The sort of error that’s made all the time

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s minor, but it bugs me anyway. An accretion of this sort of thing is how false memes (left or right) are created and reinforced until they become Truths, whether they’re true or not.

Some are a lot more important than this one, but this one is typical. Was it done through carelessness or was it purposeful? In this particular case, I vote for carelessness.

I’m talking about a point made in a piece at PJ by Michael Walsh on the rosy GOP prospects in the Senate in 2018. Those prospects are indeed pretty good, because there are quite a few Democratic senators from fairly conservative states who are up for re-election and might be at risk.

But that’s not the part of the article that caught my eye and concerned me. This did:

This was the year that the Democrats hoped to take back the U.S. Senate; after all, the Republicans were defending 24 seats, and the Dems only ten. Alas for them, the Trump wave pretty much swamped them, re-electing several shaky senators, such as Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, while sweeping away only the sad-sack from Illinois, Mark Kirk, and New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte, who unwisely threw in her lot with the McCain wing of the party and is now unemployed.

And to underscore the point, here’s the photo that accompanies the article:

ayotte

The implication is crystal clear: we are seeing RINO Ayotte with fellow RINOs McCain and Graham, in happier days. If only Ayotte had “thrown her lot” in with the winning Trump wing rather than the McCain wing, perhaps she wouldn’t now be unemployed. The Trump wave “swept her away.”

What’s wrong with that? Sounds reasonable. But it’s not what actualy happened to Ayotte. Oh yes, she lost her Senate seat, all right. And she hadn’t supported Trump—although she had initially said she’d vote for him, she took that back after his Billy Bush tape surfaced.

But Ayotte did better in New Hampshire than Trump did. There was no “Trump wave” in New Hampshire. In fact, whatever ticket-splitting New Hampshire’s GOP voters did favored Ayotte over Trump. So it’s far more logical to conclude that she would have lost by a larger margin had she supported Trump.

Trump lost New Hampshire by 2,736 votes. If you think that’s not all that much, you’re correct. But New Hampshire is a small state, and a purplish state, and victory margins are often very small there.

Ayotte’s margin of loss was much smaller than Trump’s: she lost by a mere 699 votes. What’s more, she was running against a highly popular two-term NH governor, Maggie Hassan, and Ayotte’s seat was known to be shaky even before Trump ever threw his hat into the ring.

In summary, there isn’t a single reason to think that Ayotte lost votes by not supporting Trump. If anything, she gained them.

You might say, so what? As I already stated, it’s a minor issue. But take that misperception, and multiply it by many factors and many other issues, and you have the way many of us we get our information and form our ideas about things.

The swelling “Trump is illegitimate” meme

The New Neo Posted on by

It was inevitable, of course, that the MSM would mount this attack on Trump’s legitimacy, particularly their leader and still champ (despite its financial woes) the NY Times.

They didn’t acknowledge the possibility of a Trump win. Now they are refusing to acknowledge the reality of the Trump win. And if it’s not Comey or fake news that’s responsible, it’s the Russians hacking and the republican (small “r”) Electoral College system.

Just look at Memeorandum’s roundup of articles and you can see what’s going on, and it’s typical of what’s been going on for many days now.

This is nothing like 2000, of course, where we had a truly contested photo-finish election and a series of court battles to decide what was essentially a tie according to the rules. This was not a tie. This result did not fall to a few votes in a single state (Florida in 2000). And this push by the left is to overturn the rules, not to follow them, for very shaky reasons.

The shakiness of the Times’ argument that Russian hacking had anything to do with the election results and Trump’s victory is thoroughly discussed here by Ann Althouse, so I’ll just suggest you read what she’s written. And also go back to Memeorandum and take a look at the headlines, particularly one from the Times entitled “Buck up, Democrats, and fight like Republicans!”

That headline alone is enough to make anyone on the right chortle—fight like Republicans? But that’s part of the meme, too; that Republicans fight low, hard, and dirty, and Democrats are gracious gents who continually need to take off the gloves.

