Stromata Blog

Sudden Conversion or A New Way to Obstruct?

Cynicism is mean-spirited, of course. When a Democratic senator who isn’t named Lieberman says –

We’ve got to try to stop weapons coming into Iraq from any source that are killing our troops. I agree with the comments about trying to stop them coming in from Iran. I think we have to try stop them that are going to the Sunni insurgents as well as to the Shia. I was just wondering, does the military have a plan to, if necessary, to go into Syria to go to the source of any weapons coming from Syria? That are going to Sunni insurgents? That are killing our troops? … I think we ought to take action on all fronts including Syria and any other source of weapons coming in, obviously Iran is the focus – but it shouldn’t be the sole focus.

– we should be grateful and attribute his turn-around to the patient advocacy of fellow liberals like Senator Lieberman and the New Statesman’s Nick Cohen.

But then a small, doubting voice intrudes. Earlier in the day, before Carl Levin (D–Mich.) uttered the quoted words, the news wires reported that the Bush Administration is backing a plan to include Iran and Syria in regional peace talks. That’s the sort of terrible idea that Jim Baker’s Iraq Study Group pushed during its 15 minutes in the limelight. At the time, liberals smirked about how “adults” from the Bush I era were at last taking control of foreign policy. “Father Knows Best”, one of the news mags (I forget which) gloated.

Is it just coincidence that, as soon as the Administration takes a step toward the ISG’s views, a leading Democratic opponent of the war starts denouncing the prospective negotiating partners and taking notice of the fact that they furnish weaponry to our enemies? One can’t help suspecting that Senator Levin is more interested in torpedoing whatever the Administration does than in “go[ing] into Syria”. If Coalition troops actually cross the Syrian border in search of terrorists or weapons caches, can we be confident that he will endorse their actions?

Confidence would be warranted if he ceased his drives to repeal Congressional authorization of military intervention in Iraq and to “prove” that a vast White House/Pentagon conspiracy duped all of the world’s intelligence agencies prior to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. More likely, today’s rhetoric, if it doesn’t vanish without a trace by tomorrow, will lead not to support of more forceful action in the Iraqi theater but to demands that soldiers be pulled out of Baghdad and Anbar in order to set up border cordons. Energetic words thus will become the rationale for nerveless deeds.

I hope that I’m wrong and that Senator Levin is the first anti-war Democrat to wake up to the impossibility of peaceful coexistence with the Islamofascist murder cult. If that proves to be the case, I’ll gladly apologize for the doubts expressed in this post. And the crow will taste delicious.

A New Brand for NASFiC 9

The NASFiC (“North American Science Fiction Convention”), held when the Worldcon takes place outside the continent, is a persistently controversial concept. I won’t rehearse the arguments here. They’ve been batting around fandom since Roger Sims was a pup. For the record, I think that the NASFiC is a fine idea and that many of the problems to which its detractors point are the product of Smoffish disdain for a plebeian stepchild. Whatever the cause, this year’s, facing particularly daunting obstacles, has just adopted a new name. We can only hope that the spirit of Bob Tucker will smile on TuckerCon, for the event is definitely in need of ghostly aid. (N.B.: There is nothing presumptuous about the new moniker. Bob was a regular guest at Archon, whose committee is putting on the NASFiC.)

On the positive side, the con has an experienced concomm and dates (August 2nd-5th) that are convenient for the increasingly common species of fans-with-children. The location, Collinsville, Illinois, sounds out of the way but is actually just across the river from St. Louis and not at all hard to reach.

Then there is the negative side: The HQ hotel, the Collinsville Holiday Inn, was financed by a state loan in 1982, one of the many improvident actions that doomed the Illinois Republican Party. Despite the fact that it has a first rate local reputation and a facade of prosperity, the owners fell far behind in their payments. The matter has been locked in litigation for the past eleven years. Last month, the State Treasurer at last succeeded in placing the hotel in receivership and appointing new management to run it until it can be sold in (very partial) payment of the outstanding indebtedness. (Vide “On the Auction Block: Holiday Inn”.)

Archon has been held at the Holiday Inn since 1993 and enjoyed good relations with it – until after it booked the NASFiC there. The old management apparently saw an opportunity to squeeze cash flow out of a captive audience. I quote from the NASFiC Web site:

All reservations are required to include at least Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and will be charged to your credit card at the time of booking. Reservations cancelled on or after June 1st, 2007 will not be refunded.

IN ADDITION: The Holiday Inn is insisting guests fill out, sign, and return a form agreeing to the above, and a separate form with the credit card information including a photocopy of both sides of the credit card. We have argued, pleaded, and yelled at them and, so far, they have refused to budge on this outrageous requirement.

One needn’t be a privacy zealot to see why it’s a Very Bad Idea to send a photocopy of your credit card and signature to strangers. The new management is, at least, “reconsidering” this preposterous demand, though it shows no sign of budging on the rest of the just slightly less preposterous package.

All of this is quite distressing. Needless to say, nobody should book rooms at the Holiday Inn until and unless it revises its policies, but there are alternative hotels and I hope that fandom won’t punish TuckerCon for other people’s sins. Although fans may be a trifle weak on organization and planning, we have always displayed resilience. Mundanes indulge in Schadenfreude. Fen work to “smoooooth” the road, however rough.

