I have about a thousand things I could write today. But they’ll have to wait for this evening (well, not all thousand of them, but I plan to tackle one or two) because I have some other tasks to do first.

But I just wanted to say, looking outside (which is where I’m about to go in a couple of minutes), that there’s something about winter sun on winter snow up north that is almost inexpressibly lovely. Those of you who live in southern climes may think me mad, but winter is one of the most beautiful seasons of the year.

We who live where the winter is long know that the worst thing about it is usually the early darkness—that, and driving in an ice storm. Luckily where I live we haven’t had too many of those this year.

There’s something about a cold day when the air is sharp and the sun is out that can banish the winter blues. That is, if you’re dressed warmly enough: long underwear, waterproof mittens, scarf, earmuff, and sometimes one of those helmet thingees with a face mask made of specially insulating material. But today that last item won’t be needed.

The definition of autism is about to be narrowed, which may cut the number of people designated as having autism or espcially Asperger’s, and will be likely to reduce the number who will be able to receive benefits because of their diagnosis. The question is, how many will be affected?:

At least a million children and adults have a diagnosis of autism or a related disorder, like Asperger syndrome or “pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified,” also known as P.D.D.-N.O.S. People with Asperger’s or P.D.D.-N.O.S. endure some of the same social struggles as those with autism but do not meet the definition for the full-blown version. The proposed change would consolidate all three diagnoses under one category, autism spectrum disorder, eliminating Asperger syndrome and P.D.D.-N.O.S. from the manual. Under the current criteria, a person can qualify for the diagnosis by exhibiting 6 or more of 12 behaviors; under the proposed definition, the person would have to exhibit 3 deficits in social interaction and communication and at least 2 repetitive behaviors, a much narrower menu.

No one really knows the answer; some studies indicate the effect will be small, and some large.

But that’s not the reason I’m highlighting this article. I’m interested mostly in how it underlines the ways in which the DSM’s (the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals) diagnostic categories, and changes therein, can have fairly profound political, social, and economic effects. The decisions made about how to modify the criteria for such diagnoses are not only clinical, but political and social and economic as well—and sometimes it may seem as though they are primarily political and social and economic.

I can’t. I’m just plain exhausted with these things.

I cannot even imagine where the candidates get the energy to do this again so soon. I guess the answer would be “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.”

You can go here and read if you want a bit of a chuckle as you listen.

I can’t escape the notion that the main purpose for all these debates is to collect plenty of sound bites that show each candidate looking foolish, evasive, or stupid.

Commenter “Wolla Dalbo” asks the following question:

Neo–Over the years you have been very calm and even-handed in your criticisms and treatment of all sorts of people and issues.

Yet, in the language and arguments you have been using with regard to Newt, I detect what seems to me to be a very active hatred of him.

What gives?

I do try—very hard—to be “calm and even-handed in my criticisms and treatment of all sorts of people and issues.” I like to think that’s one of my distinguishing features as a blogger (in person, well—let me just say I plead the apple). I’m not sure exactly which language and criticisms Wolla Dalbo is referring to, but he (I’m pretty sure Wolla’s a he) is a commenter whose opinions I value, and the question is a good one.

After a moment of reflection (we bloggers only get a moment; it has to be churned out at a fast and furious pace here), I think the answer is that I consider my arguments to be calm and even-handed and based on reason and observation, but I would also say that I have, not an active hatred of Gingrich, but a combination of what I consider a dispassionate evaluation of his pluses and minuses in terms of policy and position and temperament and record, an assessment of his appeal in terms of polls and the reaction of others, and a gut-level negative reaction of my own. In politics, I feel I must always pay attention to my visceral personal reactions, not because they’re mine and therefore important (only to me, really), but because I believe (as I wrote here, perhaps in the comment that sparked Wolla’s question?), that the intangible quality of likablity is a large factor in politics, whether we like it (pun intended) or not:

Most Americans are not political junkies, unlike political bloggers and commenters at political blogs. I know; I spent most of my life as a typical only-somewhat-interested American voter. My observation is that people vote at least 75% with their guts, on impressions they have of the candidates. Romney and Gingrich both are unfortunate in that regard, in almost entirely different ways. Romney is bland and goodlooking, and he doesn’t seem to have much fire in the belly or much conviction. Gingrich is quite different, but his personality is offputting to most people who are not already in his camp, and when I say “offputting” I mean it in the most forceful way possible. He repels people on a visceral level. At least, that’s my observation.

