Ricochet's own Andrew Klavan is the author of the "Homelanders" series of novels for young adults. The newest title? The Truth of the Matter. From the toughest reviewer I know, Andrew Robinson, 14, this just in:

The book I am reading by Andrew Klavan, The Truth of the Matter, is holding me on the edge of my seat. I can't stop turning the pages. A lot of my friends like adventure/thriller books, so I'll be recommending it.

I have never met Stacy Schiff; I have not read her Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Vera Nabokov; and I doubt that I ever will. You see, this morning I picked up the Saturday-Sunday review pages of the 23-24 October Wall Street Journal; and after reading one marvelous piece after another, I came upon Ms. Schiff’s article Still under Cleopatra’s Spell – which touches on a subject which I, on occasion, still teach. Based presumably upon Schiff’s forthcoming book Cleopatra: A Life, her article reminds me a bit of the sort of Hollywood movie that takes a classic work of profound insight – say Henry James’s The Bostonians – and twists it into a boring feminist tract.

We remain unnerved by female ambition, accomplishment, and authority,” Ms. Schiff informs us.

The wise woman mutes her voice in order to maintain her political or corporate constituency. She is often cast all the same as a scheming harridan or a threatening seductress. Her clothing budget attracts uncommon scrutiny, by definition either too large or too small. If she is not overly sexual, she is suspiciously sexless.

"Oh, really?" I found myself thinking. Since when have such aspersions generally been cast to real effect on the likes of Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Diane Feinstein, Ella Grasso, Sandra Day O’Connor, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, or Indira Gandhi? All of these women have been subject to attack, of course, but ordinarily not in the fashion that Ms. Schiff imagines – except, of course, when Maureen Dowd is on the prowl. And if Ms. Schiff’s account describes with any accuracy the brickbats frequently thrown at the likes of Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton, perhaps it is because there is some truth in the charges lodged.

When Ms. Schiff turns from generalizations to the putative subject of her new book, her prose becomes breathless:

Cleopatra emerged as stand-in for her occult, alchemical land, the intoxicating address of sex and excess. She wielded power shrewdly and easily, making her that rarest of things: a woman who—working from an original script—discomfited the very male precincts of traditional authority. Two thousand years later, those tensions and anxieties have not relaxed their hold.

And when Ms. Schiff turns to the particulars, she is similarly inclined to exaggeration. “Cleopatra controlled the greatest grain supply in the ancient world,” she rightly observes. Then, she promptly goes off the tracks: “Rome stood at her mercy. She could singlehandedly feed that city. She could equally well starve it if she cared to.” The first and third of these claims are utterly unfounded. To begin with, Ms. Schiff neglects the fact that Rome had other sources of grain in Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, North Africa, Anatolia, and the Crimea, and she fails to mention that, like her father, Cleopatra was a client monarch who ruled at the sufferance of Rome and who possessed no means by which to prevent the Romans from landing an army in Egypt and supplanting her. There was a reason why – when faced with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony – Cleopatra resorted to sexual allure. Seduction is what she had to offer; and, if she exercised power in the Roman world, it was solely through the men that she seduced.

In Cleopatra’s day, Rome was not, as Ms. Schiff claims, “a provincial backwater.” It was a gigantic city – the capital of a vast empire encompassing the entire Mediterranean as well as the region now occupied by Belgium and France. If one wanted a book, it was not generally “difficult to get a copy” at Rome, and there is no evidence that on cultural grounds the Romans “nursed a healthy inferiority complex” vis-à-vis the residents of Alexandria. Nor is there any evidence that “in Egypt female children were not left to die” and that “the Romans marveled” at the fact. Ms. Schiff is no doubt correct when she says that “Egyptian women loaned money and operated barges, initiated lawsuits and hired flute players,” but – when she then adds that “they enjoyed rights women would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years” – she once again goes off the deep end.

Roman women lacked political rights, as did all Egyptians of both sexes (apart from the Ptolemies, their Macedonian overlords). But Roman women did not lack “legal rights,” and Roman widows were perfectly capable of loaning money, operating barges, and initiating lawsuits. Moreover, it is a mistake to assert that in republican Rome – as opposed to, say, Pericles’ Athens – “a good woman was an inconspicuous woman.” Lucretia was, to say the least, conspicuous, and so was Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi – and, at Rome, these two women and those like them were celebrated for their strength. It is, moreover, absurd to say, as Ms. Schiff does, that among the Romans “the allergy to the powerful woman was even sturdier than that to monarchy or to the impure, inferior East.” Octavian’s wife Livia was no shrinking violet. Cleopatra was not a Roman, and when Antony ditched Octavian’s sister and embraced as his consort the Macedonian ruler of Egypt, he was turning his back on his country, and everyone knew it.

As for “the divide between the civilized, virtuous West and the tyrannical, dissolute East,” it did not begin, as Ms. Schiff asserts, in any way “with Rome and its Egyptian problem.” It began centuries before with the Persian Wars, and it is visible in Aeschylus’ Persians and in Herodotus. When Octavian launched his propaganda assault against Mark Antony, he had a well-defined cultural heritage on which to draw.

If Ms. Schiff’s book is anything like the article she has just published, it will reveal a lot more about its author than about its subject – which is, alas, generally in my experience true of feminist writing and, for that matter, feminist film direction.

Just wait, though. Scott Rudin has reportedly bought the film rights; Angelina Jolie has supposedly been cast as Cleopatra; and some African-Americans – forgetful that Cleopatra was Macedonian and not Egyptian, and caught up in the myth that the ancient Egyptians looked like the Bantu peoples of modern, sub-saharan Africa and not as they do today – are reportedly complaining that she is “too white.” Are we going to have Brad Pitt inflicted on us as Mark Antony? I shudder at the thought.

If you Google the words “lots and lots of Hollywood Republicans,” you get about 700,000 hits, which just goes to show you that the internet is really just one big swamp of wishful thinking, political and pornographic.

About every four years, Republican fund-raisers and strategists lose contact with reality and declare “impressive inroads” in the Hollywood community. “A lot of Hollywood stars and industry professionals are really supportive of the Republican agenda,” some glassy-eyed Republican mouthpiece will declare, with Moonie-like cheerfulness. “I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from some major names in the business,” some deluded Republican fantasist will chirp to some lazy, gullible reporter, “and let me tell you, they’re interested in knowing just what this party is all about!”

