We're Overseas about "Overseas"

Today I'm in Greenwich, Connecticut, for the roll-out of my daughter Beatriz Williams' debut novel, Overseas.  There's an event at the Greenwich Library tonight at 7pm EDT, but right now we are listening to an author interview on "The Business of Living" AM1490 WGCH.  It's a delight: Beatriz comes across as knowledgeable, confident, articulate, with a good radio voice.  Just how you'd want your daughter to come across.



So what's Overseas all about?  Here is an interview in the Greenwich Citizen.  Says Beatriz:

"Overseas" is a sweeping love story about a First World War infantry officer who follows the woman he loves across time to contemporary Manhattan. It really crosses over genre lines, with elements of historical fiction, mystery, contemporary romance, and a touch of the paranormal.

Or, as I like to pitch the book: Overseas is about young Kate Wilson in Manhattan in the 2000s.  She's fallen in love with this guy Julian that runs a $20 billion hedge fund, but then she gets a book in the mail about a family in World War I.  And her Julian looks exactly like a British infantry officer that was killed in the Battle of the Somme!  What gives?



Real estate, they say, is all about three things: location, location, location.  Book publishing is similar.  It all comes down to three things: publicity, publicity, publicity.  So whatever people are saying about the book, whether it's on your website, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Twitter, Facebook, GoodReads, radio, newspaper, it's all good.  The only thing that's bad is when nobody is talking about you!



But publishing a book is not all fun and games.  Being the father in question you have to expect a little gentle ribbing.  You find that your fatherly advice comes back to haunt you.  Here's where I come in, the sorrowful father with gloomy advice as recalled by Beatriz Williams:

If you must write, he told me, with a sorrowful shake of his head, go off and do something else first. Otherwise you'll have nothing to write about except writing.

Well.  Thank goodness that my daughter took my advice.  Children very often do, you know, for better or worse.  So you should be careful when you dish it out.  They are listening, even when they are teenagers and pretending that they don't hear a word you say.

A 60-40 Year?

The big question in any election is: who will turn out to vote?  That is the dirty little secret that the pollsters keep under wraps in their "turnout models."  That's why it is meaningless to show, right now, that the presidential race is tied.  Because the pollsters really don't know who will turn out in November.



But now we are beginning to get a look at things.  The 60-40 defeat of 80-year-old Senate incumbent Dick Lugar (R-IN) in the Republican primary sends a message.  The 60-40 success of a man-woman marriage amendment sends a message.  The majority piled up by Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) against all of his Democratic primary opponents sends a message.



The message is that it looks like Republican voters are coming out to play.  So if I were a Democrat, or if I were President Obama's campaign managers, I would start to get really worried.



On top of everything, it feels like Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney is hitting his stride.  He is starting to articulate an economic message, and he is starting to tout his business experience as an asset. (Imagine that!)  He is even taking a swipe at Julia, life of.



In my view it is serendipity that in the slowest recovery since the Great Depression the Republicans are running a candidate whose whole business experience is about starting up new businesses and trying to reorganize failing businesses.  Think about it.  As the economy struggles to create new jobs what else would be more timely that a politician in charge who really understands how jobs are saved and created?



I wonder if the American voters agree?

The Four Causes in Plato

Everyone knows that Aristotle invented the Four Causes.  In the Metaphysics he lays it out: the Material Cause, the stuff that something is made of; the Formal Cause, the form or pattern, the shape of something; the Efficient Cause, the source of the something, such as the father of a child; and of course the famous Final Cause, the purpose or "end" of something in the world.

Today of course, we often like to think that nothing has a purpose: everything just is.  But then everything in the world acts as if it had a purpose, whatever that means.

Aristotle may have been the chap to define the Four Causes, but Plato seemed to take the Four Causes for granted in his dialogues.  For instance, in the Timaeus he tells us how the world came into being.  First of call, of course, it came into being because God wanted it.

The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all what was visible--not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion--and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder. [30a]

Reads like an Aristotelian Final Cause to me, even if young Timaeus spoke it.