The only other president in my memory who won despite a personally repellent quality (although of a somewhat different type) was Nixon. Americans like to vote for people who seem likable. For neither Romney nor Gingrich is that a strong suit, but Gingrich is the more unlikable. Perhaps not to you or to many of the readers of this blog, to a lot of people.

I didn’t list them in the above comment, but some of the personal characteristics of Gingrich’s that lead to my perception of his generally high unlikability include his arrogance, a destructive rather than a constructive combativeness, his egotism (a characteristic of many politicians, of course), and his shiftiness. He’s hardly the only one with problems on the likability scale, as I wrote above—I think all the remaining Republican candidates have them—but his seem greater to me, and of course that’s a judgment call.

But that “repels people on a personal level” statement was not primarily about me. It’s about my observation of others, both people I know (especially Independents; forget the liberal Democrats, who will vote for Obama anyway) and commenters around the blogosphere. Candidates have a certain je ne sais quoi that’s a plus or minus for them. You may think Bill Clinton’s a slimebag (and strangely enough I was not drawn to him back in 1992, although I voted for him), but a lot of people consider him a lovable scamp. You may think Gingrich is a street fighter, and I would agree, but my observation is that people want that in a VP and not in a president, as a rule.

Ah, but you say that Nixon was every bit as personally repellent (actually, I guess I pointed that out myself, too), and he won, didn’t he? Yes, I remember it well. But in the election of 1968 Nixon was not running against a once-popular incumbent; his opponent was Hubert Humphrey, the VP of the discredited Johnson administration. The country was also in major turmoil, and the battles in the primaries for the Democratic nomination of 1968 make this year’s Republican infighting look like an actual tea party. What’s more, one of the leading candidates of 1968, Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated. Plus, Nixon’s victory was a real squeaker; the winner wasn’t announced till morning.

In 1972, the Democratic Party erred (IMHO) by nominating George McGovern, a mild-mannered man who came off as simultaneously too weak and too extreme—too far to the left—for the majority of Americans at that time. The result was a landslide for Nixon, who had incumbency on his side as well that year.

I’m not sure any of this has much to do with what would happen if Gingrich were to be nominated in 2012, but it certainly doesn’t indicate to me he’d be elected.

But let’s leave the subject of likability for now, because it’s by no means my only or even my most important objection to Gingrich. I believe that the right conservative candidate can appeal to moderates, something I think must happen in order to win an election (Reagan did it, by the way), but Gingrich is very far from being that candidate. The vulnerabilities in his record include but are not limited to his ethics violations (“Newt has done some things that have embarrassed House Republicans and embarrassed the House,” said [Republican] Rep. Peter Hoekstra), his marital history, his own “flip-flopping,” his payments from Fannie/Freddie, and his off-putting attacks on Bain that earned him the ire of many former supporters.

All of this is about the race for the Republican nomination, which I’ve never seen as inevitably going to Romney. It’s early yet, and Gingrich has a fighting chance. If in the end he were to be designated the Republican nominee, my ABO would probably kick in. But I continue to think he’d be a weak candidate despite his pugnaciousness (or maybe in part because of it), less likely to win in the general than Romney, who’s weak as well.

Of course, for an incumbent, Obama is pretty weak, too. Picture, picture on the wall, who is the weakest of them all?

Ah, politics!

The good news for Gingrich? Perry’s out of the race and has thrown his support behind him. Will all of Perry’s votes (6% at last count) go to Newt? And would it matter enough to allow Gingrich to win South Carolina if they did? Can Newt win the whole thing? Ah, thinks Newt, if only Santorum would follow Perry’s noble lead…

The bad news? Gingrich’s woman-scorned ex-wife has surfaced and is saying what a dirty rotten scoundrel he is. But of course, we already knew that. Is there even more to the story yet to be revealed?

The ugly? It has little to do with Newt, but the Iowa caucuses have now been declared a tie between Romney and Santorum., in part because some precincts went missing.

…he’d do any better against Obama?

And if so, why? Multiple “yes’s” and “no’s” are allowed here:

—because Newt’s a non-flip-floppy conservative?
—because of Newt’s persuasive abilities?
—because Newt’s such a charismatic guy?
—because of Newt’s stellar record as a legislator?
—because of Newt’s personal integrity?
—because of Newt’s humility?
—because of Newt’s financial history?

It seems as though every ship disaster has at least one goat and at least one hero.

Titanic had many self-sacrificing heroes, and it had Bruce Ismay as the main goat, although there were others. Captain Edward Smith was both goat and hero: goat because he supposedly ordered the ship to travel at a speed greater than conditions warranted; hero because it is reported that he stayed on board and went down with the ship. But it is quite possible that both men (especially Ismay) got a bad rap: see this for the details.