It’s a bit like poor Robert MacFarlane, all those years ago during the Reagan Administration, who arrived in Tehran on a secret mission to make “impressive inroads” with “Iranian moderates,” clutching a bible and a cake in the shape of a key. Except in MacFarlane’s case, there probably were some moderates around there, somewhere. And they probably ate the cake, too, since Persians are famous for their sweet tooth and aren’t as obsessed as some of us out here in Hollywood are about sugar and carbs.

There aren’t that many of us out here, it’s true, but we really should stop complaining. After all, statistically, one out of every three Hollywood Republicans goes on to become President of the United States.

This year, the Hollywood trade paper Variety is on the case, with an excellent article by Ted Johnson. Full disclosure: Ted's a friend, and a great reporter, and he always makes sure to quote my best lines. Read the article here. Choice tidbits (in other words, my choice tidbits) below:

Democrats still enjoy a lopsided advantage when it comes trolling for Hollywood money, with the most recent figures showing that the rate of giving to Republicans is even lower than it was in the last midterm in 2006. And, warranted or not, Hollywood conservatives still express fears of speaking out, whether to avoid shouting matches at dinner parties or for fear of losing out on work.

Dreams of a level playing field anytime soon are probably just that -- dreams.

Talk of parity is nothing new, says writer-producer Rob Long, a conservative voice in the business. Hollywood Republicans have been touting seismic shifts in the biz since the GOP's Clinton-era takeover of Congress.

But, reminds Long, "It is a Democratic town. I think it becomes more Democratic when there is something to oppose.

He adds, "The rule in American politics is nobody wants to defend the party in power."

I have to admit, though: the feeling in the entertainment business is a lot different from what it was years ago, when I was just starting out. The tide may be (slowly) turning.

I wouldn't ordinarily pass along an ad that popped up in my inbox, but lately I've taken to working out while listening to lectures I've downloaded from The Teaching Company--just now I'm about two-thirds of the way through "World of Byzantium," a really wonderful series of lectures by Prof. Kenneth Harl of Tulane. (Claire, if you'd like a primer on what Istanbul was like when it was still called Constantinople, you could do a lot worse than to listen in during your kick-boxing workouts.)

Today only, the Teaching Company is offering 70 percent off all audio downloads, and, since we here at Ricochet have been talking a lot lately about constitutional first principles, I thought I'd pass the offer along--and recommend a couple of courses in particular. (I'm not sure I agree with quite every word the instructors utter, but they strive for fairness, completeness, and accessibility, and that's saying a lot.) If you're at all interested, take a look at The Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitution, and American Ideals: Founding a Republic of Virtues

On the cover of the New York Times Book Review today, an essay by Christopher Caldwell entitled “Conservatism” that includes these two sentences:

Ideological conservatism also meant “supply-side economics”—a misnomer for the doctrine that all tax cuts eventually pay for themselves through economic growth. They don’t.

Well, I’ve been knocking around the conservative movement since Ronald Reagan’s first term, and I have never, ever—not once—heard any conservative, including Art Laffer himself, claim that “all tax cuts eventually pay for themselves.”

Consider the Laffer curve, which I’ve copied here from Wikipedia. (In a drawer someplace, I still have a napkin on which Art sketched his famous curve for me.) Does it suggest that “all tax cuts pay for themselves?” Hardly. It simply shows that, beyond a certain point, raising taxes will actually reduce government revenues. Back during the Seventies, when the top income tax rate was still at some 70 percent, Art argued that tax rates placed the country to the right of the optimal point. That’s all.

Or consider the way Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker defined “supply-side economics” when I interviewed him for my book about President Reagan.

“If you look at the traditional Keynesian model,” says economist Gary Becker, “you’ll see that it pays attention to aggregates—aggregate demand, aggregate income, and things of that type. Supply-side economics, by contrast…came along and asserted that maybe we should worry less about aggregates and pay more attention to the effect of incentives—especially taxes and regulation—on individuals.”

Instead of spending to pump up demand, in other words, the government ought to encourage individuals to form enterprises, take risks, and invest. Becker, you will note, never so much as suggests that “all tax cuts eventually pay for themselves.”

A fine journalist and a brilliant writer, Chris Caldwell knows all this—or certainly should. So does—or should—the Book Review editor, Sam Tannenhaus, the author of a really splendid biography of Whittaker Chambers. But it seems to be the nature of the New York Times that it induces even fine minds to stoop to petty unfairness.

Shortly after the Delaware primary, we at Ricochet hotly debated the desirability of ideological purity within the Republican Party. But this election season, talk of party purges isn't limited to conservative Tea Partiers. The New York Times has run an op-ed this weekend calling for Democratic Party Purity and the need for Blue Dog purges:

Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus. It’s a sentiment that even Mr. Dean now echoes. “Having a big, open-tent Democratic Party is great, but not at the cost of getting nothing done,” he said. Since the passage of health care reform, few major bills have passed the Senate. Although the Democrats have a 59-vote majority, party leaders can barely find the votes for something as benign as extending unemployment benefits.

A smaller majority, minus the intraparty feuding, could benefit Democrats in two ways: first, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes as they did with the deals that helped sour the public on the health care bill...

Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans’ incessant misuse of the filibuster to require that any piece of legislation garner a minimum of 60 votes to become law.

A smaller, more fringe left Democratic Party? That may indeed be the outcome of November's election. But how, exactly, will it affect the political scene?

The socially-conscious puppet-show is still to my mind the record holder, but maybe there's a dark-horse candidate I'm overlooking?

A preliminary geological survey has indicated that there might be about 26 million barrels of recoverable oil a mile under the sand near two kibbutzim in the northern Negev. That would amount to about $2 billion at current prices. There might be 12 million additional barrels further down.

This news comes a day after drilling began on the Leviathan, a record-setting exploratory well in a massive natural gas field off the coast of Haifa. The area is thought to contain 16 trillion cubic feet of gas, and it might also contain oil. The Leviathan is twice as big as the Tamar natural gas field struck last year, and the Tamar is already expected to produce enough gas to supply Israel for twenty years. (That's a big deal: Israel has long depended on natural gas imports from Egypt; what little she had produced domestically pre-Tamar was expected to dry up in 2012.) If the Leviathan produces what is hoped, it might -- typing this makes me feel a little giddy -- turn Israel into a natural gas-exporting country.