Having decided to bring order out of disorder the god next had to decide what the world would look like.  And so he decided to make it like "the best of the intelligible things... a single visible living thing".{31a]  But here's a puzzler.  Should there be one heaven or many?  What a modern thought: universe or multiverses?  But if it is to be One Living Thing, then obviously it must be one and not two.[31b]  Of course it ought to be shaped in a way "that embraces all the shapes there are" and that would obviously be a sphere.  And there it is, turning in a circle in a single solitary heaven.[34b]

So much for the Formal Cause of the heaven and the earth.

What of the material of the earth?  It would obviously have to be at least "fire and earth."  Now it is clear that if two bodies need to be bonded together they need a third agent, and since the world is to be a solid, it needs not one but two bonding agents: air and water.  So the universe will be composed of earth, fire, air and water, just as we would expect.  The Formal Cause of binding together the universe requires a Material Cause of the four elements.

Then there is the Efficient Cause, the designer god himself.  In his art he had to decide whether the universe needed all the appurtenances that humans need: ears, eyes, nose, hands, and feet.  It wouldn't need that, he decided, because he would build it complete and self-sufficient.  It wouldn't need to see or hear or breathe or digest, or catch or stand on anything.  It would just need to spin.  It would be complete and entire, organizing the disorganized, able to "keep its own company without requiring anything else."  There are a lot of decisions to make when you are designing and building the universe.

A rather male universe too, it seems to be.  But then Plato probably didn't ever ask his wife Xanthippe what she thought about the origin of the universe.

Endgame of the Welfare State

So the French decided to toss their "conservative" President Sarkozy for the Socialist Hollande.  And M. Hollande promises to end "austerity" with growth--in government spending.  In other words the French want to spend the Germans' money for them.



And the Greeks are turning to a neo-Nazi party.  Of course they are.  What do you do when socialism doesn't work?  You turn to national socialism.



Europe's Big Problem, and ours, is that politicians have promised the moon in entitlements to the voters and now the voters are mad that they aren't going to get the moon.  Or even much in the way of green cheese.  We've known this would end in tears; we've known it for decades.  But from the point of view of the welfare-state beneficiary, none of that matters.  If s/he can keep the gravy train going another five, or ten, or fifteen years, then to hell with nation, to hell with the economy, to hell with the grandchildren: just keep those monthly payments going.  Tax the rich, tax the corporations, print the money.  Just don't cut my benefits, 'cos I earned them.



Here's what is needed.  What is needed is for the left-wing parties to admit (privately) that they were wrong and reform their welfare state so that it runs itself without detailed government supervision.  Government can proudly preside over the economy and pretend that it is giving out all kinds of benefits, but in reality it lets the market economy run itself.  Government demands the most frightful payroll taxes from evil, greedy employers, but the money all goes into private accounts for the workers and the workers get whatever pensions and health care and unemployment and disability their contributions yield.



That, of course, is what the German Social Democratic Party started to do under Gerhard Schroeder. They relaxed employment regulation.  They lowered unemployment benefits.  They didn't do it because they wanted to. They did it because they had to, and the German voters immediately voted them out of office.  But it was the right thing to do, and now the Germans have the only healthy economy in Europe.  They have even cut their green energy subsidies.  And the Social Democrats will be back as soon as the Germans get fed up with Frau Merkel.



No doubt the French socialists will be forced to do the same thing, and probably sooner rather than later.  But not until they have got the French economy completely in the ditch.



You might ask: why put the French people through such a nightmare?  The answer is that it's the only way to convince the welfare-state beneficiaries to loosen their grip on the public purse.



People will only agree to take half a loaf when they can see, beyond a doubt, that there is no chance in hell that they are going to get the whole loaf.

Rasmussen Misses Point on 50-50 Elections

Pundits often excoriate politicians as self-serving hacks that betray the noble American people.  Here's pollster Scott Rasmussen writing about the lack of decisive elections recently.

As voters, however, Americans experience a government that is unresponsive and catering to the interests and whims of politicians...



Nothing will be resolved until the political class catches up to the American people. That will require a major change in the way government and politics work.

Er, no, Scott.  The reason we are in this mess is that the American people can't make up their mind.  They can't decide whether to vote for an intensification of the welfare state of the last century or whether to cut government down a bit and take more responsibility for their lives.



