The Rubaiyat: translation and inspiration

The New Neo Posted on by

Edward FitzGerald’s translation of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is justly famous and justly beloved. I studied the poem in high school, and it was one of my favorite assignments—really, a revelation. But FitzGerald was very free with his translation, making a new and different work of art out of an already-existent work of art (or rather, many works of art; he consolidated a bunch of quatrains).

I’ve long been curious about the art of translation, and here’s a discussion, with examples, of what Fitzgerald did to create his own Rubaiyat from Omar’s.

Here’s a demonstration. First we have a literal translation of a famous quatrain (in prose, because a verse cannot be a literal translation) from Justin Huntley McCarthy:

Since life flies, what matters it whether it be sweet or bitter? Since our souls must escape through our lips, what matters it whether it be at Naishaptir or Babylon ? Drink, then, for after thou and I are dust the moon will for many days pass from her last to her first quarter, and from her first to her last.

Fitzgerald turns it into this gem:

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

Analyzed thusly:

Each quatrain in the original is a detached thought, and with no consecutive arrangement other than an alphabetical one ; whereas in FitzGerald there is a certain unity that has been obtained by selecting fragmentary thoughts and rendering and grouping them so as to form an Oriental poem, rather than a handful of loose gems as in the original. But this arrangement renders it far more delightful to English readers, and when it has been discovered that there exists in Omar a prototype for nearly all of FitzGerald’s lines, we have no quarrel with the translator for transposing them to suit his own fancy.

I certainly have no quarrel with FitzGerald.

More, from a different literal prose translation (by Heron-Allen):

Heron-Allen :

“This vault of heaven, beneath which we stand bewildered,
We know to be a sort of magic-lantern :
Know thou that the sun is the lamp-flame and the universe is the lamp,
We are like figures that revolve in it.”

FitzGerald (fourth edition) :

“We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumin’d Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show.”

And I doubt there’s anyone who doesn’t know and appreciate this:

(Heron-Allen):

“I desire a little ruby wine and a book of verses,
Just enough to keep me alive, and half a loaf is needful;
And then, that I and thou should sit in a desolate place
Is better than the kingdom of a sultan.”

How near this is, to –

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! ”

One more favorite:

Mr. Heron-Allen says:

“From the beginning was written what shall be ;
Unhaltingly the Pen writes, and is heedless of good and bad;
On the First Day He appointed everything that must be –
Our grief and our efforts are vain.”

This, with complementary thought selected from other quatrains of Omar, has been expanded by FitzGerald into two stanzas, 71 and 73 of the fourth edition :

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Perhaps in the original Persian the first is as good as the second. Perhaps; I don’t know, because Persian is Greek to me. But in English translation, it is the second one that sings—and not just because of the rhyme, although it helps.

Trump, Clinton, Obama: chaos is the new normal

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “T” recently offered a quote by Jonathan Rauch that goes like this:

What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers””political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees””that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal””both in campaigns and in the government itself.

I thought of that quote today when I turned to Memeorandum, something I often do to see what are the stories du jour and who is covering them and how. Today’s page is replete with articles on subjects that demonstrate that “things fall apart, the center does not hold,” a quote from Yeats that I discussed in this post I wrote last Wednesday.

It’s not just chaos we’re seeing, either. The disorder is actually somewhat orderly in that it goes in a certain direction, and that direction is the proliferation of more and more blatant lies and corruption with no end and no checks in sight. The MSM sporadically speaks of these things occurring on both sides (with, of course, the press’s usual bias for the left). But, as Hillary Clinton so presciently put it several years ago: what difference, at this point, does it make? In 2013 I wrote that her quote and its acceptance was a mark of the increasingly generalized cynicism of the American public. Things have only gotten worse since then on that score.

There is little question in my mind that the rise of Donald Trump and the perception of him as a bona fide candidate could only have occurred with this increase in cynicism, and anger at the entire mess. And the acceptance of Hillary Clinton by most Democrats in spite of (or perhaps because of?) her manifold corruptions and lies is an example of a different form of something similar. Trump and Clinton may both be blatant liars (as was Obama before them), but they’re our liars, right (Republican and Democrat, respectively)? And we think that perhaps they’ll lie in the cause we think is just.

Hope for that is not the least bit reassuring.