So here's the lowdown. Leviathan is 40%-held by Noble Energy, an American company. Twenty-three percent each are held by Delek and Avner, both Israeli companies. But the Lebanese government and Hezbollah are claiming that whatever the Americans and Israelis find off the Haifa coast actually belongs to them. Hezbollah, lest we forget, possesses long-range rockets. Green Prophet, an environmental and clean technology site, is worried: the destruction by terrorists -- sorry, by Hezbollah -- of the gas-producing rigs off Haifa could cause "an environmental catastrophe on a similar scale to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico." That damage would be on top of all the other consequences of what would surely be a full-scale war.

Well, we'll see. As Hank Pellissier notes at World Future Today, Israel's potential as a natural gas exporter could shift some relationships in interesting ways (Israel-Greece? Israel-Turkey? Israel-Georgia? Israel-Asia?). In the meantime, this is exciting news.

More From Judith Levy:

The Tea Party and Israel

Hamas Shuts Down Palestinian Journalists Syndicate

The (Revised) Israeli Loyalty Oath

So what did this guy say that made sense, you're wondering? I paraphrase loosely, but among other things, he said this. "Here's the thing about sanctions. We had a lot of experience of those with Iraq. Remember, this is our border. It's easy enough for you to announce, 'We're imposing sanctions,' but we're the ones who actually have to make sure this stuff doesn't get through! And when there were sanctions on Iraq, this is what happened all the time: The Germans would send something down, and then our customs agents would inspect it and figure out that actually, this is a dual-use item, and it can't go through--and you know, that takes a lot of time, there's a long list, you have to compare it. And we'd say, 'Well, we can't let this go through.' Then the Iraqis would be screaming because they already paid for it, and the Germans would say, 'Well, the customer needs to pay for shipping it back'--and they don't care, they got their money already. And we'd be stuck with this stuff, in the middle, and it's our customs agents who are wasting their time, it's us who actually does the work of enforcing this.

'So you'd think that if you're going to ask us to vote for sanctions on Iran, you'd do us the courtesy of consulting us! But I can promise you, because I was a firsthand witness, that while you were busy putting the full-court diplomatic press on Russia, on China, on France, you barely spoke to us. The whole thing took us by surprise. We're the front-line state, for God's sake, and you didn't think you needed to discuss this with us!

"We had a lot of high hopes for Obama when he came into power, but he's really let us down--the Bush Administration at least spoke to us."

Is this credible? I think it might well be true. Why do I think that? Because it seems perfectly compatible with everything else I see about foreign policy under Obama: It's low-priority generally, there's no attention to detail, it reflects almost no experience of the region, it suggests little deep understanding of the key actors, and it's incompetent generally. I don't know and can't know, but I would not be at all surprised if this were true.

Does this mean Turkey was right to vote no on the sanctions? Of course not. Putting diplomatic pique ahead of their real national security interests is insane, and no matter what they're telling themselves, Iran is a huge strategic threat to Turkey. All the honey-talking Turkish diplomacy in the world won't change that. The very last thing Turkey needs right now is for the West to be looking at them and thinking, "Well, if they love Iran so much, they can deal with that problem on their own."

But I do suspect that the Obama Administration's clumsy and inattentive diplomacy is helping those in Turkey who are looking for an excuse to wander away from the West, or from reality, generally. That story just sounds all too plausible.

Again, if you're wondering whether experience counts in the White House, it does. If this is the way it happened, it happened because it's amateur-hour in Washington.

This comes from someone fully authorized to speak on behalf of the Turkish foreign policy apparatus. The conversation was on background, and in fairness to him, most of what he said was very thoughtful and coherent. While I didn't agree with all of it, it didn't make me roll my eyes. In fact, he swayed me on a few points. I don't want to be unfair and to suggest the whole conversation was like this, it wasn't. But this exchange really happened. Now remember, everyone connected to Turkish foreign policy repeats, as a mantra, "Trust us, we know the region better than you." This guy was no exception.

Claire: Explain this to me. Why is Turkey so sanguine about the Iranian nuclear program compared, say, to the Gulf States? I mean, the UAE Ambassador is publicly begging the US to bomb Iran--

Interlocutor (thoughtfully): Well, the Gulf States ... don't forget there are religious differences there. They're Sunni, and the Iranians are Shi'a ...

Now, like I said, the whole conversation wasn't like this. But this is the kind of comment that makes me think the words "Trust us, we know the region better than you" actually mean, "We truly believe that Americans are genetically incapable of knowing the first thing about this region, so we'll just say anything."

San Francisco Giants (!!!!!!) vs. Texas Rangers

I think it's his time. He's the smartest. He's the fiercest. Negatives? Sure, but I think the media target on Palin's back runs interference for Newt. How many times can the enemies rely on the "kook" word?At some point it wears very thin. Palin, Angle, O'Donnell, and that guy running against Cuomo make Newt more electable each day. And there is something very redemptive in being a Catholic convert. Never underestimate a convert. They breath fire.

I used to lament the fact that Newt could never be president but now I feel he can rally the Tea Partiers and the Republicans and win. I'm for getting behind this man, weathering the storm, and coming out on the other side with one of history's great presidents. Nothing worth doing is ever easy. There is no white knight. Reagan had two wives and signed the law allowing abortions in California. I'll take three wives and Newt's record any day over that.

Talk about an unfortunate typo.

A candidate for governor in Illinois was mistakenly listed as "Rich Whitey" instead of Rich Whitney on thousands of Chicago electronic-voting machines.

Possibly making matters worse, about half the wrong ballots are in African-American neighborhoods.

His name is actually Rich Whitney. He's the Green Party candidate for governor.

But on 500 electronic voting machines, the "N" was left off on the page where voters review their picks.
The elections board says the problem will be fixed, but several thousand ballots have already been cast.

Pulling together material for my column in the Wall Street Journal today, I interviewed Meg Whitman on Oct. 12, the day of her third and final debate with Jerry Brown. I was only able to include a sentence or two in the column, and I thought Ricochet readers might be interested in some notes that didn't make it. They show a determined and articulate candidate--and one who is really and truly fed up with the public employees unions.