Update (3/1/07): The NASFiC press release below arrived as a comment but somehow got attached to the wrong post.

Archon 31/TuckerCon/the 9th NASFiC is pleased to announce that the new Holiday Inn management team has agreed to provide alternative ways to register. Unfortunately, advance payment is still required and the cancellation deadline is still 60 days before the convention, but there are now two ways to register and pay without having to photocopy your credit card and mail it to the hotel as was the previous requirement (option 2, below).

There are now three ways to register:

1) Use your credit card online at the national Holiday Inn reservations web site – specify "Group Code" ARC;

2) Or use your credit card by mail by filling out, signing, and returning a form agreeing to the above noted terms, and a separate form with the credit card information including a photocopy of both sides of the credit card. Adobe PDF copis of the two forms are here. You may also obtain them from the hotel by phoning in your tentative reservation and requesting that they be mailed to you;

3) Or pay with a Cashier’s Check or Money Order – mail the form from option 2 with the Cashier’s Check or Money Order in the amount of $135.54 per night per room ($119.95 + 13% tax; Parlor rooms are $214.64 per night including tax); OR make your reservation by phone at 1-800-551-5133, following up with the mailed Cashier’s Check/Money Order by 1 June, 2007. Note that NO PERSONAL CHECKS WILL BE ACCEPTED.

The convention committee is well aware that this is still far from desirable, or the industry norm, but it is a significant concession on the part of the new hotel manager.

For further information on the Holiday Inn and our other hotels, see the NASFiC Web site.

-Rich Zellich
Archon Facilities Liaison

Not perfect news, but good under the circumstances. My thanks to Judy Bemis for the information.

Quote of the Day

Political cartoonist Sam Ryskind (any relation to Morrie, I wonder?) on Congressional Democrats’ “support for the troops”:

One day the U.S. Congress may change allegiance and support al-Qaeda instead of the sons and daughters of their own constituents....

They will denounce the terrorist leadership as incompetent. Condemn the insurgency for atrocities befitting Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Seek ways of cutting off funds for the failed jihad and prevent terrorist networks from eavesdropping on suspected American agents. And mock the rank and file as dupes who wasted their lives for a Paradise that doesn’t exist.

They might also declare that al-Qa’eda had no good cause to go to war against America, that Islamofascist violence is responsible for provoking hostile reactions, that Moslems who have a duty to try to understand and accept Western culture, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, we’ll hear none of that salutary rhetoric so long as the Pelosis and Reids are nominally on our own side.

(Thanx to Power Line)

Tempus Brevis

Peter Robinson reminds us of how swiftly time is passing by.

John Tyler, tenth President of the United States, was born on March 28, 1790, in the third year of the United States Constitution.

His son and 14th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born on August 24, 1853.

Lyon Tyler’s son and 5th child, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, was born in 1928.

Harrison Tyler is alive today, living in the same home as President Tyler, Sherwood Forest in Charles City, Virginia, one of the mansions portrayed in an excellent coffee table book, Under Live Oaks: The Last Great Houses of the Old South.

The Safest War in History

In 1980, the last year of the Carter Presidency, active duty U.S. military personnel died from accidents and hostile action at a rate of 72.0 per 100,000 serving. In 2004, the first full year of the Iraqi campaign (and the one with the most American combat deaths so far), the rate was 76.1 per 100,000 (statistics from the Defense Manpower Data Center). In other words, military service was just about as risky under de facto pacifist Jimmy Carter as under “cowboy” George W. Bush.

Looked at from another perspective, death from hostile action is not strikingly more likely for today’s soldiers than death from an accident was throughout the past quarter century. From 1980 through 2004, the average annual accidental death rate was 41.4 per 100,000. The 2004 rate for killed in action was 43.1.

In the words of a commenter on NRO:

The bottom line is that we’re fighting this war with lower casualties than expected from normal training accidents in a peacetime army. You should be embarrassed that you didn’t know this. It’s a testament to the near universal innumeracy and incompetence of the journalism profession that most journalists haven’t even seriously considered looking at basic statistics and putting things in context 5½ years after 9/11.

“Lower casualties” is an exaggeration, but not nearly so grotesque as the exaggeration of those who shriek that the Tigris and Euphrates are running with American blood.

Of Nietzsche and Shakespeare

Some years ago, Duke Law School professor James Boyle served as “defense counsel” in a mock trial pitting William Shakespeare against the numerous upstart claimants to his laurels. The event attracted attention, because three Supreme Court Justices (Brennan, Blackmun and Stevens) presided, and Justice Stevens became a convert to the anti-Stratfordian cause (to what should be the embarrassment of progressive lawyers everywhere).

Professor Boyle found the event fascinating, both professionally and otherwise.

I can say with complete truth that my first and only oral argument was in front of Supreme Court Justices, that my client was William Shakespeare, and that I have a perfect win/loss record. That was my introduction to the baroque and remarkable conspiracy theories that surround the question “who wrote Shakespeare,” theories that put The Da Vinci Code to shame, but which also struck me as novelistically interesting on a much deeper level.

