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.

One more clarification about the Khan/Trump thing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and then I’ll cease and desist (I think; I hope).

I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not think grieving parents who make political speeches are above and beyond criticism. What I do think is that if you’re going to criticize them, you have to be smart about it.

You have to honor their sacrifice first. That’s just common human decency. Then you criticize them for what needs criticizing. And don’t say something offensively stupid like comparing their sacrifice of a son in wartime in the service of his country to your sacrifice of creating jobs and making a lot of money in the process.

Don’t do it. Just don’t.

Also, don’t criticize the mother for not speaking up and insinuate it’s because there’s a Muslim muzzle on her. There are so many other reasons she might have decided not to speak. She might be afraid of public speaking, and feel more comfortable supporting her husband silently. She might be too emotional about the topic of her child’s death, even all these years later; that’s what she claimed, and there is no reason whatsoever not to believe her and every reason to believe her. Don’t insult her on a level that’s so abysmally crass, based on no knowledge of the situation whatsoever.

Those were Trump’s errors, however. He did those two things. They were not just errors involving lack of political savvy, nor were they statements in which he said something true and correct but un-PC. They were not the acts of an alpha male, either. They were the statements of a weak and defensive but pugnacious person who cannot stand to be criticized in any way and who will say whatever comes to mind to retaliate without thinking first of how it sounds and whether it even makes sense (particularly the part about the jobs creation, which really sticks in my craw).

They are stupid errors that show deep character flaws in the man. And no, that doesn’t mean Hillary Clinton is better. She’s different, not better. She has her own terrible terrible flaws of character and of politics. But unfortunately that’s irrelevant to what Trump did, how it sounds to people, and how he shot himself not just in the foot but in both feet.

Can his campaign recover? Maybe. There’s a long way to go to November (it already seems very long). Can he learn from his mistakes? I’ve seen no indication of it, but it’s within the realm of possibility, and I certainly hope he does. And soon.

No one should be surprised at what Trump did regarding Khan, nor at the dilemma it presents for GOP members of Congress

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump’s response to Khan was no anomaly; it was characteristic.

And I mean the word “characteristic” in a double sense: “characteristic” as in “typical,” and also as in “a fundamental and entrenched part of Trump’s character/personality.” It is part of Trump’s character that he feels he must strike back hard if insulted, and he prides himself on his lack of political correctness.

This approach has actually held Trump in very good stead his whole life, garnering lots of publicity and earning him a reputation as a man not to be messed with. In addition, it has been a plus for him in the 2016 campaign so far—can anyone imagine him having done nearly as well without it?—as long as the race was confined to the GOP primaries and a field of so many opponents.

But now we’re in the general and the rules are different. There are some lines he may not be able to cross and win this election. It’s true that he may yet survive; stranger things have most definitely happened. But this is a self-inflicted blow that could be electorally fatal, and why did he feel compelled to do it? Because it is part of his character and part of his tried-and-true modus operandi.

Yes, I think Trump has some self-control. And yes, some of his act is just that—an act. But those who expected him to turn “presidential” at this point have been and will be sadly disappointed, and their expectation for that transformation was always misplaced, in my opinion. Trump is highly unlikely to do it, in part because he doesn’t want to control this impulse and in part because in certain situations he cannot control this impulse. It’s hard to know what the balance is between these two reasons, but the effect is the same in terms of his behavior.

Interestingly, just two days before Trump’s Khan statements he mentioned the topic of fighting back when criticized, and whether he would curb some of that impulse:

Donald Trump got sound advice the other day. At a rally at Davenport, Iowa, he told the crowd that a prominent supporter had called and urged him not to sweat all the attacks at the Democratic National Convention.

“Don’t hit down,” the supporter urged, according to Trump. “You have one person to beat. It’s Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

By Trump’s account, he conceded the good sense of this, although he noted how he always prefers hitting back – “it makes me feel good.”