What are today’s stories on Memeorandum that I’m talking about? For Trump, the first is a campaign ad that’s judged to be false. That really is small potatoes in the lying category, though; politics as usual, and I’m not going to get excited about that one. Then there’s still another indication (in a continuing series) that Melania Trump’s immigration and marriage history has been lied about. This is a relatively trivial matter, in a way, because (unlike Clinton’s and Obama’s lies) it isn’t about something big and governmental, it’s about something personal (although connected with immigration law, which is one of Trump’s supposed strong suits).

But on top of so many other lies of Trump’s, it is more evidence for the idea that Trump is a habitual and shameless liar. If so, why would he not continue lying if and when he got the power of the presidency? After all, he’s never had that power before, and there’s no reason to suspect that he wouldn’t continue his blatant lies if he gets the power, and the lies would be about much larger and more important things. And how would we know he’d lie for the “right” reasons and goals rather than the wrong ones?

Then there’s Hillary Clinton. She once again has botched—and badly—answering questions about her wretched email system. This is a topic on which she’s lied continually and shamelessly (and sometimes poorly), and it is a topic that involves national security. And yet here she is, the nominee of the Democratic Party, ahead in the polls and on a track to become our next president.

Worst of all is Obama’s ransom payment to Iran, which I wrote about last Wednesday. Obama’s lies about this indefensible action of his (embedded in a larger indefensible action, the Iran deal) have been typically shameless and seamless. The subject is of great importance, as well.

But that’s not enough for Obama. He also has boldly asserted that Israel is now fine with the Iran deal, a claim that Israel has hotly denied. But hey, Obama feels he can ignore their denials because if he says something enough, enough people will believe him. And he’s been proven correct on that.

The voter, the perplexed reader of the news, cannot make sense of any of this except to feel caught in a maelstrom of garbage (is that a mixed metaphor?). And to top it all off—and just in case Trump might be considered the less chaotic bet—he has also managed to trash talk our ally Japan:

Donald Trump has savaged Japan, one of America’s closest allies, stating that if the US is attacked, all Japan would do is “sit home and watch Sony television”.

He expressed his frustration that the US is bound by treaty to defend the Asian nation but that if the United States is attacked, the Japanese cannot help because of Article 9, which constitutionally forbids it to send armed forces overseas.

He said that it “could be necessary” for the US to walk away from the treaty, or at least threaten to do so.

At a campaign event in Iowa, Mr Trump also repeated his criticism of countries that do not pull their weight in terms of financial contributions to NATO.

Talk about encouraging chaos! I’ve written before that for Trump, everything is mutable. Apparently that includes longstanding treaties with our closest allies. Whatever you think of NATO or Japan, this is the sort of talk that makes people feel that Trump is just too risky a man to have as Commander in Chief and as president managing foreign policy and negotiations with other countries—too impulsive, too bombastic, too ignorant, and too unreliable. A little uncertainty and unpredictability may be good, but too much leads to worldwide instability and yes, to chaos.

Shelby Steele writes about American’s Shame

The New Neo Posted on by

In Shelby Steele’s Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, he writes:

…[A]ll these victim-focused identities are premised on a belief in the characterological evil of American and the entire Western world. This broad assumption is the idea that makes them work, that makes for that sweet concoction of victimization and superiority. So the very people who were freed by America’s (and the West’s) acknowledgment of its past wrongs then made that acknowledgment into a poetic truth that they could build their identities in reaction to…despite the fact that their actual victimization had greatly reduced…

…[T]his charge of evil against the white West is one of the largest and most influential ideas of our age—and this despite the dramatic retreat of America and the West from these evils. The scope and power of this idea—its enormous influence in the world—is not a measure of its truth or accuracy; it is a measure of the great neediness in the world for such an idea, for an idea that lets the formerly opporessed defend their esteem, on the one hand, and pursue power in the name of their past victimization, on the other. It is also an idea that gave a contrite white America (and Western world) a new and essentially repentant liberalism…

…[T]he vision restored esteem to the victims…and gave them a means to power; likewise, it opened a road to redemption and power for the former white perpetrators. This notion of America’s characterological evil became the basis of a new social contract in America.

There’s an awful lot to think about packed into those paragraphs. In case you’re not familiar with Steele, I’ll mention that he’s a 70-year-old self-described “black conservative” academic (Master’s in sociology and PhD in English literature) and writer who is (like Obama) the offspring of a white mother and a black father.