The novel, The Shakespeare Chronicles, was begun almost immediately but, like many avocational belles lettres, took a long time to finish. That is why it is set in 1989 and blemished by the occasional anachronism. A good editor would have smoothed the chronology and caught a few other errors, but, whether by necessity or choice, the author chose to self-publish. If no commercial house was willing to take the book, that is another sign of publishing’s decay, for this dark comedy is fully worthy of a place on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and Borders. Like Rodney Bolt’s History Play, it turns anti-Stratfordian fantasy into entertaining fiction.

The protagonist, Stanley Quandary, is a small-time English professor at a small-time college. In personality, he is one of those meek who may hope to inherit the earth but have no life estate in it. He’s the kind of man who regards service on the college snow days committee as an important challenge. In only two respects does he deviate from dreary normalcy. First, he was once married to a sexy, post-modern feminist, whom he predictably divorced after catching her in flagrante with the gardener. Second, he harbors secret doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare. Naturally, he has never voiced those heretical thoughts to anyone.

Then two events upend his routine. One is the attainment of tenure. The other is a series of dreams or, rather, dreams. Vivid scenes from the era of the first Queen Elizabeth haunt his nights. Slowly he deciphers them as glimpses of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the most popular, if scarcely the most plausible, alternative Shakespeare. The conviction grows on Quandary that these images confirm his long-held doubts. Ultimately, they tell him the whereabouts of the elusive, indisputable proof that the literary world has for 400 years been victimized by a titanic fraud.

Before that, tenure and the dreams work other changes in Quandary:

I am reborn. I am reborn in sin, cleansed in heresy, wrapped in iconoclasm. These are my chronicles. My old self would have found these words too showy, too redolent of religion, would have worried about being laughed at, would have dithered endlessly over nuance and punctuation. Now I simply write.

He also shaves his head, dons an earring, updates his wardrobe, trades in his clunker for a hot new sports car, boffs a slutty coed, and flaunts egotistic eccentricity. The transition from Quandary to Stanley Q is a midlife crisis on steroids. Soon he is off to England to unearth the evidence that will make him the most famous Shakespearean (or, to be accurate, Oxenfordian) scholar of all time. Along the way, he decides that he’d like to take up again with his ex-wife and revenge himself on her stuffy second husband.

Both the seduction and the vengeance are successful – for a time. Then nemesis overtakes the soi disant superman, and his quest ends in a farcical fiasco. In the last pages of the book, his literary executor, commenting on the journal that has been the vehicle for the narrative, reviews events from the perspective of an unperceptive dryasdust and fashions a rational explanation of the less believable aspects of the tale.

The story of Stanley Quandary’s rise, exaltation, overreaching and fall could have been constructed around a different mania: Atlantis or alien encounters or 9/11 conspiracy theories or the innocence of Alger Hiss. Still, the authorship heresy is more than a macguffin. There is a certain parallelism between Q’s willful o’erleaping of the bounds of nature and the anti-Stratfordians’ confident imposition of their opinions on recalcitrant evidence. The typical adherent of the cult is as timid as Quandary, but maybe a Q-in-waiting lies beneath many of those reticent exteriors.

While the book doesn’t pause to expound the cases against and for the “Stratford Man” (admirable self-restraint on a law professor’s part), it does offer what I believe is an entirely new theory (introduced a bit clumsily; here is a place where an editor would have been helpful) of Edward de Vere’s motivation for concealing his identity as an author. To avoid spoilers, I’ll not reveal it, but it won’t amaze me to see it showing up in anti-Stratfordian writings a year or two from now. If that happens, Professor Boyle will have unwittingly helped to make the folly a trifle more entertaining and foolish. Come what may, though, he has penned a work as full of oddities as, and far more readable than, anything conceived by Sobran or Stritmatter or Ogden.

Watch-ing No More

After five years of assiduously collecting news and opinion about the War on Terror, Mårten Barck has announced that Watch: Covering the War on Terror has come to an end.

I’ve decided to stop updating Watch. Five years seems more than enough, really, and I haven’t had any enthusiasm for it lately. It was just difficult to find a natural end for it, as history has a tendency to continue on a day to day basis. The frontpage will end on September 11, 2006, but you'll still find updates to December 2006 in the archive, which starts on September 11, 2001.

Mårten’s diligence and good news judgement made Watch an invaluable, though too infrequently heralded, resource. I’m sorry to see it come to an end but am glad that the archive remains as a research aid.

A Liberal Looks Beyond Cut-and-Run

Peter Beinart is one liberal who, while calling for scuttling from Iraq, unquestionably regards the War on Terror as a serious conflict that the West must win, not as a Bush-manufactured political ploy. It’s interesting, then, to see this admission in the middle of a paean to the malapropish fair weather hawk Joe Biden:

Biden just wants his opponents to be honest about what they’re proposing. Because, if they are, they will have to begin a highly unpleasant and urgently needed debate about how to handle the awful consequences of a necessary withdrawal. No one really knows how an all-out Iraqi civil war will affect the Middle East, but, as the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman recently argued, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and even Iran could be destabilized by waves of refugees, weapons, and jihadists. Keeping those countries from buckling may require aggressive diplomatic, financial, and even military intervention (not to mention a generous refugee policy for the Iraqis whose country we have helped destroy).