I asked about the "Nixon to China, Brown to the unions" argument. Since Brown knows the unions so well, didn't Whitman suppose he might find himself in good position to win concessions from the unions?

WHITMAN: That is absolutely not the case. Jerry Brown’s campaign is bought and paid for by the public employees unions. If he wins, there’s going to be a big meeting in the governor’s office of every union chief. They aren’t going to be there to talk about making concessions. They’re going to be there to collect their IOUs.

What does she had to offer Hispanic voters that Jerry Brown doesn't?

WHITMAN: A proven record as a job creator. And without jobs, there is no future for Latinos in California—or anybody else in California either. I have the best took-kit for job creation.

And I will fix our K-12 education system. Latinos often find themselves in the worst districts. Guess who opposes any [school] reforms. The California Teachers Association. Guess who the second-biggest donor is to Jerry Brown’s campaign. The California Teachers Association. And guess who has run $27 million in attack ads against me. The California Teachers Association.

Lots of people--including her own campaign chairman, former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson--have tried and failed to enact education reform. What makes her suppose she can do so now?

WHITMAN: It’s getting increasingly hard for the CTA to hide the results. I get this question from moms and dads of school-age kids all the time. ‘What are you going to do about the schools?’

Have you seen that movie, ‘Waiting for Superman?’ It may just be one of those catalytic events that galvanizes the country. Who are the villains? The teachers’ unions. People understand that now.”

Thanking her for making time to speak with me on short notice--I'd requested an interview only a couple of hours earlier--I noted that she sounded relaxed, surprisingly so since she would soon face Jerry Brown in the final debate.

WHITMAN: Oh, this is going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it.

Now that National Public Radio has officially become a laughingstock, there are likely to be a lot of NPR jokes making the rounds. To facilitate the process, I've written some setups:

• These correspondents from Fox, MSNBC and NPR walk into a bar...
• What do you get when you cross an NPR correspondent with a...
• A lot of people think NPR stands for National Public Radio. Actually, it's...
• How can you tell when a memo from NPR is distorting the truth?
• Did you hear about the big merger between NPR and..
• Juan Williams is in trouble again. This time he...
• Another NPR employee is being fired. Apparently he was overheard...
• The Democratic Congress just renewed funding for NPR if they promised to...
• The Republican Congress just renewed funding for NPR on the condition that...
• What's the difference between NPR and Twitter?
• Did you hear NPR's new advertising slogan? It's...
• I love NPR's new logo. It's...

Have fun.

Here's a video from director David Zucker making fun of Senator Barbara Boxer. All I can think as I watch it is whether the actors fear for their job prospects in super-liberal Hollywood.

No, I surely have not read them all. How could anyone have read them in the time it's taken for everyone in the world to pronounce judgment on them? I'm guessing a few media talking points were released with them, no?

I have absolutely no idea what one might reasonably conclude from them, having not yet read them. Here's a lone voice, however, suggesting that they might plausibly be interpreted as something other than a root-and-branch indictment of America's stone-eyed, child-slaughtering, virgin-raping imperialist war machine. I received this e-mail from "Timothy Thompson" last night. I offer it to the world in case someone else who hasn't read the documents wants an easy way out.

Documented torture in Iraq will be the headline for NYT, AJE, Guardian, & Der Speigel coverage.

There is however a lot in the second trove for conservatives. It will, predictably, go unmentioned unless someone like mentions it and then uses a truncheon to beat its meaning into some thick skulls.

Here's the 1st item: the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps were/are up to their necks in Iraq. Bluntly put, Iran was/is arming Iraqis to kill American and Coalition troops. For example, the IRGC Quds Force used Hezbollah as their direct operators; US special forces regularly targeted them.

The American & Coalition response in Iraq was measured and restrained. Under the laws of war, Iran committed repeated acts of war against the USA. We had every right to retaliate against Iran by any lawful means. We didn't. A very significant legal point in an era of liberals screaming about legal aggression by the USA. We can, in fact, use the IRGC operations in Iraq (which are ongoing) as justification for attacking Iran any time we please.

The picture painted is that a lot of people are shooting at us in Iraq. They are fighting dirty. Our Iraqi allies are fighting back real dirty. Iran is not-quite-so-covertly using Shia militias and Hezbollah to shoot at us. The American response was/is very restrained and measured.

The liberal press will miss that America under both Bush & Obama is letting Iran know that we will fight them outside Iran, but we'd rather not. We are also letting Iran know that we are fully prepared to fight them in Iran, but we'd really rather not. This is a mature and statesmanlike response to a nutcase nation.

Twitter is predictably abuzz with the torture stuff and how we shoot civilians at checkpoints. As I keep reminding the really cute [I am editing this out for you, Timothy, I suspect you'd prefer me to, no?] the "civilians" in the cars kill *far* more innocent Muslims than we do. There are no presumed civilians in asymmetric warfare. We even managed to kill the head of the Italian Secret Service, Nicola Calipari, at a checkpoint. War is a bloody business where innocents die by the carload.

No one seems to be giving the USA credit for its remarkable restraint and humanity in Iraq.

So, there you go. Me, I think I'll refrain from commenting until I've read at least, say, ten percent of the documents. Sound fair? At an optimistic rate of a document per minute, that should take me about a year. I'll get back to you then.

I read this piece by Roger Scruton with some discomfort. I've been thinking about these issues--what it really does to us to conduct so many of our relationships through the Internet--for some time. (I find the topic so interesting that I even wrote a novel about it.)

He's certainly not the first to make some of these observations--nor was I--but he puts them well:

When attention is fixed on the other as mediated by the screen, however, there is a marked shift in emphasis. For a start, I have my finger on the button; at any moment I can turn the image off, or click to arrive at some new encounter. The other is free in his own space, but he is not really free in my space, over which I am the ultimate arbiter. I am not risking myself in the friendship to nearly the same extent as I risk myself when I meet the other face to face. Of course, the other may so grip my attention with his messages, images, and requests that I stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it is ultimately a screen that I am glued to, and not the face that I see in it. All interaction with the other is at a distance, and whether I am affected by it becomes to some extent a matter of my own choosing.