Now Concordia already has its goat and its hero:

The Coast Guard officer who ordered the captain of the capsized Italian cruise ship to go back aboard unwittingly became an instant hero on Wednesday, credited with saving the national honor on one of its darkest nights.

Italy has become enthralled with the tale of two captains.

One is Coast Guard Captain Gregorio De Falco, who furiously ordered the skipper of the Costa Concordia to return to his ship and oversee the rescue operations.

The other is Captain Francesco Schettino – whom newspapers have branded a coward for fleeing in the face of adversity and who is now under house arrest, accused of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship.

“Listen Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Go on board (Expletive!)” De Falco yelled at Schettino during a 4-minute radio exchange made public on Tuesday.

The Italian word De Falco used, “cazzo” in Italian, is slang for the male sexual organ but it is commonly used to emphasize something, equivalent to “Go on board, damn it.”

The imperative phrase in Italian — “Vada a bordo, cazzo!” — was already on T-shirts by Wednesday morning.

There isn’t much question that Concordia captain Schettino was responsible for the disaster. He admits as much:

The captain confirmed that he took the cruise liner close to Giglio’s rocky coast in order to give a ‘salute’ to an old colleague, a former Costa Cruises captain named Mario Palombo.

“It’s true that the salute was for Commodore Mario Palombo, with whom I was on the telephone. The route was decided as we left Civitavecchia but I made a mistake on the approach. I was navigating by sight because I knew the depths well and I had done this manoeuvre three or four times. But this time I ordered the turn too late and I ended up in water that was too shallow.

“I don’t know why it happened, I was a victim of my instincts.”

(Sounds as though something got lost in translation; “victim” of his “instincts?”)

The accusations against Schettino include another very serious charge, that of abandoning the ship. It seems obvious that that’s exactly what happened. But not so fast, says Schettino:

Mr Schettino told investigating magistrates in Grosseto, on the Italian mainland, that he ended up in the lifeboat by accident.

During three hours of interrogation on Tuesday, he reportedly said: “The passengers were pouring onto the decks, taking the lifeboats by assault. I didn’t even have a life jacket because I had given it to one of the passengers. I was trying to get people to get into the boats in an orderly fashion. Suddenly, since the ship was at a 60 to 70 degree angle, I tripped and I ended up in one of the boats. That’s how I found myself there.”

He said he got stuck in the lifeboat for an hour before it was lowered into the water off the coast of Giglio island.

Also with him was Dimitri Christidis, the Greek second in command of the Concordia and Silvia Coronica, the third officer, according to La Repubblica newspaper.

“Suspended there, I was unable to lower the boat into the sea, because the space was blocked by other boats in the water.”

So is he telling the truth about this or lying through his teeth? Is he the victim of the press and a rush to judgment, at least in regard to this portion of the charges, or guilty as charged? Were all three officers cowards who abandoned the ship, or did they all fall when the ship suddenly listed, and then other boats blocked their way back? How improbable is this story?

Time will tell—perhaps. But when I read the transcript of the conversation between De Falco and Schettino (and before I’d read Schettino’s explanation), I thought it odd that Schettino seemed to be trying to explain something about his situation with the other boat to De Falco, and the latter was so agitated and urgent that he never quite gave Schettino the opportunity to say it.

This doesn’t mean Schettino is telling the truth now, but he does seem to be telling the truth about the fact that his stupid and reckless actions caused the accident. So why would he tell the truth about that but lie about the other? Perhaps because it seems more acceptable to be reckless than a coward?

[NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to Whitman's poem about the assassination of Lincoln. I invariably get a chill when I read it, because the emotional immediacy of Whitman's grief for Lincoln is so striking.]

…maybe not so much.

[Hat tip: Instapundit.]

You may not know about the 24-hour Wiki blackout*, but I certainly do, because it’s cramping my style.

Just a little, anyway. Wiki is often a surprisingly good source for general background information, although it’s hardly impeccable. But then, few things are; the truth often requires assembling information from a lot of sources, and even then it can be very elusive.

There are certainly other ways to get information online. But without Wiki—and to a far greater extent, Google—bloggers like me would have trouble writing as fast and furiously as we do. It’s a race against time here. How could we do our requisite speedy research on various and sundry subjects with only the library, a home encyclopedia set, and our local newspaper?

Of course, some might say that’s a good thing: haste makes waste and all that, you know. But Wiki and other online sources have helped me immeasurably in learning a little bit, or even a medium bit, about a lot of things that interest me. And I can’t imagine that that’s not a good thing.

