similarly large, and in the case of the Bain brouhaha they involve nothing less than that old debate that has led to such turmoil around the world (just ask the residents of the former Soviet Union): is capitalism and/or the free market system inherently good or bad or neutral, and what limits should be placed on it?

You may be relieved to hear that I’m not going to tackle that question today. But don’t think I haven’t been thinking about it. I believe it would certainly be a good “dialogue” to have in public life—in fact, I think it’s one we’ve been having in some form or other for quite some time, maybe the entire history of the Western world since feudalism met its demise some centuries ago.

But a presidential campaign is not going to lend itself to a dispassionate discussion of the sort, even if such a thing were possible anyway. My guess is that Romney’s “explanation,” when offered, will be just as self-serving and fall just as short of the goal of an objective analysis of the situation as Newt’s feigned concern about the possible rapaciousness of Bain (or maybe I missed his previous crusade against leveraged buyouts) has been. Meanwhile, one could do worse than read this WSJ article by Holman W. Jenkins, and its accompanying comments section.