“House Forecast: G.O.P. Plus 54-55 Seats; Significantly Larger or Smaller Gains Possible”

That’s the headline today at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com.  I really don’t want to make fun of Nate (“significantly larger or smaller gains possible”) — he’s an excellent, non-partisan and uncannily accurate pollster — but that’s really covering your bets.   The conventional wisdom is the Republicans will take the House, but by how much or how little no one can tell.  The numbers are crazy and the outliers are really out there (Gallup today shows the Republicans ahead by an unbelievable 15% on a generic ballot, something they’ve never achieved before in the history of polling).  And, of course, a lot of people predicting a sure-thing Republican win are hastening to add that so many races are too close to call and that the Democrats might do much better than expected.

The best of the hedging also comes from further polling data Silver posted today under the headline, “Five Reasons Democrats Could Beat the Polls and Hold the House”.

That’s from the same guy on the same day.

Take your pick.

Frye in his robes as Chancellor of Victoria University.

Here’s a quote from Frye I hope academic administrators everywhere might think about.

“When anyone is considered for a deanship or a presidency, one of the first questions asked about him is, ‘How good a scholar is he?’ It sounds absurd to associate a man’s administrative ability with his specialized knowledge of a scholarly discipline, but the question is relevant none the less. If he has never been a scholar, he doesn’t know what a university is or what it stands for, and if he doesn’t know that, God help the university that gives him a responsible job.” (CW 7, 314)

“The current GOP is far more rigidly ideological and economically irresponsible than any other governing party in the West right now.” Conservative journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan

If with the literate I am

Impelled to try an epigram,

I never seek to take the credit;

We all assume that Oscar said it.

Dorothy Parker

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Further to yesterday`s post on Matt Taibbi`s article about the Tea Party in Rolling Stone

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”

This is a well-known and often cited quote from John Stuart Mill in a letter to the Conservative MP, John Pakington, March 1866.  The issue Mill was addressing?  The unwillingness of the Conservatives to extend women the vote.

Adam Gopnik on the meaning of the quote:

After [his wife] Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SoBF4vFArg&feature=related

BBC report on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet

This week’s Rolling Stone has a devastating article on the almost unbelievable rate of melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.  Here’s a particularly hair raising excerpt:

In the past few years, scientists have begun to worry that the world’s glaciers have entered what they call a “runaway feedback mode,” in which the dramatic changes to the water and wind and ice caused by global warming have not only accelerated but have themselves begun to alter the climate, creating a dynamic that could be irreversible. Both Antarctica and Greenland are now losing ice at twice the rate they were in 2002 — as much as 400 billion tons each year. In July, after the planet’s six warmest months on record, a giant crack opened up overnight in the Jakobshavn Glacier; for the first time ever, scientists monitoring satellite data were able to observe in real time as an iceberg covering 2.7 square miles broke off and floated into the sea. Three weeks later, an even larger iceberg — four times the size of Manhattan — cleaved away from another glacier to the north of Jakobshavn, stunning scientists who study the ice sheets. “What is going on in the Arctic now,” says Richard Alley, the geoscientist at Penn State, “is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done.”

Scientists say that oceans have long memories. The water reflects the slow-spreading response to events that took place a month, a year, a hundred years ago. An earthquake in the Arctic. A cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. A particularly strong El Niño summer, a decade and a half in the past. These memories are not all known, and their physics are not perfectly mapped, so the movements of the oceans are not well understood. “The ice sheet,” Bindschadler says, “really is just the tail of the dog.” There remains the chance that cutting carbon emissions might, in the long term, prevent more warm water from getting into the Amundsen Sea, where it is melting the ice shelves. If the atmospheric system really does have dials, in other words, then perhaps they can be turned to more comfortable settings. “That may be the saving grace,” Bindschadler says. But even if we reduce emissions, he warns, there is no way to get the heat that is already in the ocean, melting the ice, back out.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4q-XzrlPe0&NR=1

Rush Limbaugh: “Not replaceable” — but steelworkers, teachers, nurses and everyone else can go eff themselves

The irreplaceable Matt Taibbi takes on radio sportscaster (that’s Sports. Caster.) Colin Cowherd, who uses a silent NFL players protest as an opportunity to trash the union movement generally and to declare (seriously) that, Simon Cowell and Rush Limbaugh excepted, “everyone’s replaceable.”

Here’s Taibbi:

Almost everyone who has a job is economically “replaceable,” but shit, outside an Ayn Rand novel, there’s more to it than that. Does it make economic sense to fire the auto worker who mangles his hand in the factory machinery and bring in a younger guy with all his fingers? How about the secretary who refuses to fuck the boss, isn’t she replaceable? Couldn’t we put her ungrateful ass out on the street and bring in another, hotter girl to do the same job at the same price? How about a teacher who refuses to pass his failing students on to the next class? How about the worker on the oil rig who complains about his company’s safety procedures? The aforementioned steelworker who gets a little too old and becomes too much of a liability to the company health plan? The government civil servant who turns whistleblower?

Yes, Colin, you spoiled little fuckhead, we can replace all of these people. After all, you’re right, none of them are truly valuable, at least not like Simon Cowell or Rush Limbaugh, anyway.

But we don’t always replace them, because some people in our past spent generations fighting to push us up above the level of savages. Unions aren’t perfect, and they don’t always pick the right causes to fight for, but they have to exist precisely because the vast majority of workers are replaceable, which is to say not special, which is to say vulnerable. Not that Cowherd would have any reason to know this, but that’s what a “job” is, as opposed to what he and I both have, careers — a job always involves shelving your own personal creativity and ambition to at least some degree, in order to push someone else’s idea along for a while.