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Way to go, Barry! Me and Deepak get it on. And other marginalia.

I like Obama's new deficit-reduction plan, as well as his in-your-face way of debuting it. Good for him. The way he was going for a while there, he had everybody mad at him, including his base. If his presidency is destined to go down in flames, he might as well do it being the guy whom some of us elected....

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Had a brief but interesting Twitter-spar with Deepak Chopra over the weekend. Was a little bit surprised that he would "engage," given his sometimes-imperial demeanor and his very vocal unhappiness with me over this piece for The Wall Street Journal; you can read his response here. However, I think I might have caught him with his logic down. Here are the tweets in chronological order:

DEEPAK: "Only life creates life."
ME: "But if only life creates life, then I'm assuming you dispute the validity of evolution/Big Bang etc."

DEEPAK: "I do not dispute big bang , evolution, cosmogenesis—they are all expressions of a living universe."
ME: "OK but at a certain point that becomes sophistry. If everything is alive—i.e the universe itself—then nothing is, either."

DEEPAK: "Biological evolution describes the transformation of life not the origin of life."
ME: "And for that matter, God is not technically 'life,' either—correct?—so the line breaks down there too."

DEEPAK: "There is no observable experimental evidence of how life began—yet."
ME: "OK, I'll grant that. But then how do you reconcile that comment with 'only life creates life'? If we don't know, we don't know."

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

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Later, this buffoon* tweeted: "A life without cause is a life without effect."

To which I replied: "Again, a nonsensical platitude. Did Mt. St. Helens have a 'cause'? Did it not have an effect? PEOPLE: Stop the Stupid, Now!"

Dr. Cummins has not replied.

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Baseball fans will know that the Philadelphia Phillies were the first team to clinch a playoff berth, and then a divisional championship (admirably, their fifth straight). The latter happened on Saturday night. On Sunday, the Phils lost big. The next morning, in a column titled "Phillies appear lifeless in loss to Cards," one of sportswriting's best and brightest, Amanda Housenick—whose columns often unfold in a never-ending series of Sportsthink cliches—framed Sunday's loss like so: "Seven of the Phillies regulars were physically in the lineup, but their regular intensity wasn't.... A day after clinching their fifth consecutive NL East title in record time (150 games), the Phils hit into double plays three times in the first four innings."

This mentality, which is pervasive not just in sports but in the broad culture, reasons backward from an observed result and finds a mental/emotional predisposition to explain it. It's a mindset that implies that everything is responsive to sheer willpower—or, to quote the Socrates of our day, Tommy Lasorda, "The guy who wins is the guy who wants it the most."

That line of (alleged) reasoning is dumb enough big-picture, but it gets especially silly when one does what Housenick did, i.e., using it to explain the countless, often inconsequential component parts of a given outcome. The linkage that Housenick draws between the Phils' lack of "intensity" and their three double-plays is so absurd as to hardly bear comment, but comment I will. Those of you who play baseball or even watch it now and then realize that, first, you normally have to hit a ball pretty hard in order to hit into a DP. So where exactly did the lack of intensity come into play? Is Housenick implying that it was flagging intensity that caused the hitter to—on the one hand—hit the ball hard, but also—on the other hand—hit it right at a fielder? That is not just silly. It is probably insane. After all, if those same balls had been hit a few feet or even inches to one side of the fielder who started the double-play, the result easily could've been a run-scoring hit. Are we saying that a player with more intensity would've somehow "made sure" the balls (a) weren't just hit hard, but (b) found open spots in the infield? ... Please. Spare me.

* Read his page. If you don't laugh your ass off, I'll give you your money back.
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