Later on in the same book, Steele continues:

The new accusation of characterological evil suddenly threatened the legitimacy of both the government and the broader culture. America needed an idea of The Good that was untethered to character…We needed to make The Good into something that was easy, something that could be waved about in the air like a white flag of surrender—something that would instantly disassociate us from the nation’s evil past.

However, by relegating The Good to the government, and making it a matter of public policy, we transformed it from an earnest and personal moral struggle into glib cultural symbolism. And as a mere symbolism, The Good became a brittle and thoughtless thing: Americans could navigate around any guilt over the past simply by acquiescing to governmental interventions—the War on Poverty, school busing, lenient welfare policies, affirmative action, and so on. This is how the American Left labored to win back moral authority and legitimacy after the 1960s—by allowing support for public policy to stand in as evidence of an evolution in private conscience.

So the actual purpose of The Good became absolution for the American people and the government, and not actual reform for minorities…Virtually all these “good” reforms failed and mired us in all manner of unintended consequences. But their failures were beside the point. These policies were expressions of America’s regret over its bigotries and sins. They weren’t policies so much as apologias.

These are not unique thoughts, but I think they are expressed with exceptional clarity and succinctness. I would add that most liberals are not so very concerned with absolving America of guilt—they continue to think America is very very very guilty, something I hear them saying with great regularity. They are interested in absolving themselves of guilt—for what, I’m not sure, but perhaps for being lucky enough to live here. And so in fact, in their continuing condemnation of America, they are proving their own worthiness.

That’s why other countries’ manifold guilts and crimes are usually of lesser interest to them, or come around in their minds to somehow being America’s fault. It is an easy reductionism that serves to distance themselves from feelings of personal wrongdoing, I believe. I also think it accounts for a great deal of the popularity of liberalism and leftism. It has come to be taught in the schools and, to a certain extent, the churches and synagogues, and has become the widespread mark of a seemingly educated, moral person.

Catholic France may fight back

The New Neo Posted on by

Worth reading:

Though the internecine conflicts wracking the Arab world ensure the war against the Islamic State is hardly a war on Islam, the jihadis are bent on a clash of civilizations. And by martyring French Catholics who are Old Christendom’s flesh and blood, they’re one step closer to getting one.

Whatever the extent of Western reluctance or prudence, the truth is there’s no better way to shake Europe out of what many now see as its guilt-ridden paralysis than to assault French Catholicism ”” the oldest, most ingrained force that transcends nationalism in Europe’s most powerful proud nation.

Is it time to get behind a third candidate, and if so, who would that be?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know the answer to the question I posed above. I just know that I’ve been pondering it more and more lately.

So I thought it would be a good topic for discussion [ducks; gets out of way of flying fecal matter].

One more thing: I don’t sense that the GOP bigwigs can be relied on to propose a good alternative, nor do I think anyone will convince Trump to drop out.

[NOTE: We all probably should listen to the recent CNN town hall meeting with the Libertarian candidates (there were earlier ones, as well):

See also this.]

And now we have: Bigorexia

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d never heard of it before last night, but when I was idly going from TV station to TV station trying to find something interesting or at least mildly entertaining, I came across a report on Bigorexia.

Ah, people and their worries about how they look! It seems there’s no end to it. I’m certainly far from immune, but fortunately I’ve avoided all the “exias” and most of the “dysmorphics” up to this point, although I know people who’ve succumbed.

Even when I was a child, I knew girls who suffered from anorexia, although it had no name back then (or at least, no name I was aware of). Two of my best friends developed it, and I spent a certain amount of time at the age of 10 and then again at around 15 trying to convince each one in turn that they were plenty thin and that it was time to eat up before they faded away to nothing or cracked in two like a brittle stick.

Needless to say, I failed in both endeavors. Fortunately the girls survived, although (and perhaps this is entirely coincidental) both have died recently, within the last two or three years—not of anorexia, however.

But on to Bigorexia, anoxeria’s opposite, and mostly limited to males, just as anorexia is mostly limited to females. “Bigorexia” seems to usually be capitalized and “anorexia” lower-case, as befits their differing attitudes towards size:

Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder (MDD) is a type of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). It is popularly known as “Reverse anorexia” or “Bigorexia” by the media. It consists of a preoccupation with not being sufficiently muscular or lean (when this is not the case). Sports wrestling & body building gyms are a breeding ground for muscle dysmorphic disorder.

