NOTEBOOK: Are Romney, Obama running for president or king?

Cleaning out the notebook…

I was in a restaurant a couple of days ago when one of the news channels showed a Mitt Romney speech live. I quit watching political speech long ago (even before I quit working in the field), so I’m not subjected to these things very often. It was brutal.

First, I can’t imagine why anyone would intentionally force himself to listen to such self-serving nonsense. From the way he talked, you’d think Romney believes he could just walk into the Oval Office and magically make anything possible, maybe by spreading pixie dust around the place. I found myself thinking that he sounds like a man who believes he’s running for king instead of someone running for president (at least in the constitutional sense).

Barack Obama is just as bad, of course. The sad reality is that people today seem to want that. They want someone to promise them everything, even if it’s not even remotely possible that the candidate elected can deliver. It’s disturbing.

It was a year ago this past week when I woke up to find that the hits on this site had already tripled the previous daily record by about 7 a.m. Unknown to me, one of my stories had been linked that morning by Instapundit, one of the most popular political blogs among libertarians and conservatives. The story was picked up by many other major blogs and even national radio talk shows, and by the end of the day, my story about an Alabama coal mine operator “going Galt” at a public environmental hearing had been read 30,000 times.

It was because of that story that many of you ended up here, so I’m really grateful to Glenn Reynolds for picking that story up. And I’m thankful to you for sticking around for a year if you were among those who first showed up that day.

Did you happen to see a little story I had earlier this week about three guys who died in the Colorado theater shooting while protecting their girlfriends? I mentioned that I think this is just an instinctive difference between men and women — and that men have the strong instinct to protect the women they love. (It’s certainly true for me.) Who would have thought what I was talking about was “benevolent sexism”?

That’s what some feminists on a message board thought about the story. You might find their thread interesting if you’d like a view into the minds of people who are desperate to explain away simple and basic differences between men and women. Here’s what the initial poster on the site said about it:

The author of the article believes that the actions of these men is something instinctual and I think this really begs for our attention. An instinct to protect a women is laden with the idea of benevolent sexism. For a while now I’ve felt that benevolent sexism is a catch 22 for men, but I am starting to think it is for women as well.

So it’s “benevolent sexism,” huh? I suppose it’s sexism to notice women’s intense instinctive desire to protect their children and it’s probably sexism to notice that differences exist between the sexes in various animals, too.

The little controversy reminded me of a thought-provoking interview from EconTalk last November with a social psychologist about gender differences. His study of various research shows that gender differences are real. (Duh.) Of course, he’s a man, so his conclusions can’t possibly be good enough for some people.

Since the shootings in Colorado almost 10 days ago, all the usual suspects have been trotting out their tired old arguments in favor of gun control. One of the most persistent refrains has been about the amount of ammunition that James Holmes had — thousands of rounds. Here’s a New York Times piece as an example.

Do the people writing these stories believe that preventing Holmes from buying thousands of rounds would have stopped this shooting? Are they really stupid enough to believe that he used thousands of rounds in the attack?

On a related note, do these people calling for banning guns know you can buy fertilizer and diesel and other ingredients to make bombs, too? If you really want to kill a bunch of people, you can do it without guns. It’s not difficult. Some people are just really emotionally invested in pretending that we can stop mass murder if we restrict gun ownership. If only we had some good old European-style gun control laws, like, say, Norway does, mass murders would never happen.

Have you noticed that more and more people have trouble just disagreeing civilly — without making issues personal? I’ve mentioned before that I used to have that problem. I’d hate to go back to feeling that way. It seems that the people I notice who do it seem like very unhappy and angry people.

A man in Georgia won a bet, but he did it the hard way. And, well, it was a pretty stupid bet to win. Incredibly, this nut was bet that he couldn’t set his face on fire. He swore that he could. His first effort failed, but the second succeeded. The images from a security camera provide details about a strange incident. How much alcohol do you suppose led to this? Ouch.