You Didn't Build Chick-Fil-A

There’s a remarkable difference between the controversy over what Obama says he didn’t say and the one over what he most certainly did say.

Why should “you didn’t build that” be the defining statement of the Obama campaign, while his “evolution” on single-sex marriage is all but ignored? There are, after all, as the current flap over chickens attests, a lot of folks who don’t like the idea ….

It all has to do with those (usually mythical) “dog whistles” that politicians are so allegedly adept at.

No one who was paying attention could look at Obama’s 2008 campaign and assume anything other than that his protestation of belief in traditional marriage and his opposition to single-sex marriage were simply election-year expedients intended to be discarded at the first practical opportunity – as, indeed, they were.

Similarly, no one paying attention could possibly mistake Obama for a small-government politician. But it is not yet politically expedient for him to campaign on his true belief, that the economy should be completely controlled by the Federal government, so he still pretends that he’s a “middle of the road,” “reasonable,” “moderate” capitalist like nearly everyone else in Washington.

But everyone knows that that’s not so: that he is, in fact, the most radical politician ever elected to office (and, yes, I include Kucinich) whose ultimate goal is the complete dismantling of the free enterprise system and the institution of state control over every aspect of our lives: what kind of cars we can drive, how far we can drive them, where and how often we can fly, what we set our thermostats to, what kind of groceries we can buy – and all in the name of “ensuring fairness,” “protecting our health,” and “combating global warming.”

So when he lets the mask slip and says – or appears to say – what everyone knows he really thinks, people get excited and Obama must, again, deny that he is who he is and believes what he believes.

College and the Arts

Instapundit linked to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Alex Tabarrok, writes that

In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.

I come from an artistic family: both my parents were musicians, as are my wife and stepmother; our eldest is a fashion designer; our youngest is a songwriter; and I write poetry. Among the seven of us, we have lots of non-technical degrees (though I do like to point out that I was the only English major in my class on partial differential equations). And, of course, we have met many, many others who also have arts degrees.

With few exceptions, arts degrees are unlikely to be worthwhile. Art is, fundamentally, something an artist does, not something an artist studies.

The model for learning the arts is not the college classroom, but the master-apprentice relationship. Though I do think that anyone who wants to be a serious musician should spend some time in a conservatory learning ear training and counterpoint and harmony and such. Even so, the mentoring relationship is much more important: think of Nadia Boulanger.

The rest of the academy should be approached carefully. In the field I know best, a strong case can be made that the academicalization of poetry has utterly destroyed its audience: it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that more people write it than read it. The reason for that is simple: a comparison of "unknown verse not worth knowing" from the 19th century with similar verse produced today is instructive: the older stuff is usually technically competent -- on the level of a mediocre TV show, pleasant enough, but insignificant. The modern stuff is acutely painful to read or listen to (and still insignificant).

But what other visual and performing artists need is mentoring and work experience. A sculptor needs to learn to cast bronze. A fashion designer needs to know how to spec a design for large-scale production. A painter needs to learn to mix paints. A poet needs to learn prosody (well, OK: that's controversial -- the number of poets today who can tell an anapest from a dactyl is vanishingly small). An actor needs to act; a dancer, to dance. And for his acting, an actor will learn everything -- and dancers, well ....

On the performing side, I think we suffer from the self-esteem movement. My wife teaches voice and piano. It is absolutely the case -- as has always been true -- that no more than a handful of her students will ever make a living at music and extremely unlikely that any of them will make a good living at it. And yet they are all and always told how wonderful they are.

The mother of one of her students reported on a college fair at a local high school, where the most popular major investigated by the students was Musical Theatre. This major did not exist even 20 years ago. And a bigger waste of time and money can scarcely be imagined: one can have private voice lessons, acting classes, and dance classes for a fraction of the cost of college (and pay for it with the proceeds of food-service work!) and have the freedom to audition for professional jobs. If, after a year or two, one has not been hired, then one can simply move on to something else.

So -- if you want to be an artist, stay out of college. Find a mentor. Make art. Perform. Then, when you've failed -- and almost all of you will -- you can go to college (or not) with some idea of what you can and can't do. And you will not be carrying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

Cocktail #2: The Burnstini

Most of you should recall that Burns wrote O my Luve's like a red, red rose. But love is more than roses: it can be bitter, and it can be spicy. So:

2 oz vodka
1 oz rose syrup
1/2 oz Campari
1/2 oz Domaine de Canton

Shake with ice; strain into a Martini glass.