I have no doubt that he does prefer it in the emotional sense, and I have no doubt that his rejoinders to the Khans “made him feel good.” I also have little doubt that that his responses to the Khans ran counter to the advice given by that supporter who called him on the phone and whose advice he seemed to cite approvingly. Was he trying to curb himself and failing because it “felt good”? Or was his decision a strategic one, because he thought it would help him? I think the former, but there’s no way to know, although it was easy to predict he was not going to follow that supporter’s advice.

It was also easy to predict not only that this sort of thing would happen, but that when it did it would place the GOP members of Congress in a terrible pickle. What to do? Support their party’s nominee and they may go down with the ship. Fail to support him and they not only may lose the chance of having a president in their own party for a change, but they also would probably lose the chance to receive some favors if and when Trump were to win the presidency. They are at a crossroads right now, and decisions must be made.

Plus, Trump has made it very hard to defend him. Many members of Congress are without much integrity, but not all of them. And besides, even if you wanted to defend him and were seeking to defend him, how would you do it without looking like a bounder yourself? Maybe Trump can get away with it, but most people can’t.

Apparently the Trump campaign is aware that Trump’s embroiling himself in this battle against Kahn has much potential for serious trouble, because it has been reported that they’ve called on members of Congress to help them spread some talking points on Khan. But there were no takers:

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate and current chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a lengthy statement sharply criticizing Trump’s comments.

“While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,” said McCain, a prisoner of war for five years during the Vietnam War.

His counterpart on the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas, echoed McCain, saying in a statement he was “dismayed at the attacks Khizr and Ghazala Khan have endured after they spoke about their son’s service and sacrifice.”…

In an open letter, 23 Gold Star families said Trump cheapened their sacrifice and called for an apology.

“This goes beyond politics. It is about a sense of decency,” it said. “That kind decency you mock as ‘political correctness.'”

What’s more, the incident has offered the Democrats—Hillary Clinton, Obama, and members of Congress—a precious gift, a rare and golden opportunity to proclaim their fervent support of the military and Gold Star parents. Hypocritical or no, it makes good political theater.

Some people think that this is more evidence that Trump is a stalking horse for Hillary and that he does not want to win. I’ve never subscribed to that theory and still don’t, although I understand why a person might. But I think other things drive Trump. The first is ego. He wants to win and due to boundless self-confidence he thinks he will win no matter what he does, and he also thinks that what he does is a winning formula by definition, because he does it. The second is emotion; he cannot let an insult go unanswered, and he has always tried to strike back hard and doesn’t mind sounding nasty or stupid as long as he feels he’s perceived as hitting back hard.

Trump wants to win, in my opinion. But if he loses, he’s still got the satisfaction of having stuck it to the pundits and defied everyone’s expectations, in addition to having gained millions and millions of new admirers. For him, that a win, too. He will land on his feet no matter what, and Trump will continue to be Trump no matter what.

[ADDENDUM: Legal Insurrection has a post that quotes Joe Scarborough as saying:

Now you even have Republicans that are saying, again, privately, mentally, like have you ever seen [Trump] like this before? I answered no, I haven’t. I’ve known him for a decade, I’ve never seen him act like this before. It’s unhinged, it’s not the Donald Trump that I’ve known for over a decade. I never have seen anything remotely resembling this type of behavior from a guy who I’ve known and liked and called a friend.

There’s also a commenter to the post who points out that Rush Limbaugh (who’s pretty much been a Trump supporter, especially since Trump became the frontrunner) also seemed worried and somewhat surprised about this latest behavior of Trump’s.

I maintain that—as I wrote in this post—this incident is not the least bit atypical of Trump. If it’s evidence of mental illness or being unhinged (and I don’t think it is) then Trump has been mentally ill or unhinged his entire life. Anyone who doesn’t see this incident as completely typical and completely in the mold of Trump’s decades-long previous behavior—be that observer Joe Scarborough, Rush Limbaugh, or anyone else—hasn’t been paying attention. Maybe Joe’s friendship with Trump has blinded him to the way Trump has, for most of his adult life, treated anyone Trump regards as an enemy.]

