Obama didn’t go to law school for nothing
Law requires an exceedingly precise use of language. People who are attracted to the profession often already have this tendency, and then they are schooled further in the honing of the ability.
Bill Clinton was reviled for his lawyerly use of language in the service of weaseling, of parsing his words so carefully—especially when in the service of self-defense—that although they seemed to say one thing they really said another. Listeners learned not to take his words at face value, but to scrutinize them the way a lawyer would the language of a contract about to be signed.
Now comes Barack Obama, another lawyer, not an unusual profession for politicians. Not all lawyer-politicians are up there with Bill in the word-parsing competition, but Obama is revealing himself—far more than Hillary—to be Bill’s true heir in that department. Continue reading →
More on Obama and courage: affirmative action is waiting in the wings
Whether it was a joke or not, Obama said he wants us to have an epiphany and vote for him. Well, I had one about him yesterday, and it’s that he has a major deficiency in the realm of moral courage.
It explains a lot about Obama. His inability to definitively break with Wright, for example. Continue reading →
Obama, Hillary, McCain, and courage under fire
I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the main themes of the coming election isn’t just “change.” It’s guts.
Why else would Hillary lie about having come under fire in Bosnia? Surely claiming there was physical danger involved in her trip twelve years ago wouldn’t have padded her foreign policy resume in a substantive way. Nor is being under fire (in anything but the metaphoric sense) something that Presidents usually have to deal with, except in assassination attempts.
Instead, what her statements really padded was her claim to have the intestinal fortitude—in other words, the cojones—for the Presidency. It’s ironic that this was the topic she was caught for lying about because, really, cojones is one characteristic that most people already grant Hillary. Continue reading →
The demon-haunted world (Part II: autism)
[Part I.]
Science is certainly far from infallible. That’s especially true of studies related to human beings, on whom any sort of research is notoriously difficult to perform and evaluate. The variables are myriad and uncontrollable, and ethics ordinarily prevents the sort of callous manipulation of subjects that would yield somewhat better results.
When evaluating a disease or syndrome, it helps if the vector of disease is singly determined. This is rarer than one thinks; even in diseases caused by microbes, for example, in which exposure to the microbe is a necessary cause of the illness, it is rarely a sufficient cause. There’s the poorly-understood problem of resistance—why do some people come down with the disease when exposed and others do not?
And even many problems that seem to have a strong genetic component (schizophrenia comes to mind) commonly have only about 50% concordance in identical twins, which indicates that some unknown environmental factor or factors must account for half the variance.
The scientific method was a triumph of human thought, but it took a while to develop because certain things about it are counterintuitive. It requires that we suspend judgment on the causes of a phenomenon even though we may think we can come to conclusions about it on the evidence of our eyes. But often the results run counter to what we would have predicted based on observations and/or intuition. And sometimes, of course, research yields incorrect or ambiguous results because of methodological or observational problems.
And so we come to the case of the autism epidemic. Continue reading →
Soon they’re gonna wish they had Spitzer back
A confession a day keeps Governor Paterson okay.
Obama’s foreign policy: riding on a smile and sophistry—and “dignity promotion”
I read this Spencer Ackerman piece with some interest, thinking it promised to define Obama’s foreign policy. And, since Obama has been roundly criticized for being all rhetoric, with no “there” there (as Gertrude Stein would say), I was looking forward to something specific at last.
Ackerman writes that Obama is proposing:
…the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we’ve heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. “It’s time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right,” Obama said in a January speech. “It’s time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right.”
“Strong and right;” sounds good. And so I read the piece, trying to extract the meat of it.
But that proved elusive. Continue reading →
Sanity Squad tonight
For all of you Sanity Squad podcast fans, tune in tonight at 8 PM Eastern time (or download later) to hear Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Shrink, and me discuss the volatile situation in China re Tibet.
You can go home again—at fifty?
It’s not news that in times of economic strife, grownup children often go back to live with their parents, if they’re desperate enough or shameless enough and the parents are kind enough to have them. And since this is a time of economic strife, it’s not surprising that some empty-nesters are seeing their fledglings return for a little R&R.
However, a few of the recent returnees are a little long in the tooth, to mix zoological metaphors. A new and startling phenomenon appears to be on the rise, according to reports from financial planners: the return of the 50-something “child” to the parental manse, this time for quite a bit longer than the usual few days’ obligatory visit. Continue reading →
This headline made me do a double take
I’m talking about this article, which had a headline on the Yahoo home page that was rather eye-catching: “Forecasters warn of historic flooding in Ark.”
Happy Easter!
[This is a repost from Easter 2005.]
Happy Easter to all my celebratory Christian readers, and to all those who just enjoy the holiday as well!
One year when my son was little, I spent the week prior to Easter blowing out eggs and dying them. Now that he’s grown and away, the eggs are packed away in boxes and stored in parts unknown. If I could get my hands on them I’d photograph them for you, because even all these years later they are beautiful, with dyes both subtle and unsubtle, interesting etched patterns and rainbow effects—definitely one of my finest crafts hours (to tell the truth, I didn’t have so many fine crafts hours, although there was also a gingerbread house we made that was stored in the attic and alas, eaten by small creatures–and not human ones, at that.)
Blown-out eggs are well worth the trouble, and why? Because they last. And nothing eats them. You only have to make them once, and you’re all set. They are a bit fragile, but not so very.
So here’s my Easter present to you (not that you couldn’t find it yourself): the instructions for blowing eggs: Continue reading →
The Democrats’ dilemma: what’s a Party leader to do?
What is it about Florida and voting? The state seems cursed. Along with Michigan, it’s become the center of a Democratic political firestorm because of an earlier decision by national Party leaders to disallow its primary due to violations of rules about when it was allowed to be held.
The decision was made by the DNC and head Howard Dean back when it all didn’t seem quite so important. One irony of the decision is that this move by the Democrats has made them arguably less “democratic” and populist than the Republicans—at least in Florida. The Republicans addressed the same issue by allowing the two states involved half their usual delegate number rather than the total.
Now the DNC decision has come back to haunt the Democratic Party, in part because of another problem—the extreme closeness of the race between Obama and Hillary. Continue reading →