In this screenful form of conducting relationships, I enjoy a power over the other person of which he himself is not really aware — since he is not aware of how much I wish to retain him in the space before me. And the power I have over him he has too over me, just as I am denied the same freedom in his space that he is denied in mine. He, too, therefore, will not risk himself; he appears on the screen only on condition of retaining that ultimate control himself. This is something I know about him that he knows that I know — and vice versa. There grows between us a reduced-risk encounter, in which each is aware that the other is fundamentally withheld, sovereign within his impregnable cyber-castle.

Read it through, substituting "Ricochet" for "Facebook." Any difference in the outcome of the argument? Is it valid to begin with?

If I had the time, I'd do it myself, but--with a high school water polo tournament to attend in the morning and a high school football game to attend in the afternoon--I just don't. I suppose what I'm hoping to find is a Ricochetian whose curiosity coincides with mine, but who either doesn't have kids yet or has his child-rearing years behind him: in short, someone with a free couple of hours on Saturday morning.

Here's what's up: Compare the House rankings on Rasmussen, the Cook Political Report, and Stu Rothenberg, I've heard several knowledgeable people comment over the last couple of days, and what you'll find is a lot less overlap in the "tossup" races than you might suppose. Each seems to be looking at different polls--or weighting the same polls in different ways. And if these pollsters--the best of the best--differ, then the rest of us may safely conclude, right along with Paul Rahe, that in these final days of the campaign the whole country is flying by the seat of its pants.

Does any Ricochetian have the time and interest actually to put together a spreadsheet, comparing the "tossup" races on those three sites?

Just got back from Day One of my business school reunion where I had a fascinating conversation with the wife of one of my classmates. She and her husband live in Tampa, and lately she's been working in a Barnes and Noble bookstore. What do customers ask for when they walk into the store? Glenn Beck, works of American history, and--could any news be more heartening?--the Constitution of the United States.

Tocqueville would have felt gratified, if unsurprised, don't you suppose, Paul?

As long as we're all being honest about our Badthink, I'm wondering--am I the only one who is generally in such a foul mood after waking up early to catch a flight, sitting for hours in traffic, trudging through all those interminable check-in and security lines, taking out the computer, putting it back in, taking it out again, putting it back in again, taking off my shoes, putting them back on again, throwing out my brand new bottle of expensive hand lotion, wading through those evil-tempered, slow-moving crowds and hearing the fifteenth announcement that my flight has been delayed that I often kind of hope there will be a terrorist on board, sometimes even fantasize about this scene in great pleasurable detail, because nothing would feel better at that point than swiftly leaping over the aisle and strangling someone?

Has anyone else actually carried through this fantasy to the point of imagining the press conference afterwards in which you humbly explain to an admiring public that no, you're no a hero, you didn't even think twice about it, it was just instinct, really, and you're just glad no one was hurt but the terrorist, and you'd have to confirm this with the authorities, Brian, but you'd guess there's still enough left of him that the FBI might be able to get a sample of his DNA if they use one of those special forensic spatulas?

Or am I just a very bad person?

And then there's the story of Boudreaux, who is the central figure in most Cajun jokes. As a little boy, Boudreaux was hauled into the principal's office one day and accused of cheating on an exam. Immediately defensive, young Boudreaux challenged, "Mais how you know if I cheat or not, eh?" "Well," said the principal, "on question number six, the person next to you in class wrote, 'I don't know,' and on that same question you wrote, 'me neither.'" I thought of that story when I read the coverage of our upcoming elections in the German magazine, Der Spiegel.

Having heard the unimaginative, unintelligent, unambiguously assinine caricatures of the tea party movement by everyone from the President on down to the anchors on MSNBC, I thought that the full choir on the left had exhausted their considerable range of emotions, which began with scorn and ran across the hall to derision. But I had failed to consider the cosmopolitans across the Atlantic.

According to Klaus Brinkbaumer, the tea party movement is populated with, "...hate-mongers, gun freaks, and Tea Party demagogues..." I'm not sure if Obama is copying the Europeans, or if the Europeans are copying Obama, but I am quite sure that the traits that have made America great are alien concepts to the whole lot of them.

Brinkbaumer laments our system in which the House and Senate, "...paralyze themselves with rules that demand unattainable majorities for everything that is important," and complains further that, "...even the Constitution irrevocably decrees that a senator from sparsely-populated Alaska has the same rights as a senator from New York." Yes, if only James Madison had checked with Klaus first.

Having been to Germany on several occasions, I am immensely fond of the place. But I'm not terribly well disposed to being lectured to, Klaus, on the supposed shortcomings of a system of governance that has pulled Europe's bacon out of the fire on more than one occasion. Germany spends 1.5% of its GDP on defense, in part because the US, which spends just over 4%, takes up the slack for the cosmopolitans. Now, I may be just a dumb ol' trucker, Klaus, but like hundreds of thousands of other American "gun freaks," I stood shoulder to shoulder with West German troops staring down the Soviet juggernaut in the hope that one day your country would be united and free. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

But let me decode how things are designed on this side of the pond. You see, in America, the relationship of the citizen and the government is predicated on the idea that the government's role is to secure the freedom of the citizen to maximize his God-given potential as he sees fit. It has worked well enough for us to flourish and even assist our European friends from time to time. It is to the propositions outlined in our Declaration of Independence that many of us have again dedicated ourselves. If these ideas seems foreign to you, you're not alone. They have evidently mystified our president too.

Here's an idea you might like, Klaus. Germany's public debt currently runs at about 77% of its GDP, whereas America's debt is about half that percentage. Obama aims to increase our debt, and the American public aims to reduce it. If you're so enamored of the direction that President Obama is taking us, then perhaps you can hire him. He may be looking for employment after 2012.

Okay, this is a little self serving, but I'm desperate. I need meal ideas. I'm in a rut. I can only serve pasta and frozen vegetables so many more times before it becomes an invitation for my husband to leave me.*

I am not currently on the dole so I can still use potatoes. (Wink, smile.)

So let's say you suddenly learn you are to host two or three guests tomorrow night. You like them. You hope to impress them. But you don't have all day to get your act together. What do you cook?

Some rules:

-- no more than 10 ingredients (not including spices/condiments)

-- no more than 45 minutes cook time

-- no more than 30 minutes to prepare prior to cooking

Whaddya got?