Austin Bay on NeverTrumpers

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve long respected Austin Bay, and so I found this article of his making the case for voting for Trump to be of interest, and I think it deserves an audience.

Everyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’ve struggled long and hard with the question of whether I can stomach voting for Trump, and I expect I’ll probably struggle with it right up to the moment of truth in the voting booth. But I’ve long said that I respect those who will vote for him and are convinced it is the right thing to do, although I also respect those who will not. There are arguments—good arguments—to be made on either side.

Bay comes down on the pro-Trump side, and reminds us of some of Trump’s good points:

He won the nomination by boldly and relentlessly addressing difficult political and social issues that his opponents preferred to either avoid or carefully finesse. He damned political and media hacks who run down America. When racist fanatics murdered cops Trump demanded law and order.

Bay feels that NeverTrumpers are fooling themselves as to the effects of their non-support:

NeverTrumpLand’s childish Sore Losers don’t thwart the ambitions of America’s all-too-real Captain Crook””Hillary Clinton””and her privileged Clinton Foundation cronies. Quite the opposite. In GetRealLand Sore Losers become Crooked Hillary’s political tools.

That’s why I’ve never been part of the NeverTrump movement—my reluctance to facilitate the election of Hillary Clinton. But I realize that many NeverTrumpers are propelled into that camp by their belief that Trump would not necessarily be better than Clinton—rather, that he and she would both be extremely bad, just in different ways. Weighing a future that features a known and more predictable type of badness (Clinton) with a more unknown and unpredictable type of badness (Trump) would be hard enough, but it’s compounded in this election by what Donald Rumsfeld might call the unknown unknowns of both of these candidates.

Does your vote matter?

The New Neo Posted on by

One man (or woman), one vote.

So how can your vote matter? Especially in predominantly red or blue states, where the results might seem to be (and usually are) a foregone conclusion.

Well, ask the Democratic voters who stayed home in the 2010 special election in Massachusetts:

Voter turnout in the 2010 special election was significantly lower than in the 2008 election. The drop in turnout was smallest””around 25%””in areas that supported Obama in the 2008 election by less than 60%. Turnout fell 30% among towns that supported Obama by over 60%. In Boston, which supported Obama by almost 79% in 2008, the decrease in 2010 voter turnout was even more pronounced, at about 35%.

The result was the election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate, which but for the trick of reconciliation might have stopped Obamacare in its tracks. Each voter’s decision to stay home didn’t matter all that much, but they mattered because they mattered in the aggregate. Very few elections are decided by one vote, of course, but one plus one plus one equals many.

When people say that one vote does not matter, they are almost always correct in a technical sense. But that’s not the way I look at it, because each person is part of a trend. It is true that each individual vote taken alone does not determine anything, but taken to extremes that sort of argument would mean that no one should vote because no votes matter.

Which is absurd, of course.

It’s somewhat like saying that the odds against any particular individual being born are astronomical. True; and yet we have all been born, so we all defy the odds.

Voters vote as individuals, but trends are aggregates. It’s somewhat paradoxical. Each voter’s decision stands for and is similar to the decisions of many. We are all unique individuals with one vote each. But we act as parts of groups, the individual members of which are all doing the same thing, and it adds up.

[NOTE: The song is from the 1959 musical “Fiorello,” which I saw as a child in the original Broadway production. I loved it. Its songs about politics are just as relevant today, if not more so.]

[NOTE II: The math whizzes among you will no doubt have something to say about this post, some of it critical.]

Trump and the Gold Star Khans

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t yet written about Trump’s reaction to the speech of Khazir Khan, the father of Humayun Khan, a Muslim soldier killed in the service of the US, although it’s been dominating the news for several days. I ignored it till now because Trump’s reaction was so dreadful, so revealing of his enormous flaws, that the entire incident reveals exactly why I believe the GOP (and about 40% of its voters) made a horrific mistake in nominating this man. In other words, it’s depressing.

But of course, it needs to be discussed; it really can’t be run away from. Nor can the hands of time be turned back and give us a do-over.

