Space Opera: What’s Out There?

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The phrase Space Opera, (a parody on Soap Opera, in case you younger readers couldn’t figure that out) was coined in response to the cycle of movies that started with Star Wars, conceived and produced by George Lucas, whose claim to popular fame remains this titanic series of six movies.

Many different creations in literature, movies and television could have influenced George Lucas, and one can certainly explore what he has written and said about his influences. I have to guess that perhaps Wagner’s Ring cycle and Tolkien’s Ring cycle both influenced Lucas, and one assumes that space movies and TV serials from the early post-war years such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon could not have failed to influence his imagination, one way or another. I would also guess that 2001, A Space Odyssey must have had a great influence of Lucas, as it did on an entire generation, as well as the entire Space Program.  Lucas confesses that WW2 flying ace movies also influenced him.

As many have remarked, the problem of good versus evil is a major focus of many of these large-scale literary works, certainly of the Wagnerian dramas, and of Tolkien’s work. Lucas, for the first time, distilled the idea of the hero who falls to the Dark Side as a central theme, though it is present in Wagner as well.  Tolkien steers clear of that idea; the seeds of evil in his villains are always present, except for the minor instance of Saruman, and even there, Tolkien portrays him as someone who needed to be watched all along.

In the Post Star-Wars world, the Harry Potter series addresses the problem of heroes who go over to the dark side, though at a much more superficial level, since the forces there are magical, and the magic takes on a greater responsibility for the action than The Force ever does in Star Wars. But in Harry Potter, just as in Tolkien, Jane Rowling presents a subtle account of the villain who is redeemed by his final actions, as well as the hero whose deep cover leads him to horrible deeds which are almost unforgivable, even given his circumstances.

Major Series in Science Fiction
There are story cycles in science fiction that have not yet made it to the big screen, or even DVD.

The first one that comes to mind is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series.  The premise is that a ship from Earth is launched in secrecy very early in the space era, containing a large proportion of colonists with extraordinary psychic powers, such as ability to teleport, or telekinesis, or mind-reading, and so on.  The ship crashes into a planet, though almost all on board manage to survive. Somehow, the conditions on the planet favor the development of the psi powers of the colonists, and over time, the colonists have among them powerful telepaths, while at the same time, the knowledge of their origins is lost.

The writing and plotting in the several dozen Darkover books is highly uneven, even though at their best the books are amazingly good. The psychic powers are disconcerting to some readers, and to others, the chief fascination of the series. One gets the impression that, for Marion Zimmer Bradley, the Darkover series was a money-spinner, far more than the chief focus of her creativity (but there could be information out there --that I’m not privy to-- that indicates otherwise).

The next story cycle --by no means less important-- is Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series.  Again, a colony ship from Earth lands on an Earth-like planet, which they name Pern (an acronym for a phrase that eludes me). The interesting feature of this planet is that there is a native life-form that is essentially a winged lizard.

Among the colonists is a geneticist, who eventually succeeds in genetically modifying the winged lizard species to be enormous in size, and to have an artificially enhanced intelligence with which it can communicate with humans telepathically. Naturally these beasts were called dragons in the series, and Anne McCaffrey was affectionately called the Dragon Lady, and pioneered the exploitation of the natural attraction of readers to everything that had to do with those mythical creatures in the fantasy genre.

The society, after centuries of isolation from the home planet, regresses into a level comparable with the early Renaissance on Earth. McCaffrey has the genius to make her depictions of the more influential protagonists in the stories interesting and 3-dimensional, and her descriptions of man-dragon interaction is fascinating. As with the Darkover stories, there is an important political dimension to the stories, and both series are persuasive in their different ways.

Anne McCaffrey has written an entirely independent series based on the idea of telekinesis; that in the distant future, space travel will be accomplished by telekinesis, rather than by rocket engines. This idea is worked out in the series beginning with The Rowan. She has written yet other series, but none as important or as interesting as the Pern series and the Rowan series.