So, what we gain from abandoning the purported quagmire of Iraq is – a quagmire spread through the whole Middle East! When truck bombs are exploding in Amman and mufsidun are assaulting the palaces of the kings and emirs, will protecting the region’s generally fragile non-fascist regimes be easier than fighting a single war in democratic Iraq?

Saudi-controlled Arabia, the most important Arab domino, was carved out by hardy, puritanical, camel-riding desert warriors. Today it is ruled by a corrupt oligarchy whose only contact with camels is to smoke them. Without an abundance of American military support, how long would its fainéant princes last against mufsidun fresh from a morale-boosting rout of the Great Satan?

Today we fight in Iraq and keep our logistical tail in Kuwait and Qatar. Will we be in a better position when our front line is in those countries and our nearest secure base is Diego Garcia?

Maybe Mr. Beinart thinks so. His final parenthetical reveals a capacity for ideologically driven delusion. As John Burns of the New York Times has observed, Iraqi society was destroyed by three decades of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. To reattribute the damage to three years of American occupation doesn’t qualify as rational. That Mr. Beinart is on the relatively sane fringe of opposition to the Iraqi campaign illustrates the degeneration of the American Left into an unthinking intellectual mob.

Questions FDR Didn’t Have to Answer

If the press corps of 1941 had been like today’s, it’s easy to imagine what it would have been asking on December 8th:

Mr. President, are you certain that this attack was authorized at the highest levels of the Japanese government?

Mr. President, are you complaining about these events in order to gin up war fever against Japan?

Mr. President, how do we know that the evidence you’ve presented wasn’t manufactured for propaganda purposes?

Mr. President, wouldn’t retaliation against Japan without a sincere effort at negotiating our differences violate international law?

Mr. President, couldn’t we avoid these problems by just withdrawing from the Pacific and not getting involved in an Asian civil war?

People who are indifferent to Iran’s acts of war against the United States ought to ask themselves whether it’s a good idea to encourage the notion that killing, or helping to kill, Americans has no down side.

The Oxford Union Precedent

Penraker calls attention to an historical parallel that deserves all the attention it can be given.

In 1933, the Oxford Union debated the proposition: “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”. The proposition passed by a wide margin. The students had just declared they would back down in any coming fight.

From that declaration, German Nazis and Italian fascists drew the logical conclusion: The English could be counted on not to fight. They eventually learned differently, but tens of millions died, because, as one contemporary put it, “The bully believes we are decadent and that he can smash all the china he likes.”

Today the threat to peace and civilization is different, but a body more consequential than the Oxford Union, namely, the United States House of Representative, is in the process of passing an Oxford-like resolution.

The Islamists imagine that we are a decadent society, unmanly and fun loving. To them, we are like trust fund kids. Their doctrine says we are rotten to the core and ready to fall over. Someone just needs to attack us to make it happen.

This resolution says that we are ready to give up.

We have undertaken a noble task. We are trying to bring an entire region of the world out of its dangerous past. That is our only chance of avoiding a major war: If that region becomes part of the regular world, there will be peace. Otherwise, the plague of Islamism will grow, just as Nazism grew in Germany. The thugs cowed everyone and took over, claiming they were in support of the people. All we had to do was sustain a level of casualties that was equal to the number of men killed in training accidents in the 1990’s (about 800 per year).

But our Congress now says “Enough! We can’t take it anymore!”

Nothing could be better calculated to bring out the bad qualities in the Arab world. These folks are going to follow us all the way home. There is a simple calculation there: those who are strong, rule. Those who are weak, want to negotiate. And the next rule follows as night does day in the Arab world: If your opponent is weak, never negotiate. Press the advantage. If he shows any weakness, that is the time to strike harder and harder.

As I’ve noted before, one of the tenets that Islamofascism draws from the Koran is that “Allah casts terror into the unbelievers’ hearts”. John Howard has been stridently criticized for naysaying Senator Obama’s bill to force withdrawal from Iraq by March 31, 2008:

I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory.

If I were running al-Qaida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.

This is one of those cases in which “gaffe” is a synonym for “a truth that no one wants to speak”. Does anyone think that al-Qa’eda fears the success of the Obama initiative? Or that it will be other than heartened when the House takes the first step down that road?

Quote of the Day

A friend sent me a bit from an interview with David McCallum – Ilya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – that appeared in the British magazine Cinema Retro. Asked why he moved from Scotland to America, McCallum replied,

Britain went socialist. My politics have always been pretty far to the right, which makes me an exception in Hollywood these days. I believe people should be allowed to work as hard as they can and reap the rewards. I think it’s part of the human spirit to do that. That’s why I’ve always thought that Ronald Reagan was an amazing man and it was an amazing time when he was president. They used to say he was an idiot – that he didn’t know what he was doing, that he was drooling, that he didn’t write any of his own speeches . Then you see his writing today and many of his speeches and letters are in his own handwriting, beautifully written with no corrections. Of course now, many of the people who were so mealy-mouthed about him when he was President are now extolling his virtues. Such hypocrisy. But right now is a very interesting time to be an American and to be involved in what I think is a huge watershed moment in the Middle East, with everything that is going on.

A pity we can’t send U.N.C.L.E. after al-Qa’eda.

