A PLAY-OFF SYSTEM FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS? Now is the time for football bowl games and for sportswriters arguing for a college football championship playoff system. Why not have playoffs for the Presidential nominations? The playoffs could take many forms, but all would have this essential component: there would be at least two rounds of primaries, with the candidates starting from scratch in the second round. As one example, all states would have primaries before April 1. The eight (or four or 16) leading candidates after the first round would be eligible for the second round of primaries on May 1, and it would be this second election which would result in committed delegates. The chief argument for giving Iowa and New Hampshire so much say in choosing the nominees is that the voters in these small states can get to know the candidates before voting, so that name recognition is not given undue weight. This system would be another way to give lesser known candidates a chance to become known.
Archive for December, 2007
A PLAY-OFF SYSTEM FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS?
Monday, December 31st, 2007LOOKING BACK– OPPOSITION TO SAVING LIVES BY USING CHECKLISTS.
Sunday, December 30th, 2007LOOKING BACK– OPPOSITION TO SAVING LIVES BY USING CHECKLISTS. I posted here about Atul Gutwande’s argument that doctors would do a better job if they used checklists for complicated procedures. I was surprised that they didn’t already use checklists. In this article, Gutwande reports that a federal agency has shut down a program in the state of Michigan which used checklists in intensive care units to reduce hospital infections. Gutwande says the program had saved more than 1500 lives in the last 18 months. What was the reason for shutting down the program? The government notice said that, “By introducing a checklist and tracking the results without written, informed consent from each patient and health-care provider, they had violated scientific ethics regulations.”
DIEHARD MARXISTS.
Sunday, December 30th, 2007DIEHARD MARXISTS. Stoppard has a memorable character in ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, a professor who is a devoted Marxist, whose loyalty to Communist regimes cannot be shaken. The character seems to be completely unaffected by the restrictions on freedom that his Czech friends encounter. Stoppard doesn’t explain the fierce loyalty.
EAST GERMANY AND WEST GERMANY.
Sunday, December 30th, 2007EAST GERMANY AND WEST GERMANY. There was a controlled experiment run for about forty years comparing Communism in East Germany and capitalism in West Germany from an economic point of view. The East German economy was a huge failure. West Germany prospered. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, I encountered some German lawyers I had worked with. I congratulated them. They agreed, but then they both said that now Germany was going to have to find useful work for hundreds of thousands of people who only knew how to spy on other people. In the event, more than fifteen years after unification, and after years of massive subsidies, East Germany is still way behind, and it is estimated that it will take many more years to catch up.
HAVING ONE BIG INK BLOT ON YOUR RECORD.
Saturday, December 29th, 2007HAVING ONE BIG INK BLOT ON YOUR RECORD. I think that it is sometimes an advantage to have a huge blot on one’s historical copybook. An example is Richard Nixon. Watergate dominates any other negatives on his record; those other negatives tend to be passed over. Watergate thus distracts attention from his administration’s disastrous economic record. I suggest that this distortion of perspective shows up in evaluating Communism in Eastern Europe. Historians are still coming to grips with the fact that Stalin killed millions. They then tend to pass over the fact that Communism destroyed the Eastern European economies and deprived millions of basic freedoms by controlling their lives to the point where they couldn’t even listen to music of their choice.
STOPPARD AND THE FALL OF THE IRON CURTAIN.
Friday, December 28th, 2007STOPPARD AND THE FALL OF THE IRON CURTAIN. ROCK ‘N’ ROLL is one of the few works of fiction that I am aware of that have dealt with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain. This was one of the most important historical events of my lifetime. As important as the event seems to me, it is not an event which has captured the imagination of many writers. It seems that the freeing of Eastern Europe was of importance mainly to East Europeans and to writers with East European roots.
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.
Friday, December 28th, 2007ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. We got to see another wonderful Tom Stoppard play. ROCK ‘N’ ROLL has a two act structure that reflects the history of Eastern Europe before and after 1989. The first act is in many ways painful. The exacting regulation of life in Czechoslovakia is dramatized through the inability of one character who lives in Czechoslovakia to listen to the music he wants to hear. These scenes lay the ground for a wild release at the end of the second act when the Berlin Wall falls and the characters are simply allowed to attend a rock concert.
SHAKESPEARE AND NEUROSCIENCE.
Thursday, December 27th, 2007SHAKESPEARE AND NEUROSCIENCE. Jonah Lehrer (author of PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST) links here to a report by Phillip Davis on an experiment which measured the brain’s reaction to some Shakespearean language. The experiment measured the effect on the brain of using a word as a different part of speech. (Davis gives examples from Shakespeare: “‘He childed as I fathered’” (nouns shifted to verbs); in “‘Troilus and Cressida’”, “‘Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages’” (noun converted to adjective); “‘Othello’”, “‘To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!”‘ (noun “‘lip’” to verb; adjective “‘wanton’” to noun).” A change was shown in the electrical activity of the brain, and an effect different from that produced by simple bad grammar. The difficulty of the language creates neural excitement in the brain. Says Davis, “Shakespeare is stretching us.”
IN PRAISE OF SCROOGE.
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007IN PRAISE OF SCROOGE. Steven E. Landsburg (the Armchair Economist), who is an illustration of Robertson Davies’s proposition that “[A]ll economists are rapt, fanciful creatures; it is necessary to their profession”, praises Scrooge. In fact, he has a whole chapter entitled, “What I Like About Scrooge” in his book MORE SEX IS SAFER SEX. He argues, “What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat?” He goes further: “The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largesse far and wide.”
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007MERRY CHRISTMAS! God bless us, every one!
