Felix Salmon: Suze Orman is a really big, really fat idiot!

Okay, it’s been at least a week since I last made fun of Felix and Suze O, so let’s get with it.

Only three weeks ago, Felix wrote “I’m a big fan of Suze Orman.” Look at what he’s writing now: a post that’s headed “Suze Orman’s bad investment newsletter”!

“Suze Orman’s bad investment newsletter!” Ouch! It’s a pretty long post, with a fair amount of he said/she said, but the gist is this:

“I’m disappointed in Orman for telling her readers that they can beat the market. I’m disappointed in Orman for implying to readers that if they spend $63 per year on her newsletter, then they are likely to beat the market. And I’m extremely disappointed in Orman for getting into bed with Grimaldi in particular, who charges a management fee of 1.65% for investing in his Sector Rotation Fund, despite the fact that all he’s doing is buying ETFs.

And of course all of this rubs off onto Orman’s other products, too: the tar of the Money Navigator newsletter is going to wind up getting brushed onto the Approved Card, whether it deserves it or not. Which is yet another reason why we need a new personal-finance guru— someone who can replace Orman and judge her products impartially.”

I’m afraid I never took Suze very seriously—the sight of a chick in a pantsuit holding a microphone roaming around an empty stage and telling folks how to take charge of their lives is always a turnoff for me. But it’s nice to get confirmation from someone who knows what an ETF is.

Afterwords
Felix is off in Davos now, where, one can hope, he won’t be running into Suze. His reports make informative but depressing reading. In case you haven’t heard, Europe is about to fall apart, and it isn’t all the fault of those lazy, lying Greeks. George Soros says the same at the New York Review of Books.

“Newt’s Moon Speech: Not Actually Crazy”—Just Total Bullshit

Newt Gingrich is getting a lot of ink, photons, & pixels with his “promise” to Cape Canaveral area folks that he’s going to establish a permanent American colony on the moon, concluding his pitch with the following Gingrichian flourish: “When they have 13,000 Americans living on the moon,they can petition to become a state.”

Over at Slate, Dave Weigel calls this “not actually crazy,” which as a political pander it isn’t, since life at the Cape has been getting awfully slow, now that the realities of manned space flight—the main realities being that it’s 1) absurdly expensive, 2) absurdly dangerous, and 3) absurdly useless—have started to sink in. It was fun, back in the day, to waste $20-$30 billion a year on a program that did nothing but spend money and endanger the lives and sanity of half a dozen astronauts, but that was then and this is now, and the now reality is that Cape Canaveral needs a bailout as much as Detroit ever did, the difference being that it isn’t going to get one.

But reality never slows a good politician down. An actual permanent colony on the moon, of twenty or thirty people, would surely cost a $100 billion a year—more if you figure in the coffins. A Newt-sized colony would surely edge north of $1 trillion, which suggests, to me, that it isn’t going to happen.

Afterwords
I do have one question for Newt: If a moon colony with 13,000 inhabitants can become a state, why can’t the District of Columbia get a Congressman? (Answers involving food stamps or toilets not acceptable.)

P.S. I apologize for the sexist language here—“manned” and “Congressman”—but neither “humaned” nor “personed” sounds right to me, and “Representative” doesn’t have the same ring as “Congressman.”

The new Stanford: Unlimited admissions, and it’s free!

That’s the story Felix Salmon (yes, that Felix Salmon) tells here after hearing former Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun talk about putting his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course online, which resulted in a total enrollment of 160,000 students all over the world(I’m linking even though the class is “over” for the time being, which means that you won’t be able to watch the lectures).

Thrun has left Stanford to create an online university called “Udacity,” which is currently offering one course, “CS 101: Building A Search Engine.” The pitch is this: “Learn programming in seven weeks. We'll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!”

Geezer that I am, I’ve never wanted to build a search engine, but, well, geezers are not the future, and maybe Udacity is. It’s certainly made Felix change his tune, because just last week he was pissing all over Mitt Romney’s suggestion that a for-profit university might work better than the existing non-profits. For whatever reason, Felix seemed only capable of thinking about universities in terms of bricks and mortar (and ivy). To his credit, he’s realized, after listening to Thrun, that there might be a better way.

Afterwords
As is fairly well known, MIT lets you audit many courses online. I was able to follow the Introduction of Biology course online without much difficulty, even though my last formal contact with the subject involved dissecting a frog.

Is that, you know, a promise?

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, proving that he will go the whole nine yards, and then some, to ensure the re-election of President Obama, makes the promise everyone’s been waiting for: If Obama wins, he’s history!