Notice what I’m not saying about the incident. I’m not saying this means Trump will lose, although I think that this particular set of reactions by Trump has more potential for hurting him than almost anything he’s done so far. Nevertheless, he still could win, because Hillary is just that bad.

But it didn’t have to be this way. Even Trump’s biggest boosters are finding this one hard to defend; it’s an unforced error of no small magnitude. It highlights one of the most salient things about Trump’s character, for better and for worse: his inability to let an insult go. That may make him “a fighter”—it definitely does make him a fighter—but it also reveals his pettiness, his lack of statesmanship, and cements the perception of him as a loose cannon and as a person who is practically unhinged. I can’t tell you how many people who were otherwise disposed to vote GOP this year who have told me that Trump frightens them very much.

Let’s briefly review some of what was said by Khan and Trump. Khan spoke at the Democratic convention, and here are some quotes from him about Trump:

Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities — women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country.

Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words “liberty” and “equal protection of law.”

Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America — you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.

You have sacrificed nothing and no one.

How did Trump respond? By ludicrously claiming his own “sacrifices” and by dissing Khan’s wife as a too-obedient Muslim:

In his first response to Khan’s charges, Donald Trump claimed that he had in fact sacrificed by employing “thousands and thousands of people.” He also suggested that Khan’s wife didn’t speak because she was forbidden to as a Muslim and questioned whether Khan’s words were his own.

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” the Republican nominee said in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that will air on “This Week” on Sunday.

That latter statement of Trump’s gave Khan’s wife Ghazala the opportunity to explain that she didn’t speak because the subject is still way too emotional for her. And everyone who heard or read Khan’s speech understood, or should have understood, that the sacrifice he meant was one of blood. Anyone who has lost a child in the service of his or her country in wartime is on a level that other people have not reached (fortunately) in terms of sacrifice, and anyone with an ounce of judgment or decency would know better than to mount any other response to the issue of sacrifice than to acknowledge that fact. I haven’t seen anyone—even the most fervent of Trump’s supporters—defending Trump’s “thousands of people” comment about Trump’s own “sacrifice,” although I suppose somebody somewhere might be doing it. But it was that stupid, that offensive, that inadequate.

In the beginning of his campaign, Trump got away with something similar towards John McCain’s POW history. I believe that incident—and the fact that he only grew stronger after it—made him feel invincible in terms of criticizing military people or their families. I believe that he got away with his McCain remarks for several reasons, none of them operating here. The first was that he was dealing with Republican primary voters, not voters in a general election. The second was that a lot of people on the right detest John McCain and would forgive almost any criticism of him. And the third was that McCain is a grown man, a public figure, and he is alive rather than dead, having survived and prospered.

Grieving parents are a very very different story. But Trump was moved to take them on because he cannot stand, cannot abide, being dissed, and he is compelled by his own personality to fight back in any way he sees fit, even in stupid ways. This is not a recommendation for the job of the presidency. Whether most people would consider it a fatal flaw I do not know, but I can speak for myself: I was already very reluctant to vote for this man, and he’s making me even more reluctant, despite my detestation of Hillary Clinton. Simply put, the prospect of either becoming president is almost literally sickening.

There’s another thing wrong with one of Trump’s rejoinders to Khan. This one was embedded in an attempt by Trump to make things right [emphasis mine]:

Late Saturday evening, Trump issued a statement honoring Khan, but he also took the opportunity to deride Clinton. “Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things. If I become President, I will make America safe again.”

Mr. Khan has no right to do so? In fact, he has every right to do so, and that right is protected by the very Constitution that Trump purports to have read.

What’s more, Khan never “claimed” that Trump has never read the Constitution. I’ve already quoted Khan; what he said was to ask Trump a question: “Have you even read the U.S. Constitution?” Now, granted, that implies it is highly unlikely that Trump has read it. But it doesn’t claim that Trump hasn’t. And Trump’s response indicates that Khan may be right in asking the question and in assuming that Trump either hasn’t read it, or has read it and not understood it, or has read it and understood it and thinks that one exception is that no one has a right to publicly criticize Donald Trump.