The idea that psi powers are a major force is firmly established in science fiction. Piers Anthony, for instance, has written a series called the Cluster cycle, in which telepathic powers, assisted by mechanical devices, enables the mind-essence of humans and other intelligent species to travel enormous distances, and occupy the body of a host being, temporarily.

The main force that drives better science fiction is the use of a setting for battles of good and evil and fear and courage and responsibility and revenge and love and hate far from the restrictions of life on Earth. The stories may depend on the same themes, but divorced from the traditional settings of Earth life, they become less clichetic, and gain in abstract power.

[To be discontinued]

Arch





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An interesting new piece of information about Mitt Romney

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For a long time I've wondered what Mitt Romney was all about, and a new video that's being circulated piecemeal gives a little insight. One wonders whether it has been doctored (beyond a little blurring that has been introduced to protect those who ostensibly recorded the video), and some heavy cuts.

The big motive, apparently, is to give a big boost to the Stock Market.  [Romney says (I'm paraphrasing) If I (Romney) win, I know the stock market will have a huge jump.  If the other fellows win, I don't know what will happen.]  Yes, I know: the Stock Market is important for All Americans. It is an indicator of a sort of average of what a whole bunch of total idiots think are important stocks, and what stupid value they place on them. But these Economic Elite investors do not realize that they've given the Stock Market a sort of superstitious value that is extremely dangerous, and which is easy to manipulate by unscrupulous people, as we found to our dismay during the collapse of the housing market.

The Stock Marketologists (sort of like Scientologists, but less rational) believe that nothing like the housing market collapse will happen again to investors. They don't mind consumers being hurt by it, you see? As long as the investors can pull out in time. So: Investors 1, Consumers 0.  (These same people were angry at the Government bailout of GM and Chrysler, because it was intended to save the workers, not the investors. I'm still not sure how well the GM and Chrysler investors did as a result of the bailout; perhaps the Fed waited until the stocks hit rock bottom before they intervened; perhaps the big GOP types pulled out of GM and Chrysler too fast to benefit from the bailout. (They deplore insider trading, but there certainly is plenty of networking among big investors to enable them to respond fast to approaching disaster.)

The Church of StockMarketology, like other extreme denominations, does not believe in (1) handouts for the poor, (2) bailouts for struggling companies, (3) Government spending beyond its ability to levy revenue, except to lower taxes, (4) and they don't believe in any moves to prevent offshoring of jobs. They would rather let a company (and its workers) die, than permit government intervention, but particular members have been known to sneak off to Mexico to obtain treatments not available in the US.

As long as the GOP stuck to its principles of lowering the deficit, keeping a brake on raising taxes, and keeping government small, I sort of knew where they stood, and it was actually possible to compromise with them. But this new, fragmented, shooting from the hip, disunited, jingoistic unholy alliance of neoconservatives and feeble-minded conspiracy-theorists and StockMarketologists is pathetic to see.

In strong contrast to that, Ed Rendell appeared on Stephen Colbert's show recently, to promote his book: A Nation of Wusses. The video is here. In a pithy remark, Ed Rendell says that no politician worth his salt should be afraid of losing an election over something that really matters.  Obama may lose the election over Obamacare, he says, but it would have been worth it.  Certainly a whole Congressfull of Democrats lost over Obamacare, but I wonder whether it was for lack of confidence in their product (Obamacare), lack of support from the President in their bids for re-election, or just a brilliant effort by the Tea Party to get them defeated. I guess the voters qualified to be labeled Wusses if it was lack of courage that resulted in that debacle. Perhaps elections are just as much of an averaging of stupidity as the Stock Market is. If Democrats do not turn out to vote this election and every election in the next century, we truly deserve what we get.

[Added as an afterthought: More importantly, voters must have the courage (read: the guts) to stick by their candidates over the long haul. Voters who abandon their candidate at the slightest thing, at the least bit of political discomfort, at the most minor criticism, these voters do more harm than good. Some writers think that political loyalty is stupid. I think a certain amount of ideological continuity is essential if we are to support initiatives that take more than a year or two to bring to fruition. Credit card reform, Lobbying Reform, Health Care reform, Social Security reform, all of these take at least six years to get done, and voters who abandon their candidates before the job is done are silly, and may as well have stayed at home.]