Patrick Deneen is better than you are, or at least more pompous

Over at Front Porch Republic, a site that I’ve never visited before and probably won’t visit much again, Georgetown Poli Sci Professor Patrick Deneen announces that he’s leaving G-Town for Notre Dame, saying that “my family and I are looking forward to living in a community that is less hectic and less dazzled by the lights of the imperial city.” According to Patrick:

“My wife and I hail from small towns, and both view our upbringings in those places as a deeply constitutive part of our worldview. We have sorely missed a sense of community in the DC area, a place where most of our lives’ activities are fragmented, often connected only by long car rides in heavy traffic. It has been a source of great dissatisfaction that our home life is so divorced from my vocation as a teacher and scholar. While teaching at Princeton, we frequently hosted dinners and gatherings of students; it was in the midst of those kinds interactions and colloquy that I wanted to raise our children. But, the reality of the D.C. area is that it is only possible for us to maintain a home relatively far from campus. This sense of fragmentation informs much of our daily lives – we have a set of very different spheres that rarely interact and overlap – home, work, schools, church, and so on. In the waning years that remain in which our children will live under our roof, I would like to give them that experience. This experience is palpably a part of the daily rhythm at Notre Dame.”

I’ve never been to Notre Dame, but I have had lunch a couple of times at Princeton, which, to my mind, is a lot like Cape Cod without all the ocean: everyone seemed to be richer than me, and no one had a job. Coming from the Washington area, I find it amusing that the good professor sees fit to picture little DC as the glamorous, heartless, “imperial city,” where only the mega-rich (and, presumably, mega-heartless) can afford to live in town, while the little people lead sad, fragmented lives, driving endlessly through “heavy traffic” like dry leaves driven before the autumn blast.*

Afterwords
According to Deneen, he's also leaving because Georgetown doesn’t seem to care much about his ideas about the nature and importance of the “Catholic humanistic tradition,” while Notre Dame does. As a pseudo-Episcopalian secular humanist, I'll offer a hearty “no comment” on the matter.

*If you’ve never been to DC, believe me, New York it ain’t.

Mitch Daniels, Man of Steel

Is there anything more pathetic than a liberal like myself, who sees “his” President, Barack Obama, as the tool of both Wall Street and the CIA? Well, apparently there is, the fate of big-city conservatives like Ross Douthat and Bill Kristol, who are wetting their collective worsteds over the prospect of either Newt or Mitt becoming the 2012 Republican nominee. Bill’s latest brainwave is that Mitch Daniels should announce, which would be about a year too late, even if we ignore the fact that Daniels was pathetically unelectable from the get go, as he himself recognized when he took himself out of the race.

Ross assesses Mitch’s chances as follows: “The scenario [Kristol’s] seeking almost certainly won’t happen. But that’s very different from saying that it couldn’t, if someone, from Daniels to Jeb [Bush] to Bobby Jindal, were willing to step into the breach that caution has created, and cowardice has sustained.”

So Mitch is a coward for not having run, huh? If you’ll remember, Ross, Mitch didn’t run, in large part, because he was afraid of being called a pussy, because his wife Cheri divorced him and ran off to California to marry her high-school sweetheart, leaving Mitch to stay home in Indiana to raise their four daughters, returning a couple of years later to remarry Mitch after having divorced hubbie number two. Cheri also refused to make any campaign appearances with him in his two gubernatorial campaigns in 2004 and 2008.

Bill? Ross? Your hero is a guy who can’t control his wife? I thought Obama was supposed to be the sissy in this election.

Another thing, Ross. “Almost certainly won’t happen” is not “very different” from “couldn’t happen.” It’s almost the same.

Afterwords
Back in the day, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Cheri that ended with the following quote from Mitch:

“She is funnier than hell,” Mr. Daniels said. “And half the time she is ragging on me or making fun of me for something.”

She does sound funny, Mitch. Real funny. How often do you work late at the office? Every fucking day?

Late-Breaking Amusing Update
Jennifer Rubin, my fave fauve, my bête noire di tutti bêtes noires, is joining in the fun, running an open letter literally begging “sane Republican leaders”—a group that is apparently limited to Govs. Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, and Bobby Jindal; Sens. Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Jim DeMint; and Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence—to get up off their collective Republican rectums and put the kibosh on Newt Gingrich, whom she describes charmingly as “an egomaniac whose personal advancement takes precedence over any principle.” She suggests that they could either choose among themselves to be the Newt-slayer or else get behind either Mitt “Rich Man” Romney or Jim “Lost by 18 percentage points last time around” Santorum. Good luck with that, Jenny, and thanks for all the giggles.

Stan Getz, Gary Burton, and a whole lotta Roy Haynes

Sometime in the early sixties. Thank you, BBC. Sorry, I can’t identify the bassist. He looks English. Posted by dliberg