Our Innumerate Media

Last week, USA Today ran a shocking-sounding article, “Suicide Rates Jolt Police Culture”. It informed us that “Suicide rates for police — at least 18 per 100,000 — are higher than for the general population” and offered an explanation:

Police bear the same stress from work, family and illness that civilians do. What’s different is the stress of the street and the access to a gun. “Research has always shown that availability of firearms, comfort with firearms, increases suicide rates”.

The statements concerning relative suicide rates and the link between suicide and nearness to guns came from the same source, the chief psychologist of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Apparently, no one at USA Today thought to scrutinize the proffered statistic, but James Taranto debunked the story line by simply consulting published data from the Centers for Disease Control.

According to a sidebar titled “Police at Risk,” the suicide rate among policemen is 18 per 100,000, far more than 11.1 per 100,000 among the [whole] population. . . .

USA Today and its sources have ignored the key factor behind police suicide rates: sex. The vast majority of policemen are men, and men are much more likely to commit suicide than women.

The male suicide rate is, in fact, four times the female rate: 18.4 per 100,000 vs. 4.2 per 100,000. Since almost 90 percent of police officers are men, adjusting for the sex differential between them and the general population erases most of the suicide rate disparity. Adding age to the picture more than offsets the rest.

[T]he overall nationwide suicide rate is skewed downward because it includes children and teenagers, who have a much lower propensity for suicide than adults. This effect is so pronounced that every age group over 20 has a higher-than-average suicide rate. In particular, the overall suicide rate for 25- to 44-year-old men was 22.2 per 100,000 in 2002, and for 45- to 64-year-old men it was 23.5 per 100,000 [emphasis in original].

It’s possible that other factors are at work here, such as race (white men are far likelier to kill themselves than minority men, except for American Indians). But based on just these numbers, it seems clear that the suicide rate among police is not alarmingly high, and may even be lower than you’d expect among a population made up mostly of young and middle-aged men. Because USA Today’s reporters and editors didn’t bother thinking the numbers through, the paper ended up publishing a nonstory.

It isn’t an especially harmful nonstory – not like the Washington Post’s much publicized attribution of a partisan smear job by left-wing Senator Carl Levin to the Department of Defense’s inspector-general – but it reveals how easy it is to feed innumerate reporters statistical nonsense in support of ideological agendas.

The Landlubberly Shakespeare

Tom Reedy, co-author of one of the best elementary discussions of the Shakespeare Authorship “controversy” (“How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts”, with David Kathman) has unearthed a hard-to-find but illuminating article titled “Shakspere and sea-glasses” by Brinsley Nicholson, M.D. (New Shakspere Society Transactions (1880)) that calls attention to a gap in Shakespeare’s nautical knowledge.

In the last scene of The Tempest, the playwright twice repeats that the action of the play, from the opening shipwreck through the denouement has occupied three hours. First Alonso says,

If thou be’st Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here, who three hours since
Were wreck'd upon this shore.

Then to his son Ferdinand, who has met and fallen in love with Prospero’s daughter:

What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?
Your eld’st acquaintance cannot be three hours.

Shortly after, the boatswain enters and likewise makes a statement about the length of the comedy’s action:

The best news is, that we have safely found
Our king and company; the next, our ship –
Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split –
Is tight and yare and bravely rigg’d as when
We first put out to sea.

It is clear that Shakespeare thought that one “glass” equaled one hour. His only other reference to “glass” as a unit of time is consistent with that (All’s Well That Ends Well, II.i.163–4):

Of four and twenty times the pilot's glass
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass.

Yet, as Dr. Nicholson points out, a nautical “glass” is thirty minutes long, eight glasses to a four hour watch. He quotes a 17th Century sailors’ manual to show that the term meant the same in Shakespeare’s day. From this evidence, he infers that Shakespeare never went on a sea voyage.

If he had been, we must suppose that, quick, inquiring, and sagacious as he was, ever ready to pick up even crumbs of information, he failed to pick up what every boy picks up at once, and what every one, sailor or passenger, must have picked up. Shakspere could not have been “in the cabin,” unless in a mere coasting craft, and the steerage passenger is even more bound than he “in the cabin” to learn ships’ hours if he would live. A cabin passenger of that day was also more bound to attend them than he is at present, when passenger ships have become floating hotels.

This argument has a chink that allows the Bard a little scope for foreign travel. Some biographers speculate that he visited Italy during a prolonged theater closure in the early 1590’s. All’s Well That Ends Well was written at least a decade later, and The Tempest was his last solo play. After such a long interval, he may have recalled that seamen told time by “glasses” while forgetting what a “glass” signified.

For believers in “alternative Shakespeares”, the sea-glasses are more of a crux. The 17th Earl of Oxenford and Sir Henry Neville, to take two popular current candidates, each crossed to the continent several times. Oxenford, according to his partisans (though non-Oxenfordian scholars disagree), even sailed with the English fleet opposing the Armada, subjecting himself to the discipline of a sailor. Plausibly explaining how either man could have been under a misapprehension about the length of a “glass” is a challenge, though anti-Stratfordians have a knack for contriving excuses for anomalies.

The Supply Side of “Universal, Affordable, Quality Health Care”

After the 2006 elections, the American public is – or the elite media would like it to be – eager for dramatic changes in the market for health care. The current combination of private enterprise with government regulation is to be restructured to guarantee that access to medical treatment will be universally available, affordable to all and of the highest possible quality.

