Recent books

During the last week or so I read
Zachary Karabell, Chester Alan Arthur
Niven & Pournelle, The Burning City
and watched
Secondhand Lions

Karabell is the best of the lot, and he assumes his conclusion.

First Impressions of Kerry Speech

These are the notes I jotted down last night. I want to dig into the comparison between Cold War Liberalism and Kerry's approach to the Islamofascists, but right now I am typing in edits while the (sick) toddler naps.

Federal Reserve on Civil Religion

I have been wrestling with the chapter on civil religion over the last few weeks, most recently on a section discussiong what happened when civil religion met the Jacksonian party system.

I was thus amused to see that the St. Louis Federal Reserve has a short article on civil religion and prosperity. They focus their analysis on fear of hell, on eternal punishments and not on eternal rewards, but that does seem to be a reasonable proxy for their test. They find a high correlation between low corruption and high prosperity, a moderate correlation (correlation coefficient .34) between fear of hell and low corruption.

+- 25

So, over the weekend J was rubbing suntan lotion into my back. I made the mistake of whining that my comfy old swim trunks were wearing out.

"Well" she said "You have some grey hair here on your back, so you can go get a Speedo."

"No" I replied "Not yet. I am the wrong weight."

"What do you mean?"

"I am 5'7" and 175 - I am pudgy. To qualify to wear a Speedo I would have to either gain or lose 25 pounds and become either scrawny or obese."

"Hmm, good point. Gain the weight. That way your belly will hang over the swimsuit and you will look fat, grey and nekkid."

She always wins these arguments.

Powerful rhetoric, broken streams

I did not watch the first couple of days of the Democratic convention. I did skim a couple of transcripts earlier today, and I have the CSPAN feed of Monday's speeches lurching in the background.

They say not to bitch about things you get for free, but it is hard to follow the thread of a speech when it constantly stops to refresh the buffer - not sure if this is CSPAN's servers being pummeled, the worm du jour hitting the internet, or the inherent suckiness of RealOne Player, but it makes it hard to follow the flow.

Bitching aside, Obama gave a good speech, Carter gave a solid Carter speech, and Clinton, who is streaming in the background, gave a wonderful speech.

I got about halfway through Clinton's memoirs before having to return it to the library, I will finish it when it comes around to me again, but one of the things that I noticed in that book is also true about this speech; retirement has been good for Bill, as a person. It has given him a chance to think about what he did and what he did not do, to engage in a perior of introspection, and to discuss his record without the pressure to be right, a pressure that inflicts all Presidents while they are in office. Clinton's best moments in this speech, and in his memoirs, use self-knowledge to make a larger point. Ulysses S. Grant did something similar in his memoirs, and that is why many have made the comparison between Grant and Clinton. For that matter, Alexander Hamilton did the same, although few have linked Clinton to Ham..

My final convention thought, one that may be carried out tonight, is that the Democrats are making the very strong point that their values are consensus values, that they are the party of uniters while the Republicans are dividers. I happen to believe that Bush followed his violently partisan domestic agenda in part to discredit Nader's accusation that the parties were all alike, and that the Democrats are being very smart to take advantage of GWB's leap to the right.

More later.

EDIT - The Democratic National Convention has much better streams. This makes sense; they are spending a lot of money on their infomercial.

Home again, home again

Home from a trip to the beach - we went down the shore to visit with my sister and her family who were back for a couple of weeks from their home in the Western desert.

I am not sure what the highlight was, it might have been that on the 4th day at the shore the toddler finally stopped being afraid of the ocean, largely because my brother and I dug him a little wading pool and sand castle that he could use to watch the rising tide, and that let him figure out that the waves were more fun than scary.

It might also have been watching my nephew chase his uncle around, and watching my toddler chasing the nephew around, like 3 ducks in a row, all wanting attention and play with the bigger duck up ahead. (does that make any sense?)

Or, it might well have been the first day, where we overlapped with some old friends and their kids, and we had 10 adults and 6 kids for breakfast. Thats a full house!

Oh, and one day we took the toddler to the zoo in the afternoon. He saw a lion and was hypnotized by it. I think we get to take him to the local zoo one day when we will have more time to spend looking at critters.