Warning: this drink is very, very red. Do not attempt to drink it except as the first of the evening, especially if you're wearing white.

A new cocktail: The Mellow Mullah

We need to find a way to get this to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Years ago, my eldest daughter and I had a falooda at an Indian restaurant (note, though, that its origins are Persian). We liked it. But ... my youngest took one look at the vermicelli and seeds among the pink rose syrup and vanilla ice cream and started to cry.

So I found a rose syrup at a local South Indian grocery store. Inspired by the memory of falooda, I offer you the Mellow Mullah:

2 oz vodka
4 crushed green cardamom pods
scant 1/8 tsp vanilla extract
a grind of black pepper (not too much!)

Mix the above and let sit for at least one hour.

Put the above in a cocktail shaker. Add

1 1/4 oz rose syrup
1/4 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz Domain de Canton ginger liqueur
1 oz half-and-half

Shake vigorously; strain into chilled martini glass

Alas, I just looked up 'mellow mullah' and someone else beat me to the name. But my recipe's better and way more Persian -- or at least as Persian as a cocktail can be!

A game plan for global warming

Recently, a friend at NASA -- after I had been somewhat dismissive of his (and James Hansen's) political acumen -- asked me how I would propose to get a solution to global warming through the American political system.

So ...

1. Prove that the problem exists. "But we've done that!" I hear you complain. No, you haven't. To prove that the problem exists, you need to provide relatively short-term predictions (5-10 yrs) that are proven correct in every particular. Only then can you create confidence in longer term (50-200 yr) predictions. This is a high bar, of course, given the reality of climate science.

2. Get your allies to shut up, part one: weather. There's a fun page that lists everything that anyone has ever blamed on global warming: the warmlist. This is propaganda, and deeply unfair -- but quite effective. The practice seems to be that anytime some unfortunate event occurs in the natural world, someone will attribute it to global warming, and that attribution will show up in the newspapers, thus making global warming look rather silly. (Look, for instance, at the "Atlantic more salty" and "Atlantic less salty" links on the warmlist.) Also, the "cooling trends are mere weather" vs. "warming trends are a result of long-term climate change" arguments are unconvincing (even if true!), and make global warming seem nonfalsifiable.

3. Do the economics. Now, economics is an even less accurate science than climatology, so this will prove a challenge. But if the present cost of mitigation is greater than the future benefit, then mitigation will never occur. (And any forecast must assume that the future world is richer and smarter than the present world, so more expensive fixes later are actually less costly than cheap fixes now.)

4. Consider fairness. Any mitigation effort that maintains the status quo in poor countries will be ignored, being rightly perceived as the West saying to the Rest "I've got mine, Jack." And any mitigation that explicitly disallows the possibility of a Western life to the 6 billion or so who aspire to exactly that will not be popular. For that matter, those in the West will not countenance any diminution in their living standards.

5. Get your allies to shut up, part two: politics. Al Gore, Tom Friedman, James Hansen, and others have lamented the existence of democracy in the West and dreamed of running a Chinese-style totalitarian state ("for a day" -- Friedman) so they could get their preferred policies put in place by fiat. This is not the kind of sentiment that makes it easy to get majority support.

6. Squash the watermelons. "Watermelon" is a term of abuse directed at global-warming activists: "Green on the outside, Red on the inside." Cf. "Oreo". Unfortunately, most proposals to stop global warming curtail both individual freedom and economic growth. If mitigation policies are not pro-freedom and pro-growth, they will not be accepted.

7. But, most of all, we need the accurate predictions mentioned in point 1. Those of us who lived through the 70s have heard dozens, if not hundreds, of predictions of catastrophes, from ice ages to Jupiter effects to global famine to superstorms. None of them have come to pass. Thus, global warming has become the wolf the boy kept crying about.

In my judgement, the propaganda battle is far more likely to be won by global warming skeptics, due mainly to the complete lack of understanding of history, politics, morality, and human nature on the part of global warming activists. See also Walter Russell Mead.

Certainly I would rather be charged with the task of preventing, rather than enabling, global warming mitigation.

It is instructive to compare this issue with those revolving around the Federal deficit. Everyone knows that the government cannot continue to run deficits of $1e12/yr; but everyone also wants to solve the problem later. (Hence my own political party: the "Make someone else pay for it later" party.)