I’m tempted to say pick any two, yet there are certainly many areas in which the U.S. economy delivers all three, in a manner that is taken so much for granted that we scarcely think about it.

Food, for example, is a more basic human need than medical care. In early 21st Century America, it is, in real terms, cheaper than ever before, is of the highest nutritional and aesthetic quality in human history, and is so abundant that obesity is a major health problem for the poor. I wonder whether circumstances would be the same if, in the impoverished early days of our Republic, a benevolent government had established National Food Care as a fundamental right.

Most of the proposals for improving the health care system, right-wing outliers excepted, start with the assumption that the methods used to produce and distribute food won’t work for the services provided by doctors, hospitals and pharmacies. In fact, they assign the market only a marginal role at most. The basic concept, clearest in “single payer” schemes, is a government-imposed monopsony purchaser of health services coupled with a monopolist provider.

That is not the sort of structure ordinarily associated with efficiency and welfare. Rather, it’s a formula for making the monopolist/monopsonist very rich at the expense of both producers and consumers. The classic monopsonist sets the price that it will pay for labor and other services not at the market clearing level but at the point that maximizes the excess of its revenues over its cost of goods and services sold. Similarly, the classical monopolist restricts production to maximize total revenue, leaving some demand unsatisfied. (This is all first year economics, not wild-eyed libertarian speculation.)

So, the natural tendency of the structure almost universally favored by health care reformers is to leave productive resources less than fully utilized and to overcharge customers. That isn’t the most promising route to “universal, affordable, high quality”. To sidestep this contradiction, one must invoke enlightened regulation and a dollop of pure hope.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt that governmental willpower can overcome the defects of monopsony/poly, but I wish to focus on one: the impact on the supply side. There is no use in having medical insurance coverage for all and a low price schedule if health care professionals, medical equipment, hospital beds and pharmaceuticals are hard to find. Since no one advocates conscripting doctors and nurses (and would you want to be operated on by someone drafted into the surgery trade?), a reformed health care system can succeed only if it is able to ensure the continuing inflow of labor and capital into medical care.

Elementary supply and demand is the key reason why the U.S. spends a higher proportion of its GDP on medical care than any other country. Compared to most of the world, Americans are old. Compared to everybody, they are rich. Old, rich people place a high value on medical care and can afford to spend a large part of their resources on attracting workers and investment funds from alternative uses. Every doctor could have become a lawyer, a businessman, an engineer, etc. The rewards offered by a career in medicine had to be large enough to make it his first choice, and a large element of those rewards is th prospect of a high income.

In the short run, a medical monopsonist could save a great deal of money by cutting the pay of providers. A middle-aged neurosurgeon doesn’t have a plethora of other employment opportunities, and the capital invested in hospitals, clinics, MRI machines and the like can’t be instantly redeployed. Exploiting the inelasticity of supply is a quick and easy way to reach the goal of “affordable” care.

Unfortunately, it recedes from the goals of “quality” and “universality”. The next generation, reacting rationally to economic incentives, will furnish fewer doctors and nurses than the last, and those who choose to practice medicine will include fewer of the “best and brightest”. Lower investment returns will reduce the quality and quantity of medical facilities. Foreseeing those outcomes does not require a gift of prophecy.

Regulators can foresee them, too. Assuming, therefore, that maintaining health care quality over the long term is among their objectives, they will keep the prices paid to medical inputs at current levels (or maybe above, in recognition of the increasing medical needs of a “graying” population). Americans will still spend more than the rest of the world on health care. The only difference will be that the purchasing decisions will be centralized and largely unmoored from market discipline. The consequent inefficiencies mean that, unless our bureaucrats are extraordinarily lucky, maintaining the present standard of care will cost more, not less.

Today we have a system of private health care providers coupled with a plethora of subsidies, restrictions on entry and price controls. The assumption of most reformers is that the private sector is the source of the system’s problems. In all other areas, free enterprise promotes efficiency, growth and product quality, and government intervention retards them. For unfathomable reasons, medicine is supposed to be radically different. I don’t think that one need be a laissez faire absolutist to have one’s doubts.

Two Responses to Global Warming

Do I believe in “Global Warming”? Maybe, though this week’s single digit temperatures in Chicago are a serious test of faith. Do I believe in climate change? Absolutely.

As everybody is aware, but doesn’t often think about, the Earth has been successively warmer and colder ever since the molten proto-planet cooled enough to have a climate. In some eras, it has been quite a bit warmer than now, in others much cooler.

That natural progression didn’t halt at the birth of human civilization. Much of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance is a potted history of how climate change has affected past societies. The Sumerians didn’t have SUV’s, but they did suffer from rising temperatures and drought.

We know, as assuredly as we can know anything, that weather conditions in the 30th Century will not replicate those of the 20th, now matter what mankind does or doesn’t. If we worry about what the effect of the changed environment will be on posterity, we have two ways to ameliorate their lot.