It is characterized by

Excessive time and over-exertion in weightlifting to increase muscle mass
Preoccupation and panicking over workout if unable to attend
Overtraining or training when injured
Disordered eating, using special diets or excessive protein supplements
Steroid abuse and often other substance misuse
Distress if exposed leading to camouflage the body
Compulsive comparing and checking of one’s physique
Significant distress or mood swings
Prioritizing one’s schedule over all else or interference in relationships and ability to work
Often other body concerns, hair, skin, penis size

There is a fine dividing line between normal “body-building” and muscle dysmorphic disorder.

Just as there is a fine line for ballet dancers, gymnasts, and models—and jockeys, on the mostly-male side—between doing what is necessary in terms of losing weight in order to excel in their pursuit and/or profession and going overboard into health problems and true obsession. To pursue an activity such as ballet or body-building at a top level requires no small amount of obsessiveness and perfectionism. The trick is to keep it from seguing into something destructive and overwhelming.

The shotgun election

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s comments section, Geoffrey Britain offered this quote from the ever-admirable Thomas Sowell:

Voting for an out of control egomaniac like Donald Trump would be like playing Russian Roulette with the future of this country. Voting for someone with a track record like Hillary Clinton’s is like putting a shotgun to your head and pulling the trigger. And not voting at all is just giving up.

Nobody said that being a good citizen would be easy.

Those are actually the last two paragraphs of a column of Sowell’s that indicts both Trump and Hillary, and states that in this election “the worst case scenario may be only marginally worse than the best case scenario.” So whatever Sowell thinks about his Russian Roulette vs. shotgun-to-the-head analogy (I assume, of course, that he means a loaded shotgun), he also thinks that chances of disaster with each scenario are probably pretty darn good.

That Sowell column was published two days ago, and appears to have been written before Trump’s recent precipitous decline in the polls. It remains to be seen whether that drop will reverse itself, but right now things are not looking good for the Trumpster. As Megyn Kelly put it:

“It’s true that the mainstream media now hates Trump,” she said. “But must he help them? Must he help them so generously every day?”

Apparently, he must—it is his nature. Or, it is a well-thought-out strategy to—well, to what? Those who think that Trump has always been intent on throwing the election to Hillary (I am not one of those people) find it easy to understand. Those who think Trump is a brilliant Master Persuader (I am not one of those people, either) say it will be to his advantage in the end. Everyone else (that includes yours truly) thinks it’s just his nature to say outrageous things in his defense when he feels he’s been attacked, and also to generally say things that sound as though he hasn’t done his homework because in fact he has not done his homework.

Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way, let’s get down to the Sowell quote. Would that it were as simple as Sowell states! I have spent a lot of time pondering the issue, which has been discussed ad nauseam on just about every blog long before Sowell wrote that, usually being expressed something like this: “We know what Hillary will do, and it’s awful; we know only what Trump might do that’s awful, and therefore it’s better to vote for him. At least there’s a chance.”

That, in a nutshell, is Sowell’s argument, too. The problem with the argument is embedded in it: we don’t know what Trump will do. Sowell compares Hillary to a loaded shotgun pointed at one’s head—if the trigger is pulled, you are dead. He compares Trump to a game of Russian Roulette, which means there’s a chance you live.

That’s a terrible but still an easy choice. But to me—although I have deep respect for Sowell’s brilliance—that’s a bad analogy. It posits two conditions, and one possible victim: gun loaded or 1 in 6 chance of gun loaded, and the gun is pointed at you. But maybe the number of possible victims is different with Hillary and Trump, and who says the chances of Trump screwing up royally (accidentally or purposely) are only one in six? Perhaps the proper analogy would go something like: Hillary Clinton has the loaded shotgun pointed at everyone in the nation, whereas Trump may have the shotgun pointed at everyone in the world, and we don’t have a clue what the chances of that are.

You don’t have to believe that Trump is actually reckless enough to start—or to unwittingly enable the start of—a nuclear war, to be concerned about the possibility, or to realize that many people are concerned, and that their concern is not crazy. And in fact, a president actually does have a great deal of power in that regard (nuclear weapons), as recent research I’ve done has proven to me, to my surprise. Before this, I had dismissed the idea as impossible—after all, the system has all sorts of checks and balances and requirements for approval by others along the way, doesn’t it? The short answer (and I plan to write a post in the next week or so that gives the long answer, because it’s complicated) is is no, not so much, and certainly not to the extent I originally thought.