Here is Diane Ellis's Picadillo (stolen from her potato post). I plan to make it next week.

In a large skillet, over 1-2 tbsp of olive oil, saute over medium heat half a chopped onion, a clove of minced garlic, 4 chopped medium sized yukon gold potatoes, and 2-3 chopped carrots. After 5 minutes, add 1lb of lean ground beef. Cook until browned. Season the mixture with cumin, oregano, salt, pepper. Add 1 15 oz can of tomato sauce (I use 2 7 oz cans of "El Pato Salsa Fresca" but it might not be widely available). Bring to boil. Add 1 15 oz can (or 2 cups of frozen) green peas. Add 1/2 tsp chili pepper flakes. Let simmer over low heat for 10 minutes. Serve with tortillas and Mexican beer of your choice.

*Truth be told: My husband is the cook in the family. He's patient, creative, and cheerful about it. But I'm the one home from 4-6 p.m. to prepare food. Help me RicoChefs!

If the political prognosticators are right, the Republicans will win enough seats to control the House of Representatives. They may even control the Senate, though the odds are that they will fall just short. It is always hard to switch from campaigning to governing (just ask President Obama!). One of the most important things for success is that the Republicans have a legislative agenda ready to pass in the first 100 days -- that was one of the signal achievements of the Contract with America in 1994. Even if Obama vetoes some or all of the legislative agenda, that will put the President on record as opposing popular legislation or it will cause him (as it did President Clinton) to approve conservative policies to stay politically viable.

So what do Ricochet readers think should be the first 10 things that a Republican Congress should do? Here are some ideas to get thing started:

1. Repeal and/or defund Obamacare
2. Extend the Bush income tax cuts
3. Extend the elimination of the estate tax

Other ideas?

Yesterday on Drudge Report, the centerpiece headline was: GOOGLE PAYS ONLY 2.4% TAX RATE; 'INCOME SHIFTING' ROBS GOV'T OF $60B, which linked to a story in Bloomberg by the same title.

While I'd love to get in a dig at Google CEO Eric Schmidt as much as the next guy, the problem here is that this article conflates a couple of very different things. The Google activities described in the article don't directly affect its U.S. taxes. What it is doing is reducing the taxes it pays internationally -- to other countries -- to around a 2.4% rate. This may be of some concern to Ireland, where Google has its European headquarters, but hardly has anything at all to do with the U.S. or Obama. The article then makes the broader point that according to one expert, "tax shifting" more broadly, by all companies, may cost the U.S. Treasury something like $60B a year. There is nothing in the article to suggest that Google is "shifting" any of its profits away from the U.S. in any unusual way -- it may very well be doing so, but the article offers no evidence of this. The article does actually note, buried in an obscure paragraph, that Google's overall global tax rate was 22.2% last year. Given its apparently low rate of international taxation, that would seem to imply a U.S. tax rate of 25% +. Last time I looked into these things, which was almost 10 years ago, the average U.S. company paid an effective tax rate of between 25 and 28%. That would make Google about average here in the U.S.

There is a broader and more substantive question underneath all of this, which is whether "transfer pricing" of technology licenses and other intellectual property to overseas subsidiaries should be allowed at all, or whether all of the profits of a Google, no matter where the revenue comes from, are really "U.S." profits -- but that is (a) extremely complex, (b) hardly a gripping topic, and (c) one on which I am not remotely qualified to pose as an expert.

The real lesson here is that the caliber of reporting in the mainstream press about "business" issues is really pretty bad, and reinforces a point I've been making for more years than I can count: If the government/media/academic "elites" really think they ought to be regulating business, the very least they can do is learn enough about it to be able to address its issues intelligently.

SACRAMENTO--Proposition 10, a ballot initiative suspending California’s groundbreaking anti-pollution law, The Global Climate Disruption and Water Vapor Management Act of 2026, is losing ground and appears headed for defeat in next week’s midterm election. According to a Savage Research poll released today, support for Prop 10, which has hovered near 50 percent for three weeks, is now down to 40 percent, with 55 percent of likely voters opposing the initiative..

The polling trend parallels the effort twenty years ago to suspend AB32, California’s then-revolutionary climate control bill, with early support evaporating after well-heeled venture capitalists and alternative energy entrepreneurs kicked-off a homestretch media campaign in favor of strict limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Savage Research pollster Stuart Drippel credits a similar media blitz by the Recyclable Water Council--bankrolled by vapor recovery technology and bottled water investors-- for Prop 10's precipitous decline in the polls. “The latest ads are effectively focusing voters on the potential for high-tech hydroponic farming and home vapor-recovery systems to perform a hat trick: address California’s structural unemployment rate, stubbornly mired over 17 percent for the past decade; recreate a sustainable agriculture sector for the first time since President Obama’s controversial 2016 Wilderness Water executive order; and mitigate global climate disruption by standing up to Big Water.”

Supporters of Proposition 10 claim that AB3200’s mandated cap on the net use of bulk-delivered water will destroy many of California’s remaining private sector jobs—now 25 percent of total employment. Advocates also highlight unpopular energy supply disruptions associated with the move to renewables together with the lack of any noticeable effect on the climate from AB32’s carbon dioxide controls. Opponents argue that investment in high-tech vapor recovery systems will spur economic growth within Wilderness Water conservation limits needed to address Global Climate Disruption. “Water vapor's climate disruption potential is roughly 100 times carbon dioxide's,” says San Jose State University climate scientist Lars Vazne. “We now realize that man-made water vapor emissions—irrigation, car washing, excessive bathtub use—are the real drivers of calamitous disruptions around the world. CO2 was a good start, but only a start on saving the planet.”

In a move to regain momentum, the Proposition 10 advocacy group Water Freedom today endorsed civil disobedience, scheduling a “candlelight vigil” rally beginning at blackout this evening in front of the Capitol. Organizers deny any intent to provoke California Air Resources Board riot police into a violent response, insisting that approved chemo-luminescent (CL) sticks provide insufficient light for participant safety, leaving open flame candles--banned as particulate pollution and wildfire ignition sources—as the only means of ensuring adequate lighting after the scheduled 9 p.m. power shutoff. Proposition 10 opponents plan an environmentally-friendly counter-demonstration nearby. CARB police spokesman Ashley Dimyn urged Water Freedom to move the rally to an earlier hour when electric lighting would be available, adding that officers would be out in force with a focus on maintaining order and public safety.