None of this is a good sign. Not one bit of it.

[NOTE: In the meantime, something tremendously offensive that Hillary Clinton said re the Benghazi parents has been eclipsed. However, what Clinton did was more subtle than Trump (and of course, the MSM is not interested in whipping up anger against her, so it has no reason to emphasize it).

Here’s Hillary’s exchange on the subject:

CHRIS WALLACE: One of the most dramatic moments in the Republican convention was when pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, one of the people who died in Benghazi, stood up before the convention and blamed you for her son’s death.

PAT SMITH: I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. That’s personally.

WALLACE: She and the father of Tyrone Woods both say that on the day that their sons’ bodies were returned to the United States that you came up to them and you said it was all because of a video, not terrorism. Now, I know some of the other families disagree with this, and I know you deny it. The question is, why would they make that up?

HILLARY CLINTON: Chris, my heart goes out to both of them. Losing a child under any circumstances, especially in this case, two State Department employees, extraordinary men both of them, two CIA contractors gave their lives protecting our country, our values. I understand the grief and the incredible sense of loss that can motivate that. As other members of families who lost loved ones have said, that’s not what they heard, I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said.

Pat Smith and Tyrone Woods’ father were making a far more serious charge against Clinton than the one that Khan made against Trump. But note the difference in Clinton’s response. She begins with a lengthy tribute to them and their sacrifice. Then she calls them liars (or merely mistaken—knaves or fools) for not “fully recalling” “everything that was or wasn’t said.”

The implication is that she—the magnanimous, respectful Hillary—is calm and forgiving towards those who accuse her, as well as understanding, and that she is possessed of the more perfect memory that the others lack. The fact that she’s insulting them can get lost in the shuffle, because the response is quite masterful in the political sense. Whatever you think of her remarks (and I think they are self-serving and abominable), they convey the idea that she, in contrast to Trump, is no loose cannon. She is a person who thinks before she speaks. That is reassuring to those (and their numbers are legion) who are afraid of Trump’s emotional volatility.]

Partisans of the Moiseyev

The New Neo Posted on by

I know I’ve posted a video of this dance (“Partisans”) before, but I want to show it again. This video is of better quality than those that were previously available on YouTube, which makes me happy because it happens to be one of my favorite dances ever since childhood. Watching the video is not as good as seeing it in person, of course, where the illusion is especially stunning. But some of the magic nevertheless comes across, and since the company doesn’t tour the US too often any more, YouTube is much much better than nothing.

The performance is by the Russian professional folk/character dance troupe known as the Moiseyev (after its founder, Igor Moiseyev), which I saw in person for the first time in the late 50s as part of the Khrushchev-initiated cultural “thaw.” Their first visit here was apparently in 1958 to the old Met, but I have a very clear memory of seeing them in Madison Square Garden, so it must have been a year or two later that I attended. I saw grown men (probably Russian expats) weep, and many people in the audience were practically hysterical with joy and some other complexity of emotion. I had never seen anything even remotely like the group’s theatricality and athleticism, its thrills and chills, its beautiful and emotional music, and the overwhelming masculinity and force of this type of dance.

This particular selection is a tribute to the partisans who fought in Russia during WWII. You might say it’s schmaltzy and showy and almost circusy, and I’d say you’re right, but the skill and artistry of the performers save it from being a mere trick.

The dance features imaginary horses, too, going from a walk to a jog/trot, canter, and full gallop at times. You’ll see what I mean in a moment. Enjoy:

I think that, in addition to the magic of the horses’ gait, the sudden changes of pace to the smooth glide, and the Russian facility at mime (smoking, laughing, talking), my favorite parts are the pair of shooters beginning around 6:40, followed by the Georgian man (love those Georgian men!).