One approach is to try to predict the climatic future and then take measures to offset unfavorable trends. That is the rationale of the Gore-Pelosi strategy. The best thinking in climatology tells us that the Earth is getting warmer, that warming results from the increased release of carbon into the atmosphere, and that we can, through drastic reductions in the usage of oil and coal, slow that increase. It’s conceded that warming won’t stop, even if human-generated carbon emissions are reduced to zero, that we have no way to know how much difference our efforts will make, and that the negative economic impact of carbon restriction will be huge. The optimum outcome is that our surroundings will be somewhat less warm than otherwise, while we will be significantly poorer.

The alternative is to worry less about trying to change the climate and more about readying society to adapt to whatever comes. Proponents of this strategy (likened to Holocaust deniers by the bien-pensants) doubt that we can accurately forecast the future climate or gauge how human activity will alter it. In the 1970’s, after all, the best thinking in climatology was that the next big change would be a new Ice Age. Should we have acted on this scientific consensus by pumping carbon emissions up in order to counter the cooling trend?

What we can do for our descendants is promote, or at least avoid retarding, economic growth. Wealthy societies cope with any contingency, including climate change, more effectively than poor ones. The Gore-Pelosi recessionary formula will work if and only if a great many theories and guesses about climate dynamics turn out to be unanimously correct. In any other case, it will leave the world less well fitted to deal with whatever really does occur.

The Flags That Must Be Respected

The Supreme Court decided some years ago that burning or otherwise mutilating the American flag is a protected exercise of First Amendment rights, a decision that no self-respecting liberal would ever think of repudiating. It must be, then, that the administration of San Francisco State University has been taken over by right-wing censors, for it has threatened to punish a student group for trampling on flags.

You’ve already guessed the punch line. The flags were those of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups (or, to be precise, reproductions of those banners on butcher paper). Each includes the word “Allah” in Arabic script. Therefore, in the university administration’s view, defiling them could violate the prohibitions against inciting violence, creating a “hostile environment” and “incivility”.

I somehow doubt that smashing a crucifix or posting the anti-Christian rants of John Edwards’ newly hired blogmaidens would evoke the same concern for civil conduct. But maybe the opponents of flag burning should consider a new tactic: Add “Allah” to the Stars and Stripes, and the Left will reconsider the merits of a ban.

Further reading: Debra J. Saunders, “S. F. State – Hecklers’ Paradise”

What’s Wrong With Iraq? – In One Easy Lesson

John Podhoretz has posted excerpts from a TV interview with John Burns, one of the few saving graces of the New York Times. Mr. Burns was in Iraq during the years of Saddam Hussein:

I’ve been to, I think many of the world’s nastiest places in a 30 year career as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and Iraq was, by a long way saving only North Korea, the nastiest place I’ve ever been. It was a truly terrible place and what I think we were transfixed by was the notion that if you could remove this of carapace of terror and you could liberate the Iraqi people, many good things would happen.

That is why “the American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it.” Unhappily, as the experience of post-communist Russia also illustrates,

I think that the policy makers in Washington, and to be on honest with you the journalists also, to speak for myself, completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people and their willingness, in President Bush’s phrase, “to stand up” for themselves, to take authority, to take risks.

“Violent, brutal repression” actually goes back further – to the Ba’athist coup that bloodily overthrew the monarchy in 1958. Iraq was no garden before Saddam Hussein seized power. Its history was no preparation for a swift transition to parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and peaceful resolution of disputes.

Many on the Left and the Paleo-Right now declare that, because the Iraqis have had trouble coping with freedom, they should have been left beneath a “carapace of terror”, with the prospect that Saddam would eventually be succeeded by his less humane progeny. Perhaps there is some level of realpolitik that can justify so heartless a point of view. To the rest of us, it is reasonable to think that learning how to be free takes time, and that the Iraqis are better off for having started the trek in 2003. Enduring another decade or century in slavery would not have made liberation, when it finally came, any easier an undertaking.

A Blonde in the White House

James Taranto pithily summarizes the case against a second Clinton Presidency:

So on Iraq, Mrs. Clinton stands resolutely on the side of public opinion, whichever side that may be in any given year. On Iran, about which public opinion is unformed, she is maddeningly noncommittal. This is fine for a senator, who merely casts one vote among 100. But the president – especially in times of international peril – needs to be able to make decisions in the national interest. Sometimes that means shaping public opinion, as President Bush did when he persuaded the public and Congress to support the war in Iraq. Sometimes it means defying public opinion, as Bush has done lately by resisting pressure to flee.

Were these decisions bad ones? History will judge, but at the moment most Americans seem to think so. Mrs. Clinton is seeking to become President Bush’s successor by countering his dangerous boldness with extreme caution. She is presenting herself as the candidate who won’t make bad decisions because she won’t make decisions – who won’t lead us astray because she will not lead [emphasis added]

But an excess of caution is itself a form of recklessness. Someone who won’t make decisions won’t make good or necessary decisions either. Therein lies the peril of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Intelligence, paranoia and viciousness toward personal enemies are not inconsistent with being a blonde airhead (no reflection intended on members of the Non-Airhead Blonde-American community, who include some of my favorite nieces, nephews and goddaughters, none of whom resembles Senator Clinton except in belonging to the same species). I wonder whether Democratic primary voters will figure that out.

Sleep Easier Tonight

. . . if you’re thinking of sending funds to terrorist groups via the European banking system. Agence France-Press reports:

The European Central Bank must take action by April to stop the transfer of personal information from Swift, the bank-data consortium, to American authorities for use in antiterrorism investigations, a regulatory agency said Thursday.