Peggy Noonan's latest column hinges on Fareed Zakaria's recent essay in Time magazine. There, Zarakia contrasts India -- "brimming with hope and faith" and "animal spirits and ambition" -- with downtrodden America, where our "can-do country is convinced that it can't." Noonan notes: "Sixty-three percent of Americans say they do not think they will be able to maintain their current standard of living."

"And yet," she intones. "We may be witnessing a new political dynamism. The Tea Party's rise reflects anything but fatalism, and maybe even a new high-spiritedness. After all, they're only two years old and they just saved a political party and woke up an elephant."

True enough. And yet: let's not put too great a psychic burden on the backs of the tea partiers. Let's not intensify the collective fantasy that there are two alternatives in life -- depressive pessimism or manic optimism. For a variety of reasons, Americans are predisposed to feel like we're slipping into decline unless we're #1 and gaining. It's a sensation that can reach from the smallest to the largest scale in American life, powered by our taste for risk, our capacity for resilience, our love of all-or-nothing play, and our not-much-discussed understanding that we're less suited to bear the burdens of ruling the world (if not ruling it) because we're best suited to lead it by example. Plus, we've inherited a little bit of Europe's longstanding pathology of declinism, driven by the notion that History is linear, inexorable, and progressive.

Manic optimists and depressive pessimists agree in a Manichean way that you're with them or you're against them -- that there's no middle ground in which we can expand or contract modestly and confidently without putting our flourishing at risk. If we buy into this way of thinking, we're in big trouble. We'll lose our cool and we'll lose our nerve, at home and abroad. Obama was greatly admired as a candidate when he, in stark contrast to John McCain, appeared to keep his calm in an alert, engaged, and focused way. But the way he's expanded government as President is so in keeping with manic optimism that it renders moot whatever commanding calm used to be associated with his character. As is clear, when the times call for it, I'm all in favor of boisterous, even angry politics. You can't flatten out human nature and call it maturity. But let's reaffirm that the tea party wave points beyond a bipolar worldview.

Keep Calm and Carry On? Yes, but that's a bit old world. Stay Cool, America.

What is going to happen on 2 November?

No one really knows, to be sure. But there is a convergence of opinion among those who follow electoral trends. Nearly everyone supposes that 2010 will resemble 1994, when the Republicans picked up fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives.

For what it is worth, I think that they all have it wrong.

Scott Rasmussen recently predicted that the Republicans will gain fifty-five seats in the House. In August, Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia estimated that there would be a pick-up of forty-seven seats. Next week, he will tweak those numbers. Last week, he reported that, if forced to do so right then, he would increase his estimate of Republican gains by single digits. In short, there is hardly any difference between his prediction, that of Rasmussen, and the RealClearPolitics average suggesting that the Republicans will gain fifty-six seats.

Of course, some prognosticators come in a bit lower. Charlie Cook puts the pick-up at fifty-one seats, and Nate Silver of The New York Times has it at forty-nine. Others – Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard comes to mind – put it a bit higher: in his case, at sixty-one.

What they are all doing is understandable. They are interpreting the present in light of the recent past. Most of the time such a procedure makes excellent sense. But it is good to remember that every once in a while there is a sharp change. Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid set out to change things, and perhaps they have succeeded in ways that they did not anticipate.

One must keep in mind that no Sovietologist predicted the collapse of the USSR and its dismemberment. Decades of comparative stability had lulled them to sleep. Only in the aftermath did the experts become aware that there had been ample warning signs.

There are plenty of warning signs now. Over the last twenty-two months, we have been confronted with one damned thing after another. First, in February, 2009, came the emergence of the Tea-Party Movement; then, in August, 2009, we witnessed the confrontations at the town-hall meetings. In November of that year, everyone was surprised by the verdict handed down in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. In January, 2010 came the biggest surprise of all: the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s senatorial seat in Massachusetts. And in subsequent months we were faced with the purge of a number of putative RINOs in the course of the Republican selection process and with the nomination by the Republican Party of a host of Tea-Party candidates. “As isolated incidents,” I wrote in a recent post, “each of these events might be dismissed. Taken together, they portend an electoral upheaval without recent precedent.”

What about the polling data? As Jay Cost recently remarked, the quite considerable disparity in that data turns on a crucial question as yet unanswered: “the partisan composition of the electorate remains the critical unresolved issue of this cycle. Every pollster is making a guess as to what the electorate will look like, and these guesses are at least as important as their final numbers.” “In fact” I added in the post linked above, “the guesses determine their final numbers.”

Moreover, as Sean Trende intimated this morning in a post on RealClearPolitics, the guessing that is going on makes no sense. When one examines the cross-tabs, as he has done, one discovers that what many of the polls are reporting is premised on the notion that the percentage of Democrats in this year’s electorate will more nearly resemble the percentage in 2008, when that party made major gains in the House, than the percentage in 2004 – which is not at all what we saw in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in November, 2009 and January, 2010. Put simply, they ignore the enthusiasm gap.

In the post linked above, I drew attention to something else that is unprecedented. The Gallup Organization has been collecting generic ballot data for almost sixty years. For the most part, they focus on registered voters and not on likely voters. In recent elections, however, when October comes around, they apply a screen to their sample for the purpose of focusing in on those most likely to vote. Here it is worth keeping in mind that in no midterm election since 1974 – when eighteen-year-olds were given the right to vote – has the turn-out of registered voters exceeded 39.6%.

This year, Gallup’s generic ballot data suggests that, if there were a 40% turn-out on 2 November, the Republicans would have a 17% advantage. Shocked by this, the Gallup Organization ran the numbers a second time on the assumption that there would be a 55% turn-out (which they have not seen fit to do in the past). In this case, they concluded, the Republicans would outpoll the Democrats by 11%. The latter number is close to what Pew, Rasmussen, Fox News, and CNN/Opinion Research report. At this stage in a midterm election season, the Republicans have never – since Gallup began collecting generic ballot data – enjoyed an 11%, much less a 17%, advantage.