When you go to that piece I just linked, you can skip the whole first part (which reports tentatively on a Trump conversation that most likely did not occur) and go right to the paragraph that begins “In 2008, then”“Vice President Dick Cheney said something pretty chilling about nuclear weapons during a Fox News appearance…” and then keep reading. The point I’m trying to make is that a president really does have a great deal of power in that regard, and therefore it’s at least theoretically possible that the risk of a nuclear conflagration with an unstable or impulsive or ignorant president is greater than the very great risk Hillary Clinton poses to this country.

Now, you don’t have to agree that Trump is any of those things: unstable or impulsive or ignorant. Or, you may believe he’s all of those things, but not that unstable or impulsive or ignorant. Trouble is, you could be underestimating his instability or impulsiveness or ignorance, and overestimating his ability to use sound judgment, and the consequences of that would be extremely dire. Whatever you (or I) may think, more and more other people are starting to feel that Trump actually might be capable of the unthinkable, and that includes the people he would need to persuade of his stability, steadfastness, and knowledge, if he is going to get elected.

The danger with Trump was always his lack of flexibility in terms of repertoire and personality. His promoters kept saying that once he was nominated we’d see a pivot to greater presidentiality. His sober and serious and reassuring side would come out. Instead, lately he has been acting more of a loose cannon (interesting metaphor, no?) than ever.

It does no good to say that a big-mouthed blusterer isn’t necessarily crazy, nor do such people usually consider murdering millions or billions of people with nuclear weapons. That’s certainly true. But we’ve never had a presidential candidate before that gives that impression. The LBJ forces liked to accuse Goldwater of having such a tendency (the famous “Daisy” ad), but in terms of personality he clearly did not. And yet even then the accusations damaged him.

People don’t like to play Russian Roulette with a president whose finger is (metaphorically) on the nuclear button, because the risks are just too high. And the more impulsive and bombastic and just plain weird Trump’s statements become, the more he scares people rather than reassuring them. It’s about personality and character: can I rely on this guy’s judgment and ability to curb his impulse to retaliate? To point out that his retaliations are all verbal makes sense but is irrelevant to the deeper issue, which is: who is this man? Is he reasonable? How does he react to stress? Does he strike out without thinking much? If the answer to the last two questions are “poorly” and “yes,” than the candidate has got a problem, a big big one.

Trump has a problem, a big big one.

When making his shotgun analogy, Sowell calls Trump an “out of control egomaniac.” That’s actually it in a nutshell, because if Trump is “out of control,” people fear that he might just be get more out of control if given the reins of a kind of power he’s never had before and only dreamed about. And if he’s an “egomaniac,” then note the root word “maniac,” which doesn’t offer people a lot of reassurance, either. And note that the definition of “egomania” includes (emphasis mine): “an obsessive preoccupation with one’s self and applies to someone who follows their own ungoverned impulses…”

I do not think that Trump is crazy, insane, or mentally ill. But his behavior lately is not reassuring to people, and one wonders why it has gotten more extreme. One of the possible reasons is that he’s having trouble handling the stress, and although this is a man who definitely has known responsibility and stress in his life, it was of a very very different kind and in an arena where he was very comfortable about his own knowledge base (real estate development and suing people who diss him). Now he’s under a great deal more stress, and in unfamiliar territory.

Nothing Trump is doing right now is reassuring. He was supposed to become more focused and presidential; the opposite has happened. And on the specific topic of nuclear weapons, even though he has made many statements about how reluctant he would be to ever use them (see, for example, the first and last statements in this list), unfortunately we’ve learned that Trump says a great many contradictory things and we can’t rely on anything he says. People do not want to play Russian Roulette on this particular issue, and on this one issue of nuclear weaponry most people trust that Hillary Clinton—whatever other deep and myriad flaws she clearly has—is not going to do something enormously destructive either impulsively or through ignorance. It is harder to trust Donald Trump on that score.