The agency, the European Data Protection Supervisor, told the bank to come up with measures “to make its payment operations fully compliant with data-protection legislation,” urging it to “take appropriate measures as soon as possible.” . . .

Under European Union rules, information on money transfers can be used only for banking purposes and not for other uses, like combating terrorism.

Because, of course, the banking system must be a neutral conduit indifferent to assaults on civilization. The New York Times, which last year exposed the existence of the terrorist funds surveillance program, is similarly above the fray. The paper’s editor conceded that there was “considerable evidence that the program helps catch and prosecute financers of terror, and we have not identified any serious abuses of privacy so far”, but he didn’t see it as his business to cooperate with the effort, not even to the minimal extent of refraining from letting terrorists know as much about it as Times reporters could uncover.

To be blunt, the Times engaged in espionage, and its disclosure of government secrets has now cost us an important weapon against Islamofascism. If the spies had left information under flagstones for al-Qa’eda agents to pick up, everybody would see that they deserved prosecution. Their choice of a more public method of transmittal doesn’t make them less culpable.

A Time for Silence (or Maybe Slightly Less Shouting)

Barry Goldwater announced his candidacy for President in January 1964, ten months before the election. He was the very first entrant into the Republican side of the race. Eleven election cycles later, expert observers regard Al Gore as almost certainly not running, because he hasn’t announced 22 months in advance. Everybody is aware of the steady lengthening of the front end of the Presidential marathon. I’ve yet to see a plausible explanation. Maybe it is simply a self-indulgence of a rich, celebrity-oriented country whose political elite takes a bored, superficial approach to policy but delights in the excitement of an imitation battle.

Whatever the reason, those of us in the rank-and-file of society must put up with it, meaning that we have to start thinking about the next Administration well before the current one leaves office. Here, then, are my first, tentative thoughts.

Historically, the GOP has been the party of nominees with impressive records of public service. Our last out-of-nowhere choice was Wendell Willkie in 1940! Since then, Republicans have, in years in which they didn’t run an incumbent President or Vice President, gone to the polls with the governor of the nation’s largest state (1944 and 1948), the former commander-in-chief of the greatest military effort in history (1952), a leading conservative spokesman (1964), a former Vice President (1968), a former governor of the largest state (1980), a former Senate majority leader (1996) and the governor of the second largest state (2000). (By contrast, in the eight elections since 1952 in which the Democrats had no President or Vice President running, they put forward one governor of a top-tier state (1952 and 1956; the same man, of course), three small-to-medium state governors (1976, 1988, 1992) and three backbench Senators (1960, 1972, 2004).)

Based on the historical record, it’s easy to spot who ought to be the front runner: a well-known, articulate conservative who has just finished eight years as governor of a major state, compiling a record that led Fred Barnes to declare him “the nation’s best governor” and leaving office with 60%-plus approval ratings. But, of course, Jeb Bush is definitively not presidentabile. His brother is too unpopular now, at the moment when a campaign must get under weigh, and that stigma irrationally infects the entire family. The picture may be utterly different in February 2008. Quite possibly, a combination of another year of strong economic growth (dismissing over half a decade of expansion as a “cyclical recovery” unrelated to the sitting President’s policies is already far-fetched), renewed momentum in the War on Terror and Democratic fecklessness will elevate George W. Bush to the status of a Dwight Eisenhower, if not a Ronald Reagan. But a year from now will be far too late for a Bush in ’08 campaign.

The three other big state Republican governors are also nonstarters, one because he is constitutionally ineligible, one because he is constantly reviled by the noisiest organs of the GOP right (despite a decent record under adverse circumstances) and one because nobody ever hears anything about him. (Who is Rick Perry? is a good stumper for radio call-in quizzes. I’ll bet that more callers would guess “Britney’s latest fling” than “governor of Texas”.)

The field that has come forward instead consists of a former mayor of New York City, a long-serving Senator who has never held a major leadership position and whose signature legislative accomplishment is loathed by most of his party, a one-term governor of the middling state of Massachusetts, a former Speaker of the House, and others not so well-credentialed. With all due respect to these men, most of whom – I have nothing to say about Chuck Hagel – possess one or more sterling qualities, the best, albeit impossible, course of action for the party would be to forbid all Presidential speculation, not to mention campaigning, for the next nine months. There are no extra points for settling on a candidate early, the world scene is changing rapidly, and, after the 2006 elections, Republicans need time and leisure to think about fundamental principles and the best ways to implement them.

In line with that opinion, I am not going to take sides among Messrs. Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Gingrich, Brownback, Gilmore, Hunter, Tancredo - umm, I must have missed a few – except for a pair of comments on the two who currently lead in the polls.

First, if we are going to nominate a liberal who backs the War on Terror, why not Joe Lieberman? Besides, more mayors of Buffalo have become President than mayors of New York.

Second, how many hours will elapse between a McCain nomination and a deluge of media retrospectives about Lincoln Savings & Loan? That embarrassment may now seem buried as deeply as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cattle future profits and vanishing billing records, but I foresee an amazing revival of interest circa September 2008.

There are times for silence. Again, I know that no suggestion could be less realistic, but if only. . . .