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Beethoven’s Awesome Music

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I wish I had the vocabulary to explain why Beethoven’s music sounds so grand, but I don’t!

In my opinion Bach’s music is very grand indeed, and just serious enough to have a certain weight. However, it is that weight that bothers some people. (Long ago I learned to ignore troublesomeness of the weight of Bach’s music, and actually glory in it. My Uncle sent me a tiny little long-playing record of the A minor organ fugue, played by E. Power Biggs, and I was completely sold.) Handel wrote grand music too; for example the Music for the Royal Fireworks.

But Beethoven’s music sounds just right for great formal occasions. (I say this so often that some of you are sure to be tired of that opinion by now, and I apologize.)

One example is the the Violin Concerto. The opening moments just make you want to stand up and cheer, though the notes are actually quite unremarkable. Here’s Joshua Bell playing the first movement.  (A slightly more lyrical interpretation by Arabella Steinbacher.)

But this is not as characteristically Beethovenian as his piano concertos. Here is Mitsuko Uchida playing the opening movement of the Concerto No. 4 in G major, probably one of the most noble movements ever written by Beethoven. Mitsuko Uchida is getting to be one of my favorite pianists for orchestral works.

This instinct for bold, masculine statements could come out of the circumstances in which Beethoven found himself. Mozart and Haydn, his great predecessors, were both beholden to patrons, wealthy aristocrats who had them on retainer, or indeed hired them as members of their households. In Haydn's case, it worked out well: Duke Esterhazy was a benevolent and appreciative employer. In Mozart's case, it did not work out well, since Mozart was more in tune with the young folks of the times, and strained against the discipline imposed by Bishop Colloredo of Salzburg, who thought it best to keep Mozart on a very short leash.

Beethoven abandoned the idea of a patron. He earned his meager living by giving music lessons, and public subscription performances, which worked a little better for him than they did for Mozart. The whole problem had to do with how seriously composers were taken by the Middle Class. Beethoven must have felt (and his letters probably bear out this surmise) that a peddler of pretty tunes could never command the respect of society; he had to be big and bold and impressive. But he had to do so without sacrificing musicality. In the piano concertos, particularly, he had to come across as bold, commanding, manly, in complete control. In my mind, Beethoven's piano concertos are the essence of classical masculinity: assertive and bold, with tender moments. (Mozart was largely similar, but Beethoven out-Mozart-ed Mozart.)

The great piece of sacred music Beethoven wrote --or at least one of them-- is the little-performed Missa Solemnis. I feel it has been very influential, because at least one major work has been greatly influenced by it, namely Brahm’s Ein Deutsche Requiem. (Readers who might not have seen much of Leonard Bernstein: this is your chance. Berstein may not have been the world’s greatest conductor, but he was an incredible musician, and in highly emotionally intense works like Mahler’s symphonies, and this Mass of Beethoven’s, he was well able to inspire choirs and orchestras to do better than their best.)

The symphonies, of course, are well known, and I have written about them before. They all have their moments of nobility, but there is so much else in them, that it is difficult to point out a particular movement and say: this one is full of noble sentiment from beginning to end.

For anyone studying Beethoven, I have to suggest the early symphonies. If you love Mozart, the early Beethoven is almost better than Mozart, thought that sounds almost like blasphemy! Symphony No. 1 in C major is truly a jewel, and so is No. 2.

I’d like to insert a reference to one of my favorite movements from the piano sonatas, namely the second movement of the Moonlight.  The first movement is so well known that hardly any attention is given to the lovely second movement, so full of cleverness and humor.  Here is a performance by a pianist I have never heard of before: Neil Rutman.



Incidentally, this clip illustrates how difficult it is to record piano music. When I play this on my small office system there is a lot of distortion at a reasonable volume level. Still, one has to admit that it is a good performance.

Here's Wilhelm Kempff playing the same movement.

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Interesting takes on Government Fiscal Policy

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An interesting thing about being a teacher --especially a college professor-- is how your students become adults and go into the workplace and have interesting opinions about things. Depending on how successful one has been with encouraging divergent opinions, they continue to be comfortable disagreeing with you on forums like, say, FaceBook.

