Quiet Declarations

Take a look at the bowl standings by conference and – after marveling that the Mountain West Conference won five mostly crappy bowl games – you may note that the Southeastern Conference went 7-2.  Bowl wins aren’t and shouldn’t be an indicator of conference strength, but they certainly qualify as anecdotal evidence.

Need more?  When a conference places five teams in the final Top 25 poll, qualifies ten teams for bowls (with an 11th missing by two points), places five teams in January bowls, and wins its two BCS games in blowouts to finish #1 and #2 in the final poll, I think it’s safe to say that conference is pretty darn good.  I’m just amazed that a couple of teams made it through the gauntlet with only two losses to put itself in that position!

Following are a couple of opinions that are pretty close to my own.

Todd Seavey on the Republicans:

You know, suddenly Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson, and Paul all seem like great candidates, compared to the GOP winner in Iowa — and it would be a tragedy if Republican support for these five men remained sufficiently divided that the Huckster was able to win a plurality…. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma sort of thing: we anti-Huckabites could each abandon our favorite candidate (Paul in my case) to shore up one of the others — but, dammit, why can’t the other camps budge first?

Todd on the Democrats:

The Democrats, by contrast, picked the best of the three most prominent candidates in Iowa (though their fourth, Richardson, is arguably the most libertarian of the Dems, which isn’t saying much). Edwards is (not so unlike the Huckster) an economically-ignorant populist, and Clinton is part of an unprincipled and power-hungry machine undeserving of another four (or eight) years in the White House. Obama is just a Democrat, as far as I can tell, which is bad but not the worst thing in the world — and he has almost verbatim promised to be a uniter, not a divider, which would probably turn out to be more accurate a statement coming from him than it was the last time a presidential candidate promised that.

Glen Dean on the Republicans:

In spite of massive resistance from the conservative punditry and intellectual elite, Mike Huckabee won last night in Iowa with a majority of voters who identify themselves as conservative. I find that to be terribly disappointing. Iowa’s results tell me that there are a great deal of people out there who have no idea what the word conservative means. Their definition is only cultural, without any regard to principles like small government and federalism. The Democrats have always been the party of populism and class warfare, but with Huckabee winning Iowa and leading nationally, emotion based demagoguery seems to have also found a home in the Republican Party. 

Glen on the Democrats:

In spite of the fact that he is wrong on foreign policy, wrong on domestic issues, and wrong on the economy, I like Barack Obama. I always have. What that young man has been able to accomplish in a short period of time is nothing short of remarkable. As far as character and personality are concerned, he is by far the best candidate the Democrats have had in many years. He has a very appealing way of selling liberalism, a more positive message that comes across as honest and inspiring.

Maybe you’ll get my own thoughts one of these days, but no sense reinventing the wheel as long as I can find people I generally agree with.

Apparently doing what you love is in, and having a traditional high-paying job is out, at least in terms of using it to show off.  At least that’s loosely what the Times suggested this weekend.

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

“There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self,” he said. “Now they just want to be themselves. It’s almost as if they’re interviewing places to see if they fit them.”

In particular, the article beats up on lawyers a lot.  My personal experience has been that the number of people who enter law for the “higher calling” is small — and about half the time they don’t even like law!  Nearly everyone I meet who goes to law school either heard having a law degree would be a good idea or they want to make boatloads of money.  If my anecdotes are even close to the truth, it’s no wonder students are bailing out in favor of flex hours and meaningful work.

[Update 1/7/08: A reader points out that it might be a good thing for the “higher calling” people to abandon law — if people hate law as much as the article suggests, perhaps it’s best left to the moneygrubbers!]

Luke Froeb points to an Economist piece on why beauty matters.  Not a surprising article, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Whew!  I’m glad Congress decided to get involved and demand that Roger Clemens testify before a congressional committee investigating his alleged use of then-legal performance-enhancing drugs in the early 1990s!

I was beginning to think Congress was wasting time on too many irrelevant, unimportant issues that they shouldn’t be involving themselves with in the first place.  It’s reassuring to see they’re back to dealing with the most pressing national and global concerns.

John Tierney wishes us a not-so-happy New Year in Tuesday’s Times, writing that 2008 will bring another twelve months of fearsome, outlandish predictions.  In summary:

Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.  But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

As I’ve written before, this pretty much jives with my position on global warming.  I’m not a scientist or climatologist, and even if I read all the reports I probably wouldn’t understand them, so I have to figure out who the most credible sources are and trust their conclusions before I can determine how to best be part of the solution.

Note to availability entrepreneurs: this is hard enough as it is without you people mucking up my honest attempts to get things straight by stifling all debates and telling me you’ve got all the answers because of some movie you saw.  I guarantee you that a person trying to make a reasonably objective determination on this issue could watch An Inconvenient Truth and The Great Global Warming Swindle (in either order) and walk away with absolutely no idea what to believe.

Here’s an illuminating explanation of how horribly undemocratic the Iowa caucuses are.  In summary:

Iowa’s vaunted precinct caucuses—especially those of the Democratic Party—violate some of the most elemental values of a vibrant and open political process. As far as a mechanism for selecting a president is concerned, you might end up with Iowa’s model if you set out to design a system that discouraged participation and violated basic democratic values.

Read the whole thing — it’s disturbing.