However, the very partisan Jonathan Chait, of all people (he of “I hate George W. Bush” fame), sounds a note of reasonable caution with the whole “flip the electors” approach:

Trump’s surprising (though not unforeseeable) election has provoked a wave of fear and anger among his opponents. But much of it has been misdirected into denial or despair rather than effective channels of political mobilization. The clearest symbol of this misplaced energy is the campaign to persuade members of the Electoral College to deny Donald Trump the presidency.

The first thing to note about this effort is that it is utterly hopeless. The electors in the Electoral College who would need to be flipped are Republican politicians who were selected for their party loyalty. They have no incentive to deny the nomination to a candidate who won heavy support among Republicans at the polls, and indeed, available reports on their thinking indicate no enthusiasm whatsoever for them to ignore their states’ results. Even if this tactic were to miraculously succeed, and the Electoral College denied Trump a majority, it would only throw the contest into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which would elect him anyway.

Second, and more important, denying Trump the presidency through an Electoral College coup is not a procedurally legitimate response. The presidential election is a quasi-democratic process.

Chait then goes into an attack on the Electoral College which utterly fails to understand the rationale for it, much less agree with that rationale. But I’ll skip that part and go to this:

The rules of the game were known in advance and respected by all sides. Trump’s clear national-vote defeat refutes his desperate boasts to represent the national will, but it does not negate his legal right to the presidency.

Nor does Russia’s interference in the election. [Chait then argues that Trump encouraged Russian hacking and it may have flipped the election.] But we have no way of knowing this with any certainty. It is far too thin a reed upon which to base the overturning of an election that followed the rules of the game.

Chait goes on to say the remedy is political activity of the ordinary sort.

But Chait is a rare voice of relative sanity on the left. The point of all of this isn’t to win the election—I don’t think most people think a win is possible for Clinton—but to inflame those who voted for Clinton into considering Trump to be a bogus president for the next four years. With many of my friends, that will be easy enough to do—they need little encouragement to feel that way anyway, and this will more than provide it.

But there’s one little catch, and it’s not really so little a catch: the reality of unfolding events that affect people’s lives. If Trump actually ends up doing some pretty good things, the left will never acknowledge it. But most people who voted for Clinton are actually not rabid leftists. Most are people like most of my friends, who follow politics but not obsessively, who aren’t very rich or very poor but who notice things about the economy and the world, and who could end up giving Trump some grudging respect if they actually see some decent results from a Trump presidency.

You know what’s coming next, don’t you?

We’ll see.

[NOTE: If you want to get ironically amused, see this NY Times editorial from October 17, 2016. Ah, how the worm turns when the shoe is on the other foot (yes, I know; mixed and lousy metaphor):

The most frightening example [of Trump’s “reckless rhetoric”] is Mr. Trump’s frenzied claim that the presidential election is being “rigged” against him – a claim he has ramped up as his chances of winning the presidency have gone down.

Instead of disavowing this absurdity outright, Republican leaders sit by in spineless silence. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, are the two most powerful Republicans in the country and should be willing to put the national interest above their own. Both know full well that there is no “rigging,” and yet between them they have managed one tepid response to Mr. Trump’s outrageous accusations: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results,” Mr. Ryan’s spokeswoman said, “and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”

This is like standing back while an arsonist pours gasoline all over your house, then expressing confidence that the fire department will get there in time.

Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell could hardly dishonor themselves more than they already have in this sordid election year, but their refusal to stand up to Mr. Trump’s pernicious lie may be their lowest moment yet.

Other high-profile Republicans have amplified Mr. Trump’s charges and further riled up his angry base…

The integrity of the ballot box is central to American democracy and to the peaceful transfer of power. Mr. Trump may have no qualms about destroying that idea and inflicting harm on the country long after this election is over. How can Mr. McConnell and Mr. Ryan continue to stand by while Mr. Trump delegitimizes the system to which they have dedicated themselves?

To paraphrase the Times editors: the members of the MSM could hardly dishonor themselves more than they already have in this sordid election year…But they seem to have no qualms about inflicting harm on the country long after this election is over, by upsetting the peaceful transfer of power.]