What does this mean? First, 2010 is not 1994. This time, the tide favoring the Republicans is much, much stronger. My own instinct – expressed in the post linked above – is that the rule of thumb Lou Cannon used to apply to the polls when Ronald Reagan was a candidate applies this year to the Republican Party as a whole. One should take the most reliable of the polls – those of Scott Rasmussen – and add 5% to the expected results for every Republican candidate.

For a time I was alone in thinking along these lines. Now I have company. After examining the crosstabs and considering the degree to which the pollsters are basing their estimates on the highly dubious presumption that, in its partisan makeup, the voting public in 2010 will more nearly resemble that of 2008 than 2004, Sean Trende suggested this morning that one would be well-advised to add 3% or 4% to the results for each of the Republican candidates.

If one does that, then my prediction that the Republicans will gain seventy to one hundred seats in the House and take control of the Senate makes perfect sense.

A few weeks ago, Ricochet's Tommy De Seno took exception with the government's decision to ban the purchase of sugary soda with food stamps. Tommy's argument:

[W]e don’t buy and own welfare recipients with our largess, and certainly don’t want someone who may have had some bad beats in life to suffer the further indignity of being told they aren’t worthy of the occasional guilty pleasure of an orange crush.

Ricochet member Matthew Lawrence pithily expressed the counterargument, which many readers -- including myself -- agreed with:

"He who pays the piper, calls the tune."
You wanna drink sody water, get off the dole.
Or, more preferably, get rid of the dole.

But now, in addition to soda, Uncle Sam has decided that poor folks shouldn't eat potatoes either. If there ever was an incentive to get off the dole, this would be it. Can you imagine the life without mashed potatoes? That could darn near ruin Thanksgiving! Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air explains why we should start paying attention to the government's creeping interference with Americans' diets.

Most offensively, the program treats subsidy recipients as if they cannot make their own food choices for themselves. People may tend to write this off by saying that aid recipients aren’t entitled to the money and that the USDA can set whatever condition it likes on the service, and that’s true. WIC and food-stamp recipients can buy potatoes with their own cash, too. But when a large number of Americans start receiving federal subsidies on health insurance — subsidies that will apply to anyone in the health exchanges with an annual salary of $88,000 or less, which is the 62nd percentile for annual household income in the US — what dictates will then be permissible? Smoking, alcohol, food? All of these impact health, and health-care costs.

Andrew Klavan says that everyone who says they've never had an anxious thought about flying Muslims is a liar; Jeffrey Goldberg insists that he never personally has a Bad Thought because he does the math:

There are roughly 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Of these 1.3 billion Muslims, it is my belief that only several thousand, or at most, several tens of thousands, are directly involved in Islamist terrorism. Therefore, the chance that a Muslim in any given airport is a terrorist is very small. I also don't believe that al-Qaeda and like-minded groups and individuals are targeting air travel, because they did that already (this is one of the reasons I think the TSA represents a misapplication of government resources).

Goldberg's right, of course. I applaud his admirable rationality on the issue. But I'd just point out that this makes him kind of a freak, because most people are at least a little bit irrational about flying generally, if not outright phobic. That's an observation that no one seems to be considering in this debate, although it's germane to the charge that everyone who has the Bad Thought must be a bigot.

Professional pilots aside, almost everyone has a sort of uneasy feeling about being in a big metal cylindrical tube that hurtles through the air at 700 miles an hour and very occasionally plunges into the ground in a fiery inferno. We all know the statistics, most of us sort of grasp the idea of the Bernoulli effect and have heard all that reassuring stuff about the multiple backup systems and all those terrific training hours the pilots put in working the simulator, but really, most of us still feel safer in a car, even if logically we know that's absurd. Goldberg is obviously just one of those superbly rational human beings who never lets his emotions run the show; I've met them, they exist, but for most of us--be honest--we're fine in that 747 until there's a weird noise or a big unexpected turbulence thwump, and then, DANGER! DANGER! REPTILE BRAIN ALERT!--there goes all chance of an in-flight nap; bring on the double vodka.

So yes, most of us do look superstitiously for all sorts of little signs that this flight is going to be just fine--pilot looks sober--check; pilot looks old enough to have done this before--check; they seem to have done a pretty good job cleaning the seat pocket, that probably means they're careful with engine maintenance--check. And in that context, "No one looks like a terrorist on this flight--check!" is a pretty normal thought to have as you proceed through your pre-flight totally irrational safety checklist. I also like to make sure they really de-ice the wings well, because I still remember that 1982 Potomac crash.

Okay, so, having that thought doesn't make you a bigot, it just makes you a normal anxious passenger. And that reminds me of a funny story. After I left the Rico Party in San Francisco I flew out of SFO, where I was seated next to a dangerous terrorist suspect--at least, that's what my reptilian brain said. Little guy, dark-skinned, subcontinental in appearance, wearing some kind of terrorist-gear, like a white robe or something, and poring over some kind of religious text. Huh, I said to myself, You shouldn't have a bad, bigoted thought, but he sure does look like a terrorist. You'd better not think that, though, because that's bigoted and bad.

I took my seat next to him, then I noticed something that in just one glance told me I could strike him off the list of Bad Signs. Beneath the seat in front of him was a bag that said, "South India Trade Company." South India--that probably meant he was from Bangalore, and since Bangalore has a huge high-tech industry, that meant he was probably just coming back from a high-tech business meeting. And he was probably a Hindu, because most people from Bangalore would be.

I just wanted to confirm, though, so that I could take my nap in perfect peace. "So," I said to him, "That book--it's Kannada, isn't it?" Kannada being the language spoken in Bangalore.

He nearly dropped sideways with shock. "Yes! It's Kannada! How did you know!" We had a long talk about the time I was in Bangalore, and how much it must have changed since then, and his job, and the book he was reading --Vedic scriptures--and I could see in his face how glad he was that I didn't think he was a terrorist, because it must just really suck to have everyone think you're a terrorist every time you get on a flight, and suck all the more if you're a Hindu; after all, it must be galling to be under suspicion as a Muslim when in fact you too are worrying about being killed by a Muslim.

No moral here, just a nice story. He seemed like a lovely Bangalorean. Hope everything went well for him, especially with his visit to his family--he seemed a little fretful about that, about whether he was bringing back the right presents for his mother-in-law and his wife and his kids.