I don’t usually agree with much on Vox, but I can’t really fault what they’re saying here, unfortunately:

It’s not clear, in this mostly incoherent answer [to Hugh Hewitt about the nuclear triad], that Trump actually knows what the triad is. When Hewitt pressed him, Trump answered with a single line: “I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”

Clearly, Trump doesn’t know the most basic thing about nuclear weapons ”” how the United States can launch them. This level of ignorance about the literal facts of nuclear weapons, together with his generally uneducated approach to policy, means it’s very likely he also doesn’t understand the strategic role of nuclear weapons.

Trump might order the use of nuclear weapons against ISIS ”” indeed, he has refused to rule it out in interviews ”” just because he has promised to wipe out the terrorist threat. We cannot know that he takes nuclear weapons as seriously he should.

The other reason for concern is his character…

Think of all the bizarre feuds Trump has gotten himself into…In all of them, he has displayed a similar pattern: irrational overreaction to perceived insults and slights.

Now imagine that same tendency to overreact to insults, only with Trump’s finger on the nuclear button. Would he order a nuclear strike on a country merely because he felt its leader had disrespected him?

I hope not. But the truth is that we don’t know ”” which makes every stray Trump comment about nukes, even thinly sourced speculation like Scarborough’s, deeply terrifying.

Whether it terrifies you, it terrifies a great many people. And these are people Trump needed to persuade of just the opposite—his good judgment and ability to control himself. He has failed in that endeavor, and I’m not at all sure that anything he could say or do at this point could change that.

It’s not what I was hoping for, and I doubt it’s what you were hoping for. But there it is, and I cannot ignore it and pretend that things are the least bit okay right now.

[NOTE: For another of Trump’s statements about nuclear weapons that could give people pause, see this for example. There are others.]

Attack in London

The New Neo Posted on by

A woman was killed and five others (two women, three men) injured in a stabbing attack in London’s Russell Square:

[Officials] called the incident a “random attack” with mental health issues at the heart of it.

Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, said: “Whilst the investigation is not yet complete – all of the work that we have done so far, increasingly points to this tragic incident as having been triggered by mental health issues.

“At this time we believe this was a spontaneous attack and the victims were selected at random.”

Except, except…

—The man who has been arrested is a 19-year-old of Somalian ethnic origin who has been in England since the age of 5.

—Stabbing is now the method of preference for Europe’s jihadi murderers.

—The victims—supposedly chosen at random—included a high proportion of foreigners. The deceased woman is an American in her 60s. The other five injured who were taken to the hospital included Israeli and Australian citizens. That doesn’t sound particularly random to me, although it certainly could be.

A great many of the recent attacks seem to involve some sort of hybrid motivation, and this is actually nothing new among terrorists. Jihadis are not all part of an organized, trained group; some are so-called “lone wolves” with no special contacts or affiliation other than usually being young men and always being of Muslim origin. And of course many such murderers, though inspired to act by jihadist propaganda and urging, have pre-existing mental problems or other dysfunctions. That makes complete sense. But it doesn’t mean that Islamic terrorism is not involved. It just means that, for many killers, Islamist terrorist propaganda is a necessary though insufficient part of the picture.

I think the beaver…

The New Neo Posted on by

…was just protecting his namesake lake:

A 67-year-old woman says she was attacked by a beaver while paddleboarding on a lake named after the rodent in North Carolina.

Betsy Bent told the Citizen-Times of Asheville that the beaver knocked her board over from underneath the water Friday at Beaver Lake, then latched on to her leg and wouldn’t let go.

The 67-year-old paddleboarder says a fisherman on the lake knocked the beaver off her twice, but it attacked again before letting her go.

A bulldoggish beaver. And she had to get rabies shots.

I once was standing about 15 feet from a river when a large beaver waddled up to me and passed within an inch or so of my feet. Practically had to step over my feet, then turned left, waddled down the embankment and into the river.

Obama’s secret ransom payment

The New Neo Posted on by

Now it’s coming out how the release of the Iranian hostages was arranged: the WSJ has reported that Obama paid a ransom of $400 million for them and kept it secret.

Scott Johnson writes

…[N]negotiators originally established a formula of people for people: American nationals held by Iran for Iranian nationals held by America. But then the Iranians started demanding billions of dollars as well. Iranian officials later bragged they coerced the ransom out of U.S. diplomates…

Lawmakers have been pressing the administration for six months to provide more details about how and where the money went, among other things because Iran has been transferring money for military purposes. They’ve made little progress…

Tehran went back to arresting American hostages after releasing the last round, and are now seeking another billion dollar deal in the last six months of the administration…

This is sickening. And yet, given what we already know about the groveling the administration did during the negotiations in their desperate desire to get a deal and to seem to be getting something out of the deal, it makes perfect sense that this was the way it was accomplished. The US has had a long-standing policy against paying ransoms for the simple reason that they encourage more hostage-taking, but I guess they can violate their own rules with impunity because, after all, who’s going to stop them?