The earliest sunset…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is not at the solstice, the shortest day of the year. It comes somewhat earlier (now, for example), and varies depending on latitude. Here’s an explanation for the phenomenon:

The key to understanding the earliest sunset is not to focus on the time of sunset or sunrise. The key is to focus on what is called true solar noon ”“ the time of day that the sun reaches its highest point, in its journey across your sky.

In early December, true solar noon comes nearly 10 minutes earlier by the clock than it does at the solstice around December 22. With true noon coming later on the solstice, so will the sunrise and sunset times…

The discrepancy occurs primarily because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis. A secondary but another contributing factor to this discrepancy between clock noon and sun noon comes from the Earth’s elliptical ”“ oblong ”“ orbit around the sun.

Read the whole thing.

For example, in Boston this year, the earliest sunset occurs from December 4 to 14, at 4:12 PM. Here’s the chart for Boston.

For me, the earliest sunset days are the darkest days, because I’m not an “up with the lark” person. And the reversal to longer days (that is, to later sunsets) is going to happen very very soon, which makes me happy.

sun

Saturated fat: good or bad or indifferent?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday Ace linked to an article reporting on a study that appears to be saying saturated fat is good for you. The subtitle at the report’s link indicates that the research “overturned previously accepted wisdom.”

Actually, not really.

First of all, one small study of this type doesn’t “overturn” much of anything. Secondly—as is almost always the case with mass media reports of studies on health, the linked article at the Express gets an awful lot about the research wrong.

Let’s look at the actual study, shall we? Unfortunately, the full text is unavailable unless you shell out a lot more money than I’m willing to pay. But the abstract is here, and the research findings appear quite mild. In fact, completely unremarkable.

First we have the number of participants, variously reported as 46 or 38 (eight apparently dropped out) overweight men between 30 and 50 and divided into two groups, each of which received a different diet. So half got the high-fat diet, which makes the number of subjects very small indeed. And we have no idea what the age distribution was, just the range. At any rate, we’re not talking about older people, the population most at risk for heart disease. Whatever findings there were, we have no idea whether they can extrapolated to a more general population.

Both groups got a diet. One was high fat (73% of calories from fat) and one low fat (30% of calories from fat). Both groups lost weight. We know that losing weight tends to improve blood pressure and cholesterol and other such markers, however it is lost, so if both groups lost weight one would expect things like blood pressure to go down. Both groups ate the same number of calories, the same amount of protein, and their diets “emphasiz[ed] low-processed, lower-glycemic foods.” In other words, they were very healthful, highly-controlled diets that differed only in the ratio of fat to carbs consumed.

The abstract is mum on what they actually ate. But none of the articles I read that reported on the research (and I read many) indicated that red meat was a big part of the diet of either group. Instead:

…[T]he food types were the same [in both groups] and varied mainly in quantity, and intake of added sugar was minimized.

“We here looked at effects of total and saturated fat in the context of a healthy diet rich in fresh, lowly processed and nutritious foods, including high amounts of vegetables and rice instead of flour-based products,” says PhD candidate Vivian Veum.

“The fat sources were also lowly processed, mainly butter, cream and cold-pressed oils.”

In the high-fat group, only half the fats were saturated, and the other half consisted of oils.

My sense is that for both groups the diet was mainly very low sugar and mostly vegetarian except for dairy products. This is a far cry from saying something like “red meat is good for you,” and it certainly doesn’t say “red meat is better for you than carbohydrates.”

And then there are the actual results. None of the MSM articles I read made it clear that the findings were essentially the same for both groups. Nor did they emphasize the fact that the diet was only followed for three months, and all the effects were small.

Back to the abstract:

The diets similarly reduced waist circumference (11”“13 cm), abdominal subcutaneous fat mass (1650”“1850 cm3), visceral fat mass (1350”“1650 cm3), and total body weight (11”“12 kg). Both groups improved dyslipidemia, with reduced circulating triglycerides, but showed differential responses in total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (decreased in LFHC group only), and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (increased in VHFLC group only). The groups showed similar reductions in insulin, insulin C-peptide, glycated hemoglobin, and homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance.

