Smartest guy in the room

View 710 Monday, January 23, 2012

Still trying to catch up.

I have other mail like this:

You should probably write something about Newt’s win in South Carolina

The negatives from the older and wiser’s are starting to roll in. They seem to not realize what you told me earlier, that Newt never expected to run for office again and therefore did things that a prudent politician probably would not do. Frankly, I’m sick of the older and wiser’s. They may be old, but they aint that wise.

I suppose I should comment, but I want to repeat, I am not an apologist for Newt Gingrich, nor have I endorsed him for President. I will say again that I think every one of the Republican candidates would be a far better President than the one we’ve got. Of course I think William Clinton was a far better President than the one we’ve got. The Obama program really will fundamentally change the nature of the United States political system. His “recess” appointments show his ignorance – or reasoned contempt – for the concept of separation of powers. His use of political trickery to defraud the General Motors bondholders of their money in order to turn the company over to his political allies would have horrified every single member of the Convention of 1787 and every single signer of both the Constitution and the Declaration. And his rejection of the oil pipeline from Canada demonstrates that he places political advantage over the national economic welfare – for that matter, as did the entire GM deal.

I have no brief for the political cronyism that took place during the Bush administration and which continues under the Obama administration. The whole concept of limited government was damaged by the people who came after Gingrich’s term as Speaker. As to the “ethics” charges against Gingrich, the one I am most familiar with was the charge that the fiction book we were to collaborate on was a sham and a means for a publisher to bribe Gingrich with an advance to be paid to both of us. As I pointed out at the time, I am the author of several best selling books, and the advance we were offered was not particularly large compared to what I was then getting for novels. I decided not to do the book – a contemporary high-tech political thriller – when Newt became Speaker; I could handle the political implications of the plot when the co-author was Minority Whip, but the Speaker is third in line for the Presidency, and the need to be careful in the plot lest it have diplomatic effects seemed too great. The book was never written, but the “ethics” charge that it was anything other than a book to make money was simply fabricated; which told me all I needed to know about the kind of people who would bring such a charge. If they could say that was unethical they would say anything.

Newt was a fairly close friend from 1980 until he left public office. He remains a friend. And I repeat that every single one of the candidates would be a better President than Barrack Hussein Obama. As was William Jefferson Clinton.

It is a long campaign. The election is not until November, and the Republican National Convention is not until Summer. I do with the candidates would concentrate their fire on Obama and the Democrats rather than each other, but then I have said all that before.

I do not have much mail like this, but I suppose I ought to comment:

You have said that Newt Gingrich is the smartest man in any room he happens to be in, or words to that effect.

You must inhabit some amazingly stupid rooms.

PenGun

What I said is that Newt is likely to be the smartest man in whatever room he happens to be in. I didn’t say always, because often those rooms contained other people I admire, and when you get to that level of intelligence the matter of “smartest” doesn’t turn out to be all that meaningful.

I have been in rooms with Newt and some pretty smart people including Max Hunter, General Graham, General Meyer, Colonel Kane, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Dan Goldin, Alvin Tofler, and many other science savvy people, and other rooms with historians of merit. Jim Baen and I spent many hours with Newt in deep conversation in Washington during the 1980’s. Who was the smartest person in the room didn’t come up.

I do know that when I knew Newt Gingrich he like to be in rooms full of smart people, and like many intellectuals he liked to come up with new and different ideas; and like most new and different ideas some sounded pretty good when first brought up but didn’t withstand critical rational discussion. That seems to happen often enough in the intellectual circles I prefer. That may not be an optimum situation for politicians, whose words and thoughts and ideas seem to be taken down in writing to be brought up again decades later.

Of course, if you are convinced that I am amazingly stupid, there is no reason to pay attention to me.

In COMDEX days Sheldon Adelson, who owned COMDEX, and I used to present the Best of COMDEX awards together. I note that Shelly has given Newt a lot of money. That changes the Florida odds considerably. It’s going to be a long campaign.

Apple has announced the end of the textbook as we know it. That sparked a lively debate on their methods, and particularly the licensing agreement for using the free apps they released to make it easy to take textbook research and classroom lecture tools and turn them into textbooks. The agreement seems ill thought out. I am sure Apple has been appalled at some of the reaction to it. I suspect revisions are coming soon enough.

The textbook industry is huge, and is a large part of the profit structure of many print publishers as eBooks become more and more important. It will take a while to change it – there are many political reasons that will make changes very hard to do, and there are many economic interests involved here – but I suspect it’s all inevitable. More on this as more comes out, but I expect Apple’s long range forecast is correct: the textbook industry as we know it will collapse.

Whether the current laptops and tablet computers are Good Enough to become the new textbooks or not is debatable; they’re expensive, to begin with. But Moore’s Law is inexorable. CES was stuffed with MacBook Air wannabees running Windows and Chrome and Linux and such like, and those are the early consumer machines. There are new generations of them coming.

No one has really thought through the implications here. It used to be that textbooks were used for a long time. Now they can be revised by “revision” with changes in text and emphasis happening in hours. Think memory holes and 1984. We live in interesting times.