■ Harvard profs can’t get into Rock’n’Roll heaven, so where do they go instead?
■ Power Line has continued to cover the so-called “GOP talking points” on Terri Schiavo. The likelihood that they had any official standing is now in the range of nil, that they were a plant by Democrats or the media very high. The latest updates are here (signs of forgery to substantiate forgery) and here (further evidence that the document was not circulated among Republicans and originated with someone not completely at home with Senate procedures).
■ Let me direct your attention to a comment posted this morning in response to my “Social Security Reform: Patrience, Please”. The substance is feeble: an argument that the present system is better for poor workers than individual accounts, because it includes disability benefits and skews its formula toward beneficiaries with low lifetime earnings. Those are unimportant advantages, because (a) President Bush doesn’t propose to alter the disability program; (b) individual accounts would provide an additional source of income for those who suffer disability; (c) low income is a predictor for shorter-than-average life expectancy at retirement, which offsets the advantage of the progressive benefit formula; and (d) it doesn’t take spectacular investment returns for an individual account to surpass the most favorable Social Security formula (and whatever is left in the account can be passed on to one’s heirs).
What’s significant about the comment, however, is not its unimpressive reasoning but its racist rhetoric. It has the appearance of a mass mailing, probably spammed to other sites that have written about Social Security reform. The racism is black, rather than white, and can’t be imputed to all reform opponents. On the other hand, if white racists were spewing this kind of stuff in favor of the President’s proposals, it would be trumpeted by the media as loudly as the dubious Schiavo memorandum.
■ The latest book on “Who Really Wrote Shakespeare?” is a rare entry on the side of sanity: The Case for Shakespeare : The End of the Authorship Question by Scott McCrea, a playwright who teaches at SUNY’s Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film. It will take a while for Amazon to deliver my copy. Meanwhile, here are comments posted on an anti-Stratfordian newsgroup by vocal Oxenfordian Richard F. Whalen:
McCrea’s book needs to be addressed because it’s a book-length, direct attack on the Oxfordian proposition by someone at a university. (Maybe that’s a compliment?) He probably spent 3-5 years researching and writing it, and he got a major academic-oriented publisher forit. . . . He accuses Oxfordians in detail of poor scholarship and selective use of evidence, and relying on totally implausible conspiracy theories. He raises some interesting challenges, eg. the WS works refer solely and many times to grammar school education but never to universities – challenges that will appeal to the unwary .
Having read Mr. Whalen’s magnum opus, I doubt his ability to evaluate the cogency of opposing arguments, so I’ll wait and see before hailing Mr. McCrea as the vanquisher of the infidels.
If, by the way, the book argues that the absence of university scenes in the plays is evidence against Oxenford’s authorship, it is straining too far. Despite the fantasies of folks like Richard Whalen, the earl attended a university for only a few months, as a Cambridge boarder at age eight. He left after his father grew tired of paying charges for broken windows. So he knew quite as little about Oxbridge as the man from Stratford.
■ Tomorrow I’m off to Minicon 40 (or “Fortean”), which I can do because my Easter weekend is still five weeks away. Posting will be either interrupted or incessant, depending.
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