The best non-technical article I saw on the subject was this one at a British health website:

After various drop-outs, only 38 of the original 46 men were available for analysis ”“ just 18 in the LFHC group and 20 in the VHFLC group.

Body weight dropped by about 11-12kg, or 3.6 BMI points in both groups over the 12-week period.

Total abdominal fat and fat around the organs decreased by roughly 20-30% in both groups. Waist circumference decreased by 11-13cm. There were no significant differences between the groups.

Fasting blood sugar only reduced in the LFHC group, but there were no other between-group differences for other measures of blood sugar control, such as insulin.

Levels of one type of fat (triglycerides) decreased in both groups. Low-density (“bad”) cholesterol decreased only in the LFHC group, but high-density (“good”) cholesterol increased only in the VHFLC group.

Improvements were noted to occur within the first eight weeks in the VHFLC group, but were more gradual in the LFHC group.

The men were all healthy to begin with, by the way, because anyone with pre-existing disease had been eliminated.

So that’s it, folks. Something of a nothingburger—perhaps literally (were they allowed burgers? Your guess is as good as mine—unless you want to pay for the article and see.)

Trump’s picks du jour

The New Neo Posted on by

We have Rex Tillerson, of course, at State. Is there trouble ahead from conservatives over Tillerson’s confirmation?

Then there’s Rick Perry (‘member him?) for Energy Secretary (by unofficial report, anyway). He said terrible things about Trump but then came on board pretty early. He also was once famous for this “oops!” moment during a debate:

In his first presidential run, Perry flamed out after a series of missteps.

The best-remembered one came during a presidential debate in 2011 when he couldn’t remember, despite repeated attempts, the third of three federal agencies he had promised to eliminate if elected. He finally muttered “Oops.”

The one he forgot was, ironically, the Energy Department.

Well, maybe he didn’t actually forget it. Maybe he was prescient.

Perry is a big champion of fossil fuels, and likely to drive environmentalists nuts. More here.

In other Trump-pick news, Carly Fiorina (‘member her?) is supposedly being considered for director of national intelligence, having been summoned to Trump Tower for an interview. The article mentions part of her resume that I had forgotten: “Fiorina served on the CIA’s external advisory board from 2007 to 2009.”

Hmmm. Was this another Romney moment, or is this going to end in a Rick Perry moment?

As I’m getting tired of saying: we’ll see.

This is interesting, too:

Trump on Monday also threw his support behind Ronna Romney McDaniel to be the next chair of the Republican National Committee, CNN reported. Romney McDaniel, who would succeed incoming Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus as the GOP’s party boss, is the niece of Mitt Romney and currently serves as Michigan Republican Party Chairwoman.

Remember when Trump first was a candidate, and everyone else had trouble trouble press coverage because “he sucked the air out of the room”? He’s still doing it, isn’t he?

Coming tomorrow morning, to a theater near you…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the name of Trump’s Secretary of State.

I have a feeling that it’s going to be Rex Tillerson, if only because that’s the name that’s been leaked all over the place. The only thing that would give me any doubt at all is that Trump loves dramatic announcements, and our knowing in advance would take away some of the drama.

However, Romney has said “it ain’t me, babe”:

It was an honor to have been considered for Secretary of State of our great country. My discussions with President-elect Trump have been both enjoyable and enlightening. I have very high hopes that the new administration will lead the nation to greater strength, prosperity and peace.

My guess is that one reason it’s Tillerson is that he and Trump were much more simpatico on Russia. Also, that Trump didn’t want to annoy his Romney-hating base.

Trump’s conservative picks

The New Neo Posted on by

John Fund opines on the surprisingly conservative makeup of Trump’s picks so far:

“This is a more conservative cabinet than Reagan assembled in 1980,” says Ed Feulner, a key Trump transition adviser. As president of the Heritage Foundation at the time, Feulner provided guidance for Reagan’s choices. The conservative cast of the nominees thus far is somewhat unexpected, given Trump’s well-known reputation as a non-ideological thinker who has often backed big-government solutions. Plus, Trump was a registered Democrat until 2009. Indeed, Trump’s entire family is largely non-ideological.