American citizens do not presently feel any ill effects from the deficit. One can argue that there are some, but they are lost in the noise of other phenomena (unemployment, housing market collapse, general recession). And any effort to diminish the deficit will cause pain to all Americans.

However, if the deficit is not brought under control in a relatively short time (a decade or so), we face the likelihood of a severe, Weimar Germany--level, economic catastrophe.

This is a very good analogy with global warming, I think -- and points up how hard a solution will be.

Presentism and homosexuality

It is widely assumed by the bien-pensants that homosexuality is innate and unchangeable.

This is obviously untrue, as even the most cursory acquaintance with history, anthropology, and current practice would reveal.

For it has long been the case that, in any environment from which females are excluded, males will indulge in sex acts with each other – aboard ships, in prisons, at boys’ boarding schools. The vast majority of these men revert to heterosexuality behavior as soon as the opportunity presents itself. This leads, naturally, to much unfalsifiable hair-splitting about the difference between ‘behavior’ and ‘orientation’. Historically, of course, humans have been far, far more concerned with outward behavior than inward tendencies. In fact, all of Western jurisprudence is based upon the former.

The recent phenomenon of ‘repressed memory’ – now well-established as a destructive lie – should make one leery of any pronunciamenti regarding anything interior. If a woman can be convinced that her father raped her, how can we be sure that a man can’t be convinced that he’s homosexual? Especially if he’s in a subculture (ballet, theater, San Francisco) that enthusiastically endorses it.

And then there’s the example of ancient Greece, which institutionalized ‘man-boy love’ among the upper class. So – either all members of the Greek elite just happened to be homosexuals (or pedophiles) or their sexual behavior was determined not by their innate orientations, but by the external society.

Even John Boswell hints at this in his ridiculous (American Book Award–winning) tome Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, in which he makes the ‘argument’ that, because there is no single word in Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew that unambiguously and solely means ‘homosexual’ or ‘homosexuality’, neither could have been condemned by Scripture. (Note that this concept, like relativity, did not exist anywhere in human thought before modern times. One could just as well argue that, because there is no ancient word meaning ‘brainwash’, Scripture could not possibly condemn the practice.) Boswell then explains the Pauline passage (Rom 1:26) referring to women who act ‘against nature’ as condemning not homosexuality per se, but those who are, by nature, homosexuals yet indulge in heterosexual practices, and vice versa.

Of course, that thought could not have been formed by Paul – or, indeed, by anyone else who lived before the modern era. One simply cannot apply our current understanding of sexuality and our current sexual practices to people who lived centuries or millennia ago. (And they would certainly resent any such imposition, were they to know of it.)

We are about to destroy all that has been true about the most fundamental familial relationships for thousands of years and replace it, root and branch.

It is odd, to say the least, that those who support such an effort are, with microscopically few exceptions, the same ones who reject genetically modified foods as unnatural and ‘not proven safe’. No one has made the least effort to prove that this wholesale change being imposed upon human nature is safe in any sense.

But the precautionary principle never has appealed to the engineers of human souls.

New Jersey’s Hindu Problem

Whaddaya mean, you haven’t heard of New Jersey’s Hindu problem? Don’t you keep up with the news?

OK, well, actually – there is no Hindu problem. Not in New Jersey, and not too terribly much anywhere else, though Tamils and Pakistanis may have different opinions.

I’m drawn to this topic by Reihan Salam’s recent post, The Browning of America, at thedaily.com, where he describes being among a group of mostly brown bus riders in L.A.

Well, Reihan would also not feel out of place on the Northeast Corridor line between Trenton and New York. Sure, we have lots of white traders and hedge-fund types – but, at a guess, 10–40% of the riders between Hamilton and Metropark are from the Asian subcontinent.

It would seem, based on my coworkers and friends and other random observations, that most of Central Jersey’s subcontinental immigrants are Hindu, with small admixtures of Christians, Muslims, and irreligious (but that last category is not exclusive).

Yet we never hear about our Hindu problem. Children whose parents speak with funny accents at home still perform quite well in our English-mostly (some Spanish) school system.

And Hinduism is quite radically different from Christianity; in fact, compared to Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are practically identical. Yet there are no difficulties based on religious differences with our Hindu immigrants.

So far as I know, no one – not even Pat Buchanan or Lew Rockwell – has raised the alarm against the Hindu menace.

Perhaps there's something here worth exploring … what could be the difference be between Hispanic and Muslim immigrants on the one hand and Hindu immigrants on the other?