Way back in the mid-90s, before I even had an email address and had almost never used a computer, people would talk them up to me. But I resisted; I couldn’t figure out what I’d want to do with one. It was my son who turned the tide by showing me, not telling me. He sat down at a computer and asked me to give him a line of favorite poetry (he knew I loved poetry). Using the old pre-Google search engines (I can’t even remember what they were called, but they seem very inefficient now) he typed it in and up popped sites that showed the entire poem from which the line originated.

A whole new research world opened before my eyes. If a line of a poem or a song was bugging me and I didn’t know the source (something that happened with some frequency), I didn’t need to go crazy any more, I could just search for it and in a matter of moments I’d have the answer! And all in the privacy of my own home!

That’s all I needed; I was a goner. Now, of course, I spend an inordinate amount of time on the computer, a great deal of it engaged in the search for information, and some of it at Wiki. And now, when I type in the word “neocon” at Google, I come in #9 on the list.

[*NOTE: The Wiki blackout is to protest certain anti-piracy laws before Congress. For the details, see this.]

Notice I haven’t written a thing about the 2012 presidential campaign today. I hope you appreciate my forbearance. Of course, you can use the comments section of this thread to keep on discussing the candidates and the debates, if you so desire. Tomorrow I plan to resume regular programming.

Now, if I could only go to the beach without freezing my butt off.

Our own roiling political waters have obscured some of the other important things going on in the rest of the world. So I hereby present the ever-insightful Theodore Dalrymple, who has a lot to say on the euro crisis and national identities.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here are some excerpts to whet your appetite:

[A journalist asked me] whether I thought that nationalism was dangerous. The question implied that the choice before Europe was between the European Union and fascism: that all that stood between us and the ascension to power of new Mussolinis, Francos, and Hitlers were the free lunches of senior Eurocrats. I replied that dangerous forms of nationalism existed, of course, but that in the present circumstances, supranationalism represented by far the greater danger. Not only was such supranationalism undemocratic, for it reflected no widespread demand or sentiment among the population; it also risked provoking the very kind of nationalism against which it was to stand as the bulwark. Further, the breakup of supranational polities in Europe tends to be messy, as history demonstrates…

It happens that the central offices of the E.U. are located in Brussels. Yet the political difficulties of Belgium [two very separate factions in one very small country] do not give the European unionists pause for thought—or, if they do pause, they reach a peculiar conclusion: that what has not worked in two centuries in a small area with only two populations will work in a few years in a much larger area with a multitude of populations. It does not occur to the unionists that different countries really are different: not a little bit, but radically, in culture, language, history, traditions, and economies. The term “European” is not meaningless, but whatever content the term may have, it is not sufficient for the formation of a viable polity.

The debt crisis has revealed differences in national character of precisely the kind that make any closer union both difficult and dangerous. Indeed, the very attempt to force a union is at the root of the crisis, for if Greece and Ireland, to take two countries at the geographical extremes of the continent, had not been able to borrow in euros under the false supposition that eurozone membership effectively guaranteed their sovereign debts, it is unlikely that they would have wound up in their current straits.

Dalrymple goes on to describe the different reactions of the Irish and the Greeks to their respective financial crises, and the role Germany has had to play, almost against its will. He concludes:

In short, the incontinent spending of many European governments, which awarded whole populations unearned benefits at the expense of generations to come, has—along with a megalomaniacal currency union—produced a crisis not merely economic but social, political, and even civilizational.

We all probably have a fantasy of finding something very valuable and rare in an old attic or barn, neglected by the world till now. And every now and then it actually happens. When it does there’s something very, very satisfying about it.

But I doubt that paleontologist Dr. Harold Falcon-Lang of the University of London thought he’d find anything quite so exciting as this (for paleontologists and science historians, anyway) when he opened a drawer in a wooden cabinet generically marked “unregistered fossil plants” in the British Geological Survey.

But let’s hear him tell it:

What I found inside made my jaw drop! Inside were hundreds of beautiful glass slides. Almost the first I picked up was labelled ‘C. Darwin Esq.’ This is an amazing snapshot into Darwin’s working life. This was one of the most exciting periods in the history of science, forming the mind of the man who would develop the theory of evolution, which would change the world.”

Falcon-Lang, according to AP, said when he found one of the slides labelled “C. Darwin Esq,” It took him a while “just to convince myself that it was Darwin’s signature on the slide…

To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary…There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn’t know existed.

So the find is a double discovery: the light it sheds on Darwin’s life and voyage, and the information the slides contain about the fossil record. Maybe someone should go through the rest of the organization’s old drawers.