I’ve been wondering about the same things.

Here’s what Fund thinks has happened:

1. During the campaign, Trump learned a lot about the country and how its economic vitality had been sapped and its foreign-policy standing eroded during the Obama years. “He now recognizes that the problems confronting the nation require bold reforms, and delaying the treatment will only sap his political capital,” former education secretary Bill Bennett says.

2. The refusal of previous GOP presidential nominees George H. W. Bush, John McCain, and George W. Bush to back Trump in the general election has liberated Trump from obligations; he owes very little to them or their followers. “An entire existing infrastructure of establishment Republicans are not favored to run cabinet agencies as would normally be the case,” a key Trump adviser told me…

3. The viciousness with which left-wing allies of Hillary Clinton and their media enablers attacked Trump persuaded the New York billionaire that there was no making peace with his adversaries. “He is not a traditional conservative, but he sure as hell knows who his enemies are,” a Trump aide told me.

Well, I don’t exactly agree and I don’t exactly disagree. I think all those things are correct. But I don’t think they are new. I think they describe ideas and characteristics that Trump had before his campaign ever began. In fact, I think that the first and second are among the very things (in addition to concern about immigration and the economy, which were enormous motivations for him) that motivated Trump to run in the first place.

The guy has a tremendous ego, of course, and that was part of it. But another part was the fact that he already perceived the erosions mentioned in #1, as well as the failures mentioned in #2, and he thought that “bold reforms” were needed, and he was the guy to do it. No one ever suggested that Trump wasn’t bold, including Trump.

None of that meant, however, that he would inevitably go in a conservative direction. After all, “conservative” isn’t usually considered a synonym of “bold,” although it can be related at times. But there are many other ways to be bold and iconoclastic than to be politically conservative.

The patterns of Trump’s picks that I see aren’t merely conservative, however. They are “possessed of real-world experience” (not necessarily in the exact field the person is chosen for), “speaking his or her mind,” “willing to dismantle what now exists (iconoclastic), “and “unexpected.” Trump likes to shake things up, and I think his idea is that these people will.

I also think the some of the conservative drift of the picks is due to the influence Trump’s running mate and transition head, Mike Pence. I think that over the months they campaigned together, Trump really grew to trust Pence’s judgment and advice. I don’t mean to suggest that Pence makes decisions for Trump, but rather that Trump respects and listens to Pence, and that Pence is a bona fide conservative.

It’s also the case that Trump has said—and will probably do—some things that are not conservative. But in terms of his Cabinet, it does have a marked conservative cast.

“The tainted election”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the new meme. Discussion of the idea that Russian hackers tried to influence the US election in Trump’s favor and may even be responsible for Trump’s victory has certainly taken over Memeorandum.

So, what does this idea rest on? Here’s David Frum at The Atlantic:

The evidence to support the CIA’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump remains mostly secret. But the outline of the case is no mystery. Both Democratic and Republican Party servers were reportedly hacked by foreign agents, yet the Moscow-friendly folks at Wikileaks somehow only obtained the contents of Democratic servers.

That’s the evidence?

Frum goes on to list {presumably as supporting evidence} a bunch of ways in which Trump is said to be Russia-leaning—such as, for example his hiring of Paul Manafort as campaign manager. Manafort had previously worked on behalf of Russia-friendly Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych. The fact that Trump had also fired Manafort fairly quickly (replacing him with the far more successful Bannon and Conway) is left out, as well as the fact that Manafort had also been “an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, [and] Bob Dole.”

Now, it certainly is the case that Trump has been more of a Russiaphile than most of us would like, and certainly more of one than I would like. That’s not in dispute. And it’s also the case that the Russians are very active hackers. Maybe they even wanted Trump to win, and some of their hacking was geared towards that end. It’s a very logical possibility that makes sense.

That doesn’t mean that it happened. And it certainly doesn’t mean that if it did happen, it affected the election. The election was won because of rust belt voters who ordinarily vote Democratic going for Trump instead, and it is way too big a stretch of the imagination to think that those voters (or just about anyone, really) cared what Wikileaks revealed about the Democratic Party. Trump also won because not as many black voters were enthusiastic about Hillary as they had been about Obama, and they likewise were almost certainly not swayed in that direction by Wikileaks.

