To the surprise of exactly nobody who has the faintest inkling of what a nut Newt Gingrich is, the GOP frontrunner today made a solemn outrageous panderpromise to the people of Florida:

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is promising to colonize the moon.

Speaking in Florida, hit hard by the loss of a large number of space-affiliated jobs, Mr. Gingrich said Wednesday that if elected, “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

Comedians of America, you know what to do.

But seriously, isn’t this just so … Newtish? The idea that this broke-a*s country of ours ought to be spending money to build a colony on the moon is so far from reality, especially anything remotely connected to conservatism, that it ought to wake some pro-Newt Republican voters up. Newt might want to go to the moon, but he’s apparently already living on another planet.

There’s a new TV drama about an autistic boy with eerie powers. More:

Tonight sees the launch of Touch, Kiefer Sutherland’s show about a father whose non-neurotypical son turns out to be able to predict future events. This comes on the heels of Alphas, which also gave us Gary, another person who appears to be on the autism spectrum but who has the ability to see hidden energies. And the notion of autistic people as savants or special fixers has been around forever.

Why do we create these fantasies about autistic people having superpowers?

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” They call this Clarke’s Third Law. I think we’re dealing with something similar here. Kids on the spectrum sometimes have especially pronounced natural abilities as a result of their neurological wiring. Musical and mathematical autistic savants are the obvious examples, but there are others, like Michael Burry, the doctor turned investor, whose Asperger’s gave him the ability to focus like a laser on analyzing fine print in financial statements, such that he became extremely rich from foreseeing the subprime mortgage crisis when no one else could. This may have looked like an ability to see the future, but it was actually the result of the ability to see more deeply  into patterns, and make predictions based on an empirical analysis of the data.

A minor example from my own experience. My son, who has a very mild case of Asperger’s, has acutely heightened senses. For example, he can hear sounds that you and I can’t hear. Once, back in Dallas, I was in the kitchen making a sandwich, and he was at the other end of the house. He heard me bite into it, and came in asking if I could make him one with peanut butter. If you didn’t know that this kid had extraordinary hearing, you might have thought he had psychic intuition. I can sometimes do this with smell; I have such an acute olfactory sensitivity that I can sometimes tell where people have been by the aromas lingering around them — aromas that others can’t pick up.

Maybe then there’s an Autism Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced neurological sensitivity is indistinguishable from having superpowers.”

Bad Catholic is ticked:

Dearest MSNBC,

Forgive me if I appear simple-minded, but it seems that you are under the impression that the March For Life is a celebration of the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. What other conclusion can I draw? The only speaker you bring on is the President of Planned Parenthood and you greet her with an “Almost 40 years, it’s amazing to think about it!”

Now it’s all very confusing — I know how that word ‘anniversary’ gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach and makes you want to make love on air — but the March for Life is actually a rejection of the murder of infants.

When you cover the Occupy Wall Street movement, do you sit down a Wall Street executive and start your interview with “It’s been almost half a year now. Isn’t it amazing to think about?” Would you have covered MLK’s march by interviewing a white supremacist, asking him, “What are the challenges facing your movement today” as you asked Cecile Richards?

More here. 

This is bracing: Investor George Soros says that for the first time in his life, he has no idea what to do. Excerpt:

Daniel Larison watched the State of the Union address and the GOP response, so I didn’t have to. His remarks here. I quit watching SOTU speeches a few years ago, because they’re always a snore. Sounds like I missed exactly nothing. According to Daniel, Obama was dull when he wasn’t offensive, and Mitch Daniels’s response was just dull.

Did you see either speech? What did you think?

Susan Matt says that America’s love of rootlessness was taught:

This tendency to denigrate the attachment to home only increased in the twentieth century. Psychologists like John Watson, an influential behaviorist of the 1920s and 30s, suggested that overly affectionate parents ruined their children by making them emotionally dependent and incapable of leaving home. “Mothers just don’t know, when they kiss their children and pick them up and rock them upon their knee, that they are slowly building up a human being totally unprepared to cope with the world it must later live in.”  To make children independent, he instructed parents: “[n]ever hug and kiss [children], never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.” Other psychologists advised parents to send their children to visit relatives, in order “to prevent a strong emotional fixation or attachment to the home situation or to any item in it.”

Accompanying such advice were new institutional forces that also pressured Americans to leave home and to do so easily. Emerging bureaucracies required workers to affiliate with them and sever their connections to home. During World War II, the Army told homesick troops that they must overcome their “infantile dependence” on their parents and transfer their loyalties to the military. After the war ended, expanding corporations required employees to relocate if they hoped to advance. A common joke among IBM employees during the 1950s and 1960s was that the company’s name stood for “I’ve Been Moved.” IBM employees were hardly alone, for during the 1950s, roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population moved each year. Employees unwilling to relocate risked stalling their careers or losing their jobs. In The Organization Man, William Whyte reported, “‘We never plan to transfer,’ as one company president explains a bit dryly, ‘and we never make a man move. Of course, he kills his career if he doesn’t. But we never make him do it.’”  As an IBM executive explained, such moves were good for corporations, for it “makes our men interchangeable.”

Organizational society required workers to be fungible, mobile – and cheerful about it.

“What I stand for is what I stand on,” says Wendell Berry, a mad farmer who obviously hates America and capitalism.

Fort Awesomeshark Military Academy  St. Benedict School headmistress: “What are you doing in there?”

Me: “Designing T-shirts for our kids.”

Her: “What?”

Me: “You’ll see.”

Her: “Shouldn’t you be writing your book?”

The woman is a harsh mistress. Welcome to the Fort Awesomeshark Military Academy Spirit Store. Because I see no reason why homeschooled Christian children should not have the opportunity to buy school spirit junk just like all those normal, well-socialized kids they keep telling us about. Motto: “Domi adsum, contra mundum” (“At home, against the world.”).

Bill McGurn, on the stupid fight the president picked with the Catholic left:

The liberal Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, blogged that he “cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on freedom of conscience”—and he urged people to fight it. Another liberal favorite, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., has raised the specter of “civil disobedience” and vowed that he will drop coverage for diocesan workers rather than comply. They are joined in their expressions of discontent by the leaders of Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities, which alone employs 70,000 people.

In the run-up to the ruling, the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins, suggested a modest compromise by which the president could have avoided most of this strife. That would have been by allowing the traditional exemption for religious organizations. That’s the same understanding two of the president’s own appointees to the Supreme Court just reaffirmed in a 9-0 ruling that recognized a faith-based school’s First Amendment right to choose its own ministers without government interference, regardless of antidiscrimination law.

A few years ago Father Jenkins took enormous grief when he invited President Obama to speak at a Notre Dame commencement; now Father Jenkins finds himself publicly disapproving of an “unnecessary government intervention” that puts many organizations such as his in an “untenable position.”

Here’s just part of what he means by “untenable”: Were Notre Dame to drop coverage for its 5,229 employees, the HHS penalty alone would amount to $10 million each year.

Says Matthew, who is 12: “Dad, I have some bad news. The state education department requires us to give a name to our homeschool as part of the registration. I suggested ‘Fort Awesomeshark Military Academy,’ but Mom decided on St. Benedict School.”

Dang! Hugely disappointing news. I have lodged a protest with the proper domestic tyranny authority on behalf of my client. We strongly believe that Fort Awesomeshark Military Academy is a much better name for our homeschool, and we are going to have T-shirts made to prove it.

Moms are so lame sometimes. In our rebel hearts, we will always be Fort Awesomesharkians.