And the symbol of this uncertainty is the white working class that has shuttled between the Republican and Democratic parties for the last couple of decades.  Do they want to stay with the grand old entitlements that FDR and LBJ designed for them?  Or do they go with the social conservative patriotism of Reagan and Bush?  It's a tough call, because the white working class hasn't quite adapted to the free-enterprise world; it still hankers for the safety of living in a close village community under the patronage-distributing lord of the manor or the urban village's precinct captain.



The point is that there are two elites competing for the votes of the American people.  There is the Progressive elite and its big-government agenda that started with Theodore Roosevelt.  Its ideal is the Life of Julia so ably described by the Obama campaign.  On the progressive view the great milestones in your life are the wonderful government programs that help you in education, in health, and in retirement.



Then there is the conservative movement that argues a small-government agenda.  Big government is the "road to serfdom" and sooner or later it will run out of other peoples' money.  In addition to that, conservatives argue, big government corrodes society, turning everyone into a dependent whose social thinking doesn't go beyond voting for the politician that offers the most free stuff.



Back in 1990 conservatives thought that they had won the overall argument about big government, and the Clintonian liberals were certainly modest about their arguments for big government, at least they were after the failure of HillaryCare.  They were the new, non-partisan Democrats that hated the divisive conservatives of the Christian Right.  Then they got into power and went pedal-to-the-metal to implement their big-government agenda before an election could stop them.



Rasmussen is right to complain about the "trench warfare" of today's politics.  But the politicians are the wrong people to blame.  The politicians are merely putting themselves at the head of the various interests battling for the soul of America.



The state of Wisconsin shows us what is at stake.  Government employees have dealt themselves a pretty cushy situation with wages and benefits well above the norm in the private sector.  Some politicians want to reform that imbalance.  Others want to defend the government employees.  The result is the political donnybrook we have seen in Madison, Wisconsin over the past year and a half.



Eventually the American people must decide what they want.  And they will.  Look for two or three really decisive elections in the next few years.  Maybe the first one will be this November.

What About Atlantis?

When Socrates and his chums gather the day(!) after they discussed The Republic for another chat on important philosophical matters, the first thing they do is rehearse what they agreed to the day before.  How everyone should stick to one job, how the guardians were a race apart, how children should be raised in common and how "the bad ones were to be secretly handed on to another city".  But now Socrates wants to look at his ideas in motion and see his ideal city compared to other cities, and who better than Timaeus, a well-born man from Lucri in Italy, and his pals, to give a response to Socrates.

Oddly, you might think, in his review of The Republic, Socrates doesn't mention the philosopher-kings we've all grown to know and love, and that Karl Popper anathematized in his Open Society and Its Enemies.  But he doesn't really need to.  It is perfectly clear that Socrates and his young friends would form the junta in their ideal Republic: philosopher-kings in practice if not in name.

Then Critias launches into the myth of Atlantis, supposedly given by an Egyptian priest to Solon the Greek lawgiver centuries before Socrates' time.  Curiously the priest seems to intuit that Atlantis is an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and "provided passage" to other islands and "to the entire continent on the other side, which surrounds that real sea beyond."  You could take that as a description of the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas, the Pacific Ocean, and East Asia beyond.  Of course, some people now think that there was contact between the Egyptians and the early South American civilizations; there seem to be artifacts and food residues in the Americas that suggest this.  The Egyptian priest is modest about how big the continents and oceans are out there.  You can use your imagination about that.  The Atlantians, did not dwell on their Atlantic island as if in an Isle of the Blessed.  On the contrary, they tried to conquer and enslave Europe and Asia, but were stopped by the mighty Greeks.  But a short while later both Greeks and Atlantis were drownded, like Li'l Em'ly's father and many others.  It was storms that did for Li'l Em'ly's dad, but earthquakes and floods that did for the Atlantians.

Was there an Isle of Atlantis where now you will find nothing but unnavigable waters obstructed by a "layer of mud at shallow depth?"  Hardly.  But it is telling that the center of the Atlantic Ocean has an oceanic ridge, and actually rises above the watery and misty hollows up north in volcanic and glacier-covered Iceland.

What I Want From Romney

You don't get to read too much about the presumptive Republican candidate for president from the mainstream media: who is is and what he stands for.  That's because they aren't much interested in Mitt Romney and his agenda.  Those chaps have another agenda.



That's why you have to get past the mainstream media and actually look at the candidate's speeches to figure out who he is and what he means for America.  Now that Romney is the presumptive Republican candidate we can get a glimpse of how he proposes to run for president rather than run for the Republican nomination.  Our first look at his general election campaign came on Tuesday night, April 24, 2012, at Romney's victory speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, after he won primaries in five eastern states.



What I want to see is for Romney to step up to who he is.  Democrats have made a big deal about his years leading Bain Capital, as if it is shameful to be a capitalist creating new companies and trying to resurrect failing companies.  Republicans cannot continue to shy away from support of capitalism. And I want Romney to take on the "fairness" issue.  So long as Democrats can go on about fairness and not get push-back so long will the unaffordable welfare state get bigger and bigger until it collapses.  Then the real "unfairness" will start.



In Romney's Manchester speech he made a start on both these themes.  Said he, about his business experience:

Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of the state in which he once sold paint from the trunk of his car.



I’d say that you might have heard that I was successful in business. And that rumor is true. But you might not have heard that I became successful by helping start a business that grew from 10 people to hundreds of people. You might not have heard that our business helped start other businesses, like Staples and Sports Authority and a new steel mill and a learning center called Bright Horizons. And I’d tell you that not every business made it and there were good days and bad days, but every day was a lesson. And after 25 years, I know how to lead us out of this stagnant Obama economy and into a job-creating recovery!

OK.  I'd call that a start.  Here's what I'd like him to say next. I'd like him to say that his business centered around two things.  First, he helped create new start-up companies, based on new ideas, with new money.  Then he helped try to turn around and rescue companies in trouble, by reorganizing and recapitalizing.



When you do that, you are putting yourself on the line, because there are going to be failures to balance the successes.  But if you don't do something, risk something, then you can't get to success.  Here in America, we need someone like that, someone with experience in turning around failing companies.  Because the United States is not in a good place.  In fact it is in a turn-around situation; we have to change now or we risk losing it.  We need not a community-organizer-in-chief but a reorganizer-in-chief.



Then there is Romney on "fairness."

This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.

Now we are talking.  The basic fact of the big-government welfare state is that it is unfair.  It is a system of looting.  You get in power and then you hand out the loot to your supporters.  So the more we limit the looting, the better for all Americans.  Right now, the biggest chunk of government loot is going out to baby-boomer seniors like me.  But why?  Seniors are the richest kind.  We shouldn't be looting the younger generation for our Social Security and Medicare.  Romney doesn't mention that, of course, because he dare not.  But he does hit the Obamis where they are most vulnerable.  On lousy urban schools, run by Democrats.  On crony capitalism, giving out money to campaign contributors.  On the gigantic disaster of government employees looting the state treasuries with their unfunded pensions and retiree health care.



Jonah Goldberg is out with a new book this week on The Tyranny of Clichés.  He argues that liberals use clichés to shut down political speech.  There are two problems with this liberal habit.  First of all it stops the other guys from talking to the American people.  That's a pity.  But then it puts liberals into an idea-free cocoon.  They never get to defend their ideas in an open forum.  They are always sneaking around looking for the chance to lead with a rabbit punch.  That's a shame.  Because one day conservatives will break through to the American people with some new idea and liberals won't know how to counter it, because they have never had to honestly defend their ideas.  Maybe that is happening right now.



Mitt Romney has started out the general election campaign with some good themes.  Things can only get better from here.  Is that possible.  One of the campaign consultants working against Romney in 2008 said this.  He said that the Romney campaign in 2008 learned so fast it was scary.



What's so remarkable about that?  That is how capitalism and business works.  That is how you get to be successful in business. You learn and adapt every day or you go out of business.  Or, as Mitt Romney said in his speech: "there were good days and bad days, but every day was a lesson."