If Russia or anyone else is hacking and trying to influence elections, we certainly need to know about it. But actually, the entire area of US cyber-security vis a vis Russia (and not just Russia) is a very troubling one that involves great vulnerability, and that includes government institutions of all kinds. It’s one of the biggest hazards of the internet age.

But that has little to do with the results of this election. Ever since 2000 and the ruckus over the election results in what was basically a photo-finish tie, decided by the courts, the pathway to delegitimization of the winner by the loser’s supporters has been to claim the election is tainted. Trump’s victory was a very deep shock to many people who would like to say it couldn’t have really happened and that he’s not really the legitimate president, and now they believe they’ve found a fine mechanism by which to do so.

[NOTE: The actual phrase “the tainted election” comes from this Krugman column.

See also John Bolton’s suggestion that the hack could have been a false-flag operation, perhaps even by the Obama administration. Personally, I don’t think so.

And see this by Andrew Malcolm:

Now that the 2016 election is long over and online hackers have had ample time to cover their e-tracks, a bold President Barack Obama has decisively ordered a “full review” of Russian and other interference in the United States electoral process.

We should probably say alleged Russian interference since no one has offered any proof, just reasonable suspicions of who might benefit from the release of documents that Democrats wanted to keep hidden…

Besides complaining publicly, has the Obama administration done something, anything, besides whine about being victimized by hackers? Maybe take responsibility and tighten security?

And why did alleged hacking only bother Obama after a Republican victory, not his own two?

In 2012, Obama mocked Mitt Romney for suggesting Russia was our top geopolitical foe. Now it’s expedient for the Democrat and minions to ensure the focus is on Moscow as foe.

I doubt we’ve heard the last of this.]

What a tangled web

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t ask me why—but after skimming some gossipy clickbait article somewhere about Australian model Elle Mcpherson, I decided to look up one of her ex-partners and the father of her two children, Arpad Busson.

Maybe it was the name “Arpad”; I don’t know. Maybe it was the fact that among his partners numbered not just Mcpherson but also Farah Fawcett and Uma Thurman. Who was this guy and what were his attractions (besides being very rich, of course)?

But I never finished Busson’s Wiki entry, because I got bogged down in an early paragraph about his growing-up years. When I found that I had read the following three times trying to make some sort of sense of it, I decided it was time to give up this particular research endeavor:

Arpad Busson’s father, Pascal Busson, was a former French army officer and Algerian War veteran, who later turned financier. His mother, Florence “Flockie” Harcourt-Smith, was an English former debutante. His aunt, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, was a companion of Timothy Leary, who coincidentally was married in the early 1960s to the mother of Arpad’s partner, Uma Thurman. His parents met in Paris and named their son after the Hungarian-born banker érpé¡d Plesch (1889”“1974), who was not only Florence Busson’s stepfather (he was the second husband of her mother, Marysia Ulam-Krauss Harcourt-Smith), but also her stepgrandfather (Plesch’s first wife was his second wife’s mother, Leonie Caro Ulam). Plesch was a mentor to Italy’s richest man, Gianni Agnelli, the late head of Fiat.

Get it? Got it? Good. Because I don’t.

BUMPED UP: shop Amazon through neo-neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

[Please scroll down for new posts, and plenty of them.]

You can solve most of your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon.

And if you use those widgets on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year) you will also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and all without spending any extra money. What could be more wonderful?

[NOTE: In case you have ad blocker or something of that sort, and the Amazon widgets don’t show up on your computer, please go here.

Also, I’ll be bumping this post up now and then till the holidays are over.]

Suzanne Farrell: the “Concerto Barocco” spiral

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen the wonderful Balanchine ballet “Concerto Barocco” many times, but never with Suzanne Farrell, one of the greats. Despite the poor quality of the footage of her in the video later in this post, it is extraordinary to watch. Farrell eclipses the other half of the solo pair, but not in an egotistical show-offy way. Her technique is secure and her extensions are high—but never in the service of “Look at me, see what I can do!” And never in the service of mere steps.