Hillary Clinton’s hands are probably clean on this one, since she was already out of office when it happened.

Things fall apart…

The New Neo Posted on by

That quote that I used for the title of this post is from Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming.” It’s one I’ve quoted many times on this blog, because it’s not only a great, great poem, but also because it describes a certain feeling that has come upon me quite a few times since September 11, 2001, when I first felt it resonating and vibrating with the atmosphere around me.

That doesn’t mean things are literally falling apart or that the apocalypse is here. It does reflect a sense of drift in a more chaotic direction and towards a vague (and not-so-vague) sense of extreme unease, a waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

Indeed.

Which brings us to the news du jour. One of the things that seems to be falling apart is Republican perception about the chances of victory for one Donald Trump, the man the GOP just designated as their standard bearer. If you take a look at the coverage today at Memeorandum you’ll see what I’m talking about: article after article describing the dismay of the GOP at his erratic behavior and the fact that they’re now trying to counsel him at the same time they explore their options for alternatives to him.

It’s a good example of something I’ve said before, which is that the plotting puppet-masters of the GOP aren’t particularly efficient or good at plotting or puppeteering or mastering, or they would have figured out what to do to stop him a long, long time ago. But either they couldn’t agree on an alternative (not Cruz! anyone but Cruz!), and/or they couldn’t execute, and/or they didn’t take it all that seriously until it was too late.

Is it too late now? I think it’s late and getting later, but it’s not too late unless people think it is. I have long said I probably won’t know for sure who I will actually vote for until I’m in that voting booth, and there are still an awful lot of “undecided” voters who might step up for a third candidate if a new one presented him/herself, or who might end up voting for Gary Johnson as the lesser of three evils.

I also want to reiterate something I’ve said before, which is that anyone who is surprised by Donald Trump’s behavior wasn’t paying attention to the man, his behavior during the campaign, his behavior during his life, and/or human nature. I don’t know why anyone would be surprised at him, or why anyone would have thought things would change, except for wishful thinking. With Trump, what you see is what you get, and I see nothing new or different about what he’s been doing lately. So those who supported him before should be able to support him now; no problem.

The GOP had many chances to stop this. Back in the primaries I offered my small voice to encourage the candidates, over and over, to drop out and leave just one or two standing long before Super Tuesday and various points of no return. It didn’t happen, and I didn’t expect it to, because it was an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. If the leaders of the “establishment” had really been able to work some powerful magic behind the scenes, they could have forced Trump out, but they either lacked the power people often ascribe to them, or they lacked the organization or the will. They could have drummed him out of the party early on when it became clear he was a threat to the party, but they didn’t; they thought he’d disappear and fade away, and they didn’t want to alienate his many voters. They could have rebelled even at the Convention, but his vote total was too large and they lacked the courage (and the foresight, in my opinion) to defy his voters.

So here we are.

Several people have pointed out that what Trump is doesn’t matter—he’s better than Hillary, and that’s all that counts. I’ve long said that both of the nominees are terrible, but they each presents different forms of terribleness and it’s not always easy to know which one is worse and which would be worse for the country and the world. As I wrote earlier today:

People who will stick with Trump no matter what because they believe anything is better than Hillary don’t need to pay attention [to what’s been going on with him lately], but what they do need to pay attention to is how other people will view things, and what such behavior tells them about who Trump is and what to expect of him were he to become president. It says something about his character and judgment.

At some point, is there anything he could do to seem worse than Hillary? For example (and this is my own personal fear) the more off-the-wall and erratic he seems mentally and character-wise, the more people will fear having him in charge of nuclear weapons. That fear may transcend all fear of Hillary for a lot of people.

Among those of my friends who are Democrats and yet don’t like Hillary and were originally looking for a GOP alternative to her, fear is the emotion they voice most often about Trump. As he does things and says things that make him seem more and more like a loose cannon and/or ignorant of the basics of international politics, that fear is increased rather than assuaged—and that “things fall apart” feeling is heightened.