Last night I posted there a link to Jon Stewart’s fascinating conversation with Austan Goolsbee.  I urge readers to watch that clip; it is a very informative and illuminating conversation about the broad principles of government intervention, and fiscal policy generally.

A student of mine, working in the financial sector, a double actuarial science and economics major, wrote a comment saying:
“I was disappointed actually.  The equation

(Tax Cuts) = (Growth) 

was not the one to discuss.  I think it has to be

(Tax Cuts) + (Social Policies and Spending) = (Growth). 

What he said was rather misleading... I wish he had talked more about other factors.”

This comment illustrates how these sorts of discussions have an enormous number of background assumptions that are crucially important to recognize.  I'm not exactly sure about where he is employed, and at what level, but having observed him for four years, I am willing to bet that his grosses in the vicinity of $200,000, but brings home a lot less.  This puts him close to the top 20 to 25 percent of earners in the USA who instinctively side with the so-called 1%, even though they’re not close to that select few.  If a member of the so-called 1% does not have offshore investments, he would be bringing home something dangerously close to what my friend brings home, after paying out salaries and expenses.  (I don’t really know; I can only guess at the lifestyles of these people.)

I responded:
“The equation they were discussing actually was

(Tax Cuts) + (Deficit Reduction) = (Growth).

I guess they could have talked about

 (Tax Cuts) + (Deficit Reduction)+ (Social Policies) = (Growth),

but  I don’t think it could have gone anywhere!”

Now the cards were really on the table; he had revealed himself as a fiscal conservative by insisting that a review of social programs must be on the table, while Jonathan Stewart and Austan Goolsbee and I had assumed that social programs were not negotiable. This is part of our strange (Liberal) morality, that we should be willing for the entire population to fund social programs that we are individually not willing to take the entire responsibility for just by ourselves.  Churches and Boy Scouts and Goodwill and American Rescue Workers and the Red Cross cannot take on the entire burden of social welfare on a voluntary basis.  It’s just plain uncivilized.

But he had left out the elephant in the room: Deficit Reduction.

True fiscal conservatives and old-fashioned economists are nervous about the deficit. All Economists agree that unless Government debts to private financiers are paid eventually, there will be inflation. (Government will have to print more paper money to pay back the loans, and each paper dollar will be worth less. This happened during the Carter presidency, and everyone was very unhappy.) So my friend, together with all the fiscal conservatives in the GOP camp, should be just as concerned with deficit reduction as they are concerned with lowering taxes. The former principle has to do with the health of the Government, and of course, indirectly to do with the true value of the stocks and the savings of the upper-crust. Reducing Taxes has to do with two things: giving the Rich more true income, and reducing the voter base of the Democrats. The urban poor have voted with the Democrats. If social spending is reduced, the GOP party insiders know, the poor will lose their faith in Government, and just not vote.

On the face of it, though, both Deficit Reduction and Tax Cuts sell well with the GOP base for any number of reasons.  Goolsbee and Stewart were simply pointing out that the Romney - Ryan plan just could not do both at the same time.  Nobody expects a plan to come out of the GOP that will do both; the fact that they’re claiming to have such a plan simply means that they’re lying.

But wait; they might be planning to completely decimate the size of the Military.  If they lay off a lot of the higher-level military generals, they will save a pile on salaries.  (This is not outside the realm of probability; a lot of top brass are Democrats.)

They might be planning to completely shut down Health Education and Welfare.  That will make many conservatives happy, but will not reduce the deficit at all.  The deficit is growing because high-income taxes have been lowered, but Defense spending has grown.

They might be planning to raise taxes on the Middle Class.  They almost certainly are.

They might be planning to privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc, etc.  The deficit will still not be reduced by very much, and a lot of senior citizens will get sick and die. This will be a huge problem for the members of the Baby Boom generation that (A) is getting ready to retire, and (B) has lost a lot of savings in the Stock Market.