What Farrell specialized in was flow. “See, see how this dance goes, a dance in which ‘I’ disappear in deference to it?” is what she is saying. The tempo in “Concerto Barocco” is sometimes very fast, but Farrell seems to have all the time in the world. Never rushed and never too slow, always part of the music, she is doing what seem to be the only steps that can possibly be imagined to match the music, to become the music.

The words that come to mind when watching Farrell dance are “luscious,” “luxuriant,” “unique,” and even “private.” That last is a paradox, because although the performer is on the stage, she doesn’t seem to be aware of an audience. Dance is a private ritual between Farrell, the music, and God.

You think that last bit is an exaggeration? I wrote those words before I read this review of Farrell’s autobiography (although I had read her book when it first came out, about twenty-five years ago), which contains the following Farrell quote:

From early on Farrell appears to have regarded her career as a sort of divine mission, a destiny that was sent to her and that, consequently, we would all simply have to acknowledge and cope with. Never does she seem to have felt that she was dancing for the audience. “I dance for God,” she said, “who gave me the gift of dancing.” She also danced for Balanchine. As for the public, “We’re stuck with each other,” she told the critic Holly Brubach. “You’re stuck looking at me, and I’m stuck being out there in front of you.”

It is doubtful that any dancer has ever worked harder than Farrell””and with a disinterestedness such that, free of the lower forms of vanity (need for compliments, fear of looking foolish), she was never deterred from moving toward her chosen goal.

Farrell was a self-possessed loner who came from a family with a remarkably determined mother who overcame all hardships, as did Farrell. Those hardships included the isolation that came with promotion at a very young age (still in her teens):

But once Balanchine began to concentrate on her more and more closely, and cast her in more and more roles, to the exclusion of other dancers, she found herself utterly friendless. In the book she tells the terrible story of how the dancer Patricia Neary, whom she liked and had roomed with on tour, not only had to give up to her her role in Concerto Barocco but had to teach it to her as well. Neary taught it, through her tears. “I learned the ballet but lost a friend.” Farrell says. Soon she had none left to lose.

It’s well worth reading the whole article. If you do, you’ll understand a lot about Farrell, although she will remain a mystery.

But you’ll understand a lot more if you watch her dance:

As the years have gone by, ballet has become more athletic. You can often feel the dancers’ muscles working and the physical effort, even if it doesn’t look strained. But Farrell managed staggering technical feats with a total absence of visible athleticism. Her dancing seemed like water pouring—fluid, and with no effort at all. Watch this series of arabesque penché promenades (arabesques with the upper body close to the ground and the leg very high, while circling around on the standing leg) that last for about a minute, with particular attention to the final one. No one else can make this look so easy, so beautiful, or so meaningful:

There aren’t many renditions of this ballet on YouTube to compare it to. But here is a good version of the same passage (by the illustrious Russian company, the Maryinsky). But to me it doesn’t even begin to measure up:

The Russian dancer is good, and she’s strong. But you never know why she’s doing any of this, except that it’s in the choreography, so she does it. She doesn’t go into the actual penché in the earlier promenades, either; perhaps she’s conserving her energy.

Farrell doesn’t worry about things like that. Farrell is saying something like, “Here’s what the music tells me to do; my front leg unfolds high, high, to the sky. And then the opposite; my back leg goes up, up, up. And as I turn around, my upper body leans in a slight spiral, so that it looks as though I’m being pulled around and around by some irresistible outside force. That force propels me forward when the leg goes up, and around in the circling arabesque, but something keeps leading me and pushing me, and I must follow it.”

You see the spiral effect? No one else does that.

Nor would I expect anyone else to. Farrell is Farrell, the only Farrell that’s ever been or that ever will be. I first saw her as a teenager in the 60s (both of us were teenagers, that is, although she’s older than I). She retired in 1983, has had two hip replacements (and came back briefly after one of them), and is still going strong as a teacher.

Here is the entire ballet featuring Farrell: