"This election is about values. It's about what kind of people we are and what kind of country we want to build."

Says email I just received from Elizabeth Warren (the Harvard lawprof and candidate for one of the seats in the U.S. Senate that do not represent my state). The Democrats are fundraising. I don't give money (to any political cause), but I do get the email.

Mitt Romney and the Republicans believe in an America that says, "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own."

We believe in an America that pays it forward -- that puts the conditions in place so that the next kid can get ahead, and the kid after that, and the kid after that.

So that's how the Democrats are talking to each other right now. I thought you should know.

When did Romney ever say "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own"? And Obama just put out an ad attacking Romney for making a "false attack" by quoting something Obama said word for word.

But let's be fair. Warren doesn't say Romney said "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own," but that he believes in an America that says "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own." But when did America ever say that? Who's accused of thinking like that?

Now, the Democrats purport to "believe in an America that pays it forward," which sounds odd to me, because it seems that the Democrats have plunged us into debt that they expect the next generations to deal with. It's more billing it forward.

But, anyway, I see the phrase "pay it forward" has its own Wikipedia page:

The expression "pay it forward" is used to describe the concept of asking that a good deed be repaid by having it done for others instead.... [T]he creditor offers the debtor the option of "paying" the debt forward by lending it to a third person instead of paying it back to the original creditor.

Hard to think about that in connection with a government that is taking on debt, not paying debt. But I suppose Warren must mean that citizens who are successful should give money to the people who are not yet successful, via the government, which will somehow channel the money properly to the "kids."

The Wikipedia article has a good "history" of "pay it forward." I liked this from Robert A. Heinlein's "Between Planets":

The banker reached into the folds of his gown, pulled out a single credit note. "But eat first — a full belly steadies the judgment. Do me the honor of accepting this as our welcome to the newcomer." His pride said no; his stomach said YES! Don took it and said, "Uh, thanks! That's awfully kind of you. I'll pay it back, first chance." "Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it."

And this from Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine":

How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he's done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can't pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way....

The idea seems to apply to private, voluntary charity — not taxing and spending. Romney gives plenty to charity — more than Obama, in fact, both in dollars and as a percentage of his income. It's an inspiring concept but there's something creepy about using in the context of acquiring votes to achieve political power for the purpose of redistribution of the wealth.

So: "This election is about values. It's about what kind of people we are and what kind of country we want to build." Yes, it is!

"There were other science fiction writers, and we loved them, just as there were baseball players besides Willie Mays and rock groups besides the Beatles..."

"... but we loved him best, and when I try to remember why, I have to conclude, proudly, that it wasn’t because his alien worlds were so magazine-cover thrilling, or his dystopian predictions so convincing, or his speculative inventions so original — they were, but plenty of others’ were too."

At the Bead Shop Café...

... you can string words into sentences.

(The photograph is from West Lafayette, Indiana — in part of a grand old place called Von's, which is mostly a bookstore, where I bought this book, which contains the sentence "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.")

"Put me in a room with a pad and a pencil and set me up against a hundred people with a hundred computers - I'll outcreate every goddamn sonofabitch in the room."

Said Ray Bradbury, in a 1998 interview, quoted in a new NYT op-ed, by the writer Tim Kreider, who says:

[Bradbury] opposed the kind of technology that deadened imagination, the modernity that would trash the past, the kind of intellectualism that tried to centrifuge out awe and beauty. He famously did not care to drive or fly, but he was a passionate proponent of space travel, not because of its practical benefits but because he saw it as the great spiritual endeavor of the age, our generation’s cathedral building, a bid for immortality among the stars.

His visions of a better world weren’t high-tech but archaic, bucolic. In “Fahrenheit,” Montag remembers “a farm he had visited when he was very young, one of the rare few times he had discovered that somewhere behind the seven veils of unreality, beyond the walls of parlors and the tin moat of the city, cows chewed cud and pigs sat in warm ponds at noon and dogs barked after white sheep on a hill.” His utopia isn’t some flying city or exotic planet but prewar, small-town America — specifically, Waukeagan, Ill., circa 1928, a town of porch swings and bandshells, dandelion wine stored up in cool cellars and fire balloons on the Fourth of July. His Martians are not alien like Heinlein’s or futuristically evolved like Welles’s but a premodern people akin to the ancient Egyptians or American Indians (or a boy’s idealized conception of them), our superiors not technologically but spiritually. He was, like most of my favorite artists, a misanthropic humanist.

That's nice. I respect the art and aesthetics. But back away from the government. Do not lay your hands on the people's money to pay for your nostalgic, utopian trips to Mars. Keep dreaming your dreams and penning your stories, but do not use tax money to make these things real. Trips to Mars belong in the same category with the high-speed rail.

Ray Bradbury has died.

He was 91.

Instapundit says: "People are mostly talking about The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, but I liked Dandelion Wine."

I think I was assigned "Fahrenheit 451" to read in high school, and I was impressed by it, but for some reason what I most remember of his is "The Veldt." Plot summary:

A family lives in a house with the latest technology. It is called the “Happylife Home” and its installation cost $30,000. The house is filled with machines that do everything for them from cooking meals, to clothing them, to rocking them to sleep. The two children, Peter and Wendy, become fascinated with the "nursery," a virtual reality room that is able to connect with the children telepathically to reproduce any place they imagine.

That was written in 1950, long before video games, etc.

The parents, George and Lydia, soon realize that there is something wrong with their way of life. George and Lydia are also perplexed that the nursery is stuck on an African setting, with lions in the distance, eating the dead carcass of what they assume to be an animal. There they also find recreations of their personal belongings. Wondering why their children are so concerned with this scene of death, they decide to call a psychologist.

The psychologist, David McClean, suggests they turn off the house and leave. The children, completely addicted to the nursery, beg their parents to let them have one last visit. The parents relent, and agree to let them spend a few more minutes there. When they come to the nursery to fetch the children, the children lock them in from the outside. George and Lydia look on as the lions begin to advance towards them. At that point, they realize that what the lions were eating in the distance was not an animal, but their own simulated remains.

The kids realized that the only way they could stay in their nursery is to get rid of their parents by locking George and Lydia in the nursery with the lions.

Don't take our video games away! Parents! Leave those kids alone!

"We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves."

Ray Bradbury talks about religion. Some of what he says makes some sense, and some, like that quote, makes no sense at all.

Oh, how I loathe, the use of the space program for inspirational purposes. (Like this.)

"When you gather together 100,000 people who are in love — that's pretty good, isn't it? — so many lovers in one place..."

"... they all love the same thing and you can feel the ambience of their love."

Ray Bradbury, at 1:25, at the linked audio.