Well, I’m all talked out. It was clear to the faithful (of both the major parties, I’m fairly sure) that the GOP was being less than candid with their budget plan. But that’s the mindset of the GOP: we want to run the country like a business, and it is not the tradition with business to share business strategy with everyone. So they can stand a lot of not-candidness just to get into power, and then their religion tells them that the party bosses will deliver for them by some miracle.

See, that’s why I’m an atheist!

Arch

P.S.

The liberal newspaper The Economist has a more objective (or cynical) angle on the
President’s acceptance speech than mine.  Their opinion is that Obama was making an appeal to undecided voters (which he probably was, among other things). 

The most succinct and persuasive portion of the article is its ending:

The smartest bit of the speech dealt with the slightly cartoonish argument about the role of government that has dominated both party conventions over the past fortnight. The Republicans called government a menace that should simply “get out of the lives” of hard-working businessmen and ruggedly individual entrepreneurs. The Democrats, on the other hand, seemed to suggest that government benevolence was a more reliable protector of the rights of the little man than the profit motive. It is not either/or, Mr Obama argued. That this simple observation represented a marked raising of the rhetorical tone is a measure of how shrill the debate has become. His words amounted to a rebuke of angry partisans in both parties:  [Emphasis mine -- Arch]

    “We don’t think government can solve all our problems. But we don’t think that government is the source of all our problems—any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles.”


--The Economist.

The quote at the end of the excerpt is a good one, and one that I had forgotten. In retrospect, it is an excellent characterization of the role of government as seen by progressive Democrats, not the superficial Democrats who join the liberal bandwagon without a clear apprehension of whether or why the political ideals of the Democrats makes sense at this time in history, and for the last several decades.

A.

[Afterword: the Media (well, some sources, anyway) panned President Obama's acceptance speech as "Same old, same old."  Well, it certainly was the same old President Obama; no plastic surgery, no extra make-up.  It was the same old well-thought-out ideas and tactful and polite presentation. I can't believe that Obama is accused of being rude; he disagrees vehemently, but I can see no rudeness at all! But in my opinion he is extremely articulate in presenting the Democrat ideas: concise, succinct, unambiguous.  Just read the last paragraph above!

Democrats do not --any longer, anyway-- want Government for its own sake. We want government to do precisely what it needs to do: accomplish the things we cannot individually accomplish by ourselves, such as set up the rules, provide infrastructure, watch out for consumers, facilitate commerce, defend against lawlessness and external threats, negotiate with other nations, provide a safety-net for the poor and powerless. Most of these things are important to the most wealthy members of our nation, even if they choose not to recognize it. Yet they want these things to be accomplished with no financial resources whatsoever. The GOP and the conservatives have given over to rhetoric completely, and sacrificed all attempts at logic.

A.]

DNC II

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Last night, Barack Obama accepted the nomination for a second term, and gave a great speech.  It was preceded by a feisty and fiery speech by the VP, Joseph Biden, which was appropriate, and I would say, sincere.  (It had a lot of things wrong with it that are wrong with political speeches generally, except those by particularly diplomatic politicians, such as the Clintons, Hilary and Bill, and the Obamas, Barack and Michelle, and exceptional orators such as Elizabeth Warren, who can criticize people with a lot of style. Joe Biden's speech was more of an old-style campaign speech by a vice-president, which the audience needed at that point in the program.)

President Obama gave a speech that was of a piece with all the speeches he has given since he announced his candidacy in 2007-2008.  It was short on oratory, but it was appropriate. Too many elections are won by eloquence, and Obama was at one time accused of being too eloquent. So, while Obama used grammatical English (and good spelling, no doubt), he outlined the conflicting economic strategies of the two parties, without stooping to criticize his opponents at the level at which they had been set straight for the previous two days.