Dallas Police Chief David Brown: the backstory

The New Neo Posted on by

davidBrown

When the recent police shootings in Dallas were in the news I was singularly impressed by Dallas Police Chief David Brown. In his public statements he was consistently calm yet intense, forceful yet articulate, during a time of great stress. Listening to him on TV one day, I had the thought (although I don’t know his politics): now, why can’t he be a nominee for president?

Why, indeed? Or at least, someone of his caliber?

Alas, that’s not the prospect that faces us right now. But the thought made me do a bit of research and learn more about Brown, who has been widely lauded for reforms that have made the Dallas police force a model since he became Chief in 2010, which is quite an achievement during the last few years of turmoil over police behavior:

The department committed itself to transparency. It developed a new foot pursuit policy that emphasized de-escalation. One proposal would make police officers in Dallas subject to lethal force training every two months instead of every two years. Brown released an enormous amount of police data, too, publishing statistics including 12 years worth of data on police shootings on an official online repository. The number of body cameras used by officers increased. Poor performing police officers were fired. And after Brown declared that traffic citations were not intended to “raise revenue,” his officers issued half as many tickets at last count as they did in 2006…

…[C]rime statistics seem to validate Brown’s work. In 2014, Dallas had its lowest murder rate since 1930. Overall crime decreased by 4.5 percent last year while violent crime dropped at a similar clip. There have been ups and downs, including a dramatic uptick in murders this year, but the trend line appears to hold true: Dallas is a less violent city than it was five years ago.

Some point out that police reform may not be responsible for plummeting crime rates. But, at the very least, Dallas police appear to have cleaned up their act. Excessive force complaints against the department dropped by 64 percent over a five-year period. Arrests are decreasing by the thousands each year.

“So far this year, in 2016, we have had four excessive force complaints. We’ve averaged between 150 and 200 my whole 33-year career. So this is transformative,” Brown told a crowd of his fellow officers and policymakers at the White House in April.

As I researched more about Brown, however, I discovered a personal story that is almost unimaginably ironic and tragic, the sort of thing that would be dismissed as unbelievable if it appeared in a work of fiction. But this is no work of fiction; it is Biblical in its dimensions, although I’m not sure what the moral of the story is (from June of 2010, shortly after Brown took office):

Wearing only light-colored boxer shorts and dripping in sweat, David O’Neal Brown Jr. silently approached and fatally shot a man driving his girlfriend and two children through a Lancaster apartment complex Sunday night.

“He just put the gun to the window and opened fire,” LaQuita Spence, 25, said of the man who killed her boyfriend, Jeremy Jontae McMillian. “He just had a terrifying look. His eyes were big; they were kind of glossy.”

Minutes later, Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s 27-year-old son also shot and killed Lancaster police Officer Craig Shaw before Brown was himself killed by officers, according to a law enforcement official who asked that his name not be published.

McMillian, 23, who did not know Brown, died at the scene. Shaw, 37, a father of two, died at a Dallas hospital.

Please read the whole thing. It appears that Brown’s son (David Brown Jr.) had been high on drugs and acting very erratically for several days, and his behavior culminated in the killings. Let me add that everyone—everyone—in this story was black: the killer, the victim in the car, and the dead police officer (who seemed to be something of a model human being himself; see this). The murders occurred on Father’s Day, which may or may not have been of some significance.

The story encapsulates so many problems both in the black community and in society as a whole: drugs, violence, father/son relationships, police vulnerability during responses to violence.

Protests in Germany against Merkel

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s always hard to know what protests represent, because the crowds in the streets are always a very small percentage of a population. The real question is always: how many people sympathize with the protesters, and how many don’t? And what are they prepared to do about it?

With that caveat, I report that a lot of Germans seem angry with Angela Merkel and would like her out:

Merkel’s premiership is hanging by a thread today as thousands gathered to call for her resignation while a key political ally dramatically withdrew his support over immigration policy.

More than 5,000 protested in Berlin and thousands more throughout Germany over the ‘open-door’ policy that many have blamed for four brutal terrorist attacks that left 13 dead over the last month.

The Chancellor faced a fresh wave of fury after it emerged that two recent terror attacks and a third killing were carried out by men who entered the country as refugees.