The Republican National Convention, while it appeared to have a degree of cultural diversity it had not enjoyed for years, still could not compete with the rainbow of faces and demographics that were on display at the DNC.  The Dems, who had soft-pedaled their support for Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals for months, perhaps to save the feelings of the general population, components of which--even if they supported Gay Marriage and LGBT rights-- might still have felt queasy about having the subject constantly brought up, threw caution to the winds in this election season, and starting with Joe Biden, went openly on the record as supporting pro LGBT rights and (possibly) legislation. My wife has a finger on the political pulse of the population simply by virtue of being a part-time campaign-worker, and making phone calls, as campaigns are wont to do. The primary objection to the Democrat ticket is, at least in some quarters, their support for gay marriage; can you believe it? Respondents spit back that they will never support Obama, because of [his support for] Gay Marriage.  That's a Whole Nother Story, as they say around here, so we won't go there.  So a stealth strategy of the GOP is, even if it is a stealth strategy, to present themselves as the Straight Party.  Not only straight, but White, as well.  There you go.

Barack Obama has done many things that we can be thankful for, and one of them is that he has presented an alternative for young African American men, and there is now a role model for them other than the highly colorful gentlemen who roam the streets at night, sometimes doing nothing but keeping themselves amused, but at other times being destructive or worse. Barack Obama champions the underdogs, the diverse population, all those who are still fighting to get what they need, rather than to keep what they have, as the Dems have stubbornly pointed out in this Convention. What the Democrats see as Social Welfare, the GOP tries to portray as Wealth Redistribution. Whether it is or it is not, we cannot stop doing it, and we shouldn't. And for the first time, a black man is doing it, with moderate or great enthusiasm from his party. And he does it with good grammar, and good diction.

I imagine that part of the Republican anger at Obama is that he doesn't act like a black man, but like someone from Harvard. Someone from Harvard, they're probably thinking, should not be siding with the enemy. (This is very similar to the German anger against the British during the early years of WW2; there is some reason to believe that they thought that the British, being from a broadly Saxon culture, must surely sympathize with the German plight.) But Harvard, of course, is a big place, and statistically there have to be somebody from there who has some brains (just as not everybody from Yale is as confused as George W. Bush).

All through his speech, Barack Obama reminded us that he was black. But miraculously, he reminded me that he was one of us, and he was fighting for us, but with restraint and judgement, and without resorting to political trickery. Perhaps the time will come when political trickery will be desperately needed, but Obama has judiciously kept away from it in his first year. It is not a matter of being deceitful, I believe. It is a matter of giving the GOP majority in Congress every opportunity to set things right with their agenda, such as it is.

My expectation is that he will win this election, unless there is inexcusable apathy on the part of the voters. He will win this election without expending all of his political capital, and without using unnecessary roughness.

At that point, assuming he is elected to a second term, and assuming that he brings with him a better balance in Congress, ideally a Democratic majority, he can say: we sang to you, but you did not dance. Now things need to be done with bolder strokes. And the bolder strokes means stronger messages from the population about what it wants.

We cannot wait too long before we permit a woman to do for our nation what Barack Obama has done for minorities and blacks. I predict that for a time, minorities and women will lead the US, just as they have done as governors in many Southern states, for instance. But we must have better ways for Congress to know what people want; the newspapers, television and the Web cannot do it, since they really seldom know what people want either. If people do not want health care, Barack Obama cannot thrust it on them. If the people do not want gay marriage, Barack Obama will be the last to force it on them. Remember: there has to be a majority in both Houses to make a constitutional amendment.

Arch

P.S.

Jon Stewart keeps poor Austan
Goolsbee in stitches

Jon Stewart analyzes the DNC from (slightly) off site.  Austan Goolsbee, a former Obama White House advisor, gives a lucid and non-technical explanation of the differences between the Republican and the Democrat plans for America.  The slow-speaking Goolsbee gets frequently interrupted by the impatient Stewart, but he manages to clarify the issues beautifully.  (How much clearer things would be, if Jon Stewart just shut up and let the man talk!!!  But seriously, the Stewart- Goolsbee team is actually quite effective.  Stewart manages to hurry the thinking along so that they don't lose viewers with short attention spans.)

The Democrat National Convention

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I am not as much of an idealist as I used to be in my younger days!  But if you're reading this, I would imagine that you're still an idealist, possibly in a small way.  That's the only way to remain alive: to hope that things can be better, and that they will come in our lifetimes.

Looking at the Republican Convention, one had to despair.  It was as though they had identified Barack Obama and all the Democrats as public enemies, and were determined to proceed in the direction they had chosen for all of us, without us, if necessary.  I can only imagine that many Republicans were deeply disappointed in their own party, simply from the tone of the speeches, and the mood of the audience.  Truly they had chosen from the very dregs to represent them at that Convention; there was little to admire.

In contrast, what a positive mood has pervaded that wonderful first night at the Democratic Convention!  Of course Mrs Obama was eloquent.  One has to expect that.  But the ideas were so unflinchingly positive; she was so determinedly gracious in her tone, that I have to think that some Republicans must have dearly wished they had that caliber of person in their ranks, to uplift them at the most pivotal meeting of the party.

But the GOP, and its various splinter groups, glare at the Democrats, sneering at us saying that our speeches are empty rhetoric, our goals are pie in the sky, our positive tone based on a fool's paradise that cannot be practically realized.  They portray themselves as throwing their shoulders to the yoke, to drag us stubborn dreamers back from out of some ditch of their imagining, onto the straight highway they believe we must take: the highway of reduced spending, reduced taxes, hardship of the poor, and self-reliance for all: both for those with great resources, and for those with none.

They imagine that, at an individual level, they can extend a hand of assistance to people, but that it is wrong for the government to be committed to reaching out an organized helping hand.  So it is all right for church groups, for instance, to go out to New Orleans and help clean up, but the Government cannot afford to be helping such vast numbers of people.  A wealthy family can adopt a poor family, and help them in any way they can, but the government should not be adopting all the poor throughout the land.

It is a basic difference of vision.  This is why the GOP is firm about Immigration: they do not want it at all.  We just cannot house all the poor and indigent, they feel, that find their way here from south of the border.  They will kill if they have to, to prevent this leak of our boundaries.

But despite that fundamental difference of vision, we cannot reject the entire party, even when we reject their vision.  The main reason we cannot reject the party en masse is simply because when the elections are over, legislation must be put forward with both parties working together, unless the GOP were to cease being a party of any importance.

I shall stop here; it seems too dismal a prospect to contemplate a landscape so changed that the GOP ceases to be the leading party of the conservatives, and that function is taken over by some groups such as the Tea Party.  This has happened in some countries such as Germany, where neo-Nazis have taken the reins of the conservatives.  I see no point in speculating in that direction until and unless that happens.

A.

Where are the Jobs?

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The big problem President Obama is accused of not solving is actually two questions that look like one question: (A) Where are the jobs?  and (B) Why isn't the Economy bouncing back?

As the media fact-checkers remind us, there have been 250,000 jobs created in the automobile industry alone.  These jobs are probably concentrated in certain areas that have been traditionally where the Auto Industry had their factories, etc, at least some of which do not need any additional persuasion to vote to keep the President in office.  (Auto Industry executives, I imagine, have probably slid off large portions of their supplying industry offshore to places like China and Mexico and South America, where labor is --for the present-- cheaper.  If not for this, there would be still more jobs.)

A large proportion of the jobs that have disappeared are probably related to the big time investors, commercial real-estate outfits and mortgage lenders and insurance companies that failed to survive their attempt to make bigger profits off the public than they had been able to some decades ago.  Real Estate has always been a good racket, but of course what was happening in the last ten years went far beyond what could be described as a racket.

Now, a lot of people invested in Real Estate indirectly, including me.  Our retirement account was managed by an insurance company, which had a lot of money invested in commercial real estate.  Commercial real estate companies are not traditionally get-rich-quick outfits, though individual developers do tend to be pretty exploitative of both land and communities in order to drive through deal that would make particular parcels of real estate worth more than when they bought it, e.g. fooling with zoning laws.  But the big life insurance companies have stock in companies that own skyscrapers in Manhattan, for instance.  All they can be accused of is charging horribly large rents from retailers.

But once businesses started failing in early 2008, they started vacating large skyscrapers (and strip malls), and real estate prices plummetted, and so did the stocks.