This outcome was inevitable. The combination of a wave of refugees—many of them young men—from Muslim countries, the inability of Europe to properly vet or track them, and the calls by ISIS and the like for them to attack Europeans in their host countries, have made for an obviously toxic brew. I wonder what on earth Merkel thought would happen as a result of letting in so many refugees. Even though the vast majority of the newcomers are law-abiding, there were always going to be a significant number who would take up the jihad call.

But Merkel is determined to forge ahead. However, the defection of one of her key allies—Horst Seehofer, the conservative premier of Bavaria (where most of the recent attacks took place)—may end up being the straw that breaks the Merkel coalition’s back:

Speaking after a meeting with the Bavarian government in Tegernsee, he added that the solutions to date were ‘too inadequate.’

Stressing he had no wish to start a quarrel with Merkel’s party, Seehofer said it was important to look ‘reality’ in the face.

An axe rampage, a shooting spree, a knife attack and a suicide bombing in the span of a week stunned Germany, leaving 13 people dead, including three assailants, and dozens wounded.

Three of the four attackers were asylum seekers, and two of the assaults were claimed by the Islamic State group.

But to look reality in the face is something that Europe—and the US’s Democratic wing—has been very reluctant to do. You can see the strain in a recent speech by Merkel:

…[I]n a powerful speech on Thursday, Merkel said that she would not allow jihadists to keep her government from being guided by reason and compassion.

‘Despite the great unease these events inspire, fear can’t be the guide for political decisions,’ she said.

‘It is my deep conviction that we cannot let our way of life be destroyed,’ she added.

Critics of Merkel would say that they are the ones being guided by reason and compassion, and that the two must be in the proper balance in which compassion does not overshadow and overwhelm reason. They would also say that it is the entry of so many jihadi- and/or sharia-promoting newcomers that threatens to destroy the German and Western European way of life, not the reduction in the flow of those newcomers.

And although this news involves France, and the perpetrator was not a refugee but a “French national of Algerian origin,” it cannot help Merkel’s cause that, “A French ISIS fanatic who ended up murdering a Catholic priest got through a police investigation to become an airport baggage handler ”˜easily’.” It turns out that, until three months ago, future terrorist Abdelmalik Petitjean had worked full time at busy Chambery airport.

This illustrates the scope of the problem. The more recent refugees who committed the German attacks are a somewhat different phenomenon than someone like Petitjean, who went to school in France (although it’s not clear whether he was born there or in Algeria; I believe it was probably the latter). Petitjean was apparently radicalized recently, probably within the last few months or so, and was known to be an ISIS sympathizer. But even that was not enough to stop him, because the authorities did not know his name:

Security services were searching for him the week prior to the attack, police sources told Reuters, after a foreign intelligence service alerted the French to his plans to conduct an assault.

French intelligence only had an image of Petitjean, with the counter-extremism unit UCLAT sending the photograph to different police units four days earlier on July 22, reading that the man “could be ready to participate in an attack on national territory.”

It added that the unidentified person “could already be present in France and act alone or with other individuals. The date, the target and the modus operandi of these actions are for the moment unknown,” according to a UCLAT flyer obtained by the Associated Press. But authorities never flagged Petitjean after the image’s release and his identity was not known, hampering the search, another source close to the investigation told Reuters Thursday.

Petitjean was only properly identified by name through DNA-testing after he was killed by police. No one who knew him prior to this had sensed that he would become a jihadi; he seemed no more at risk than any other Muslim youth in the country, not especially devout nor especially serious or troubled. This is another pattern for terrorists, what one might call “sudden radicalization syndrome,” which I believe is a very real phenomenon.

Another chilling item is this: “Petitjean was one of 10,000 people that French authorities have marked as radicalized or on the verge of radicalization.” No wonder they can’t follow them all. It makes the growing support for what is called “the far right” in Europe—and in this country, Donald Trump—quite understandable, and every terrorist attack probably only adds to that reaction.