Just like me, a lot of fat cats are hurting, because their stocks aren't worth quite as much as they were back in 2001, for instance.  So these people want Obama to do something to make their stocks as valuable as they used to be.  Wall Street stocks will skyrocket if taxes go down and stay down.  They will also skyrocket if capital gains taxes are removed.  All the things that millionaires want are precisely the things that everybody else does not want, and Democrat congressmen and senators who know how things behave are reluctant to make legislation that will give joy to Wall Street.

The Man in the Street probably does not quite see the logic of how scratching the back of Wall Street will work for him.  It is in the interest, of course, of those who understand Big Business and investment and so on, to keep the connection between taxes, Wall Street, insurance, Welfare, Housing, Education, etc, etc, well hidden from the prying eyes of everyman.  This is unfortunately very easy, since Everyman has become gradually pretty myopic, and frankly uninterested in the type of economics that puts a smile on the faces of rich investors, and the mainline members of the GOP.

Certainly some members of the GOP are nervous about what they call Obama's penchant for "Collectivization".  But the bottom line is that Wall Street does not like Collectivization, and so we're not going to have a runaway stock market (which some idiots salivate over) while the population looks towards direct methods of solving problems, like getting together to grow crops, or teach kids, or create a forest preserve out of a piece of wilderness, or putting up windmills for wind energy.  Wall Street is probably confused about the value of, say, hybrid vehicles.  If Mikey doesn't like hybrid vehicles, we don't want them either, says the GOP.  Because the GOP is too strongly influenced by people whose income comes from the stock market.

Nothing has hurt America as much as this religion of the stock market.  Some decades ago, the stock market was an engine for getting new inventions off the ground and into the factories, where someone could make an honest buck building a better mousetrap.  But somewhere along the line, people got impatient with making money a buck at a time, and that's where we got into trouble.

Arch, wondering what to do next.

Ice Cream

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Apparently there are two entirely different kinds of ice cream, and possibly many more.

The first kind is made out of custard; that is, a cooked mixture of egg (or egg yolks, in most commercial recipes) and milk, to which is added sugar, and whatever flavorings are desired, e.g. strawberry, chocolate, pistacchio, etc.  My suspicion is that most complicated flavored ice creams are made this way, e.g. Ben and Jerry's.  This sort is called French Custard, by most writers.

The next kind is described as American Ice Cream, and is made of almost entirely just Cream and Sugar, and of course, flavorings.  This kind is supposedly very delicately flavored, and depends on highly efficient refrigeration methods and electric mixers to keep the ice crystals small.  Big crystals detract from the texture of the ice cream.

Then, of course, there is gelatine and all these gums, e.g. guar gum, Xanthan gum, gum Arabic, Carrageenan gum, and so forth, as well as the sea-weed based gums, all of which are really brilliant ways of reducing the cholesterol and calories that accompany heavy use of cream.  Using these, it is possible to make American style ice cream that thickens at lower temperatures.  That's the ice cream I like; the super-cold, hard as rock ice cream doesn't really float my boat.  I don't know whether these materials are available for ordinary folks, and whether one needs special methods and recipes to use them.  Being diabetic, I'm interested in low-sugar, or sugar-free recipes, obviously, which means yet another means of thickening the ice cream mixture is not available, namely sugar.

The ice cream I made a couple of weeks ago, with heavy cream, egg-custard mixture, one banana, and a single packet of Sweet and Low, was very good.  The recipe is as follows:

Make the custard with one egg and one cup of milk.  (Some folks use a double-boiler for this.)
Immediately cool it down with one cup of refrigerated heavy cream.
Add half a teaspoon of salt, and mix like crazy until smooth.
Add vanilla, and one mashed, not-too-ripe banana.  Mix.  Add Sweet 'n' Low.  Mix.
Put in freezer for half an hour, take out and mix until smooth again.
Repeat until satisfied with the texture; in my freezer, three more times.

It came out wonderful, except that of course I like less sweetened ice cream than most people!  You might like another sweetener, like Splenda or whatever.  Just sweeten until it tastes right to you.