Violette Verdy in Balanchine’s “Liebeslieder Waltzer”

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no secret how highly I think of the late and very great ballet dancer Violette Verdy (here’s a list of my previous posts).

She was exceptional.

I hadn’t seen this video before. It’s a production of Balanchine’s “Liebeslieder Waltzer” from the late 70s. I’ve only seen the ballet one time in person—long long ago, probably in that very era of the 70s—and I don’t remember being particularly taken with it. It’s glorified balletified ballroom dancing, a mood piece that conjures up an era of elegance and restraint. Now that I’m older it appeals more, and of course Verdy is (as always) a revelation.

Note the unusual choreography in this section I’m highlighting (I’ve cued it up to start at 6:55, where the segment I’m referring to begins, and it goes till about 7:38). It’s all about gaze and the delicate emotional nuances between two people:

GOP politicians: no good choices this time around

The New Neo Posted on by

Until the Indiana primary revealed that the GOP nominee in 2016 would be Donald Trump, I fought that prospect tooth and nail. I did what I could to write about his flaws, and why I saw so many of the other candidates as having both a better chance of winning and a much better chance of being a good president if they won. I had plenty of company in that endeavor, but all our efforts were unsuccessful.

I have not changed my mind about Trump since then. But now that it’s not the primaries we’re facing, but the general, if it comes down to Clinton vs. Trump (and I strongly believe it will) or even Biden vs. Trump, I face a different dilemma.

Any choice feels wrong, and that includes a third party candidate on the right. Unless a very organized third-party campaign by a very strong alternative candidate begin to catch fire today (or preferably many months ago), a vote for that candidate is a vote that helps Hillary Clinton. An abstention is a vote that helps Hillary Clinton. And a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for Donald Trump, a man whose deep and wide flaws both as human being and as potential president I’ve written about ad nauseam.

That’s the dilemma we face, and I blame those who supported Trump in the primaries for putting us there. But that fight is over and done, and there’s no need to beat up on anyone anymore, because there’s no changing the result. Plus many (not all!) of those who supported Trump did so in good faith.

Ever since it became obvious Trump would win, we’ve had the phenomenon of GOP officeholders and/or former candidates jumping on the Trump train. Ben Carson was one of the first, but he certainly isn’t the last. The latest is Marco Rubio, and many people are excoriating him for it (for example, see this from Allahpundit and this by Philip Klein; there are others).

Here’s an excerpt from the latter piece, so you can get the flavor of it:

It’s one thing to begrudgingly argue that as dangerous as he thinks a Trump presidency would be, that he thinks a Clinton presidency would be even worse. But to actually say that he would be “honored” by the chance to speak on Trump’s behalf at the GOP convention, and to downplay his previously stated problems with Trump as mere “policy differences,” is to prove the Rubio skeptics right.

That is, far from being an inspirational moral leader, Rubio has shown himself to be more of an opportunistic politician with his finger to the wind.

Well, if true, that makes him about like 99.99999% of people who run for office.

Let me recap: like the rest of us, all GOP officeholders and former officeholders face the dreadful “Hillary or Trump” dilemma. In fact, politicians face a much more intense version of it, with no good solution. None. Not supporting Trump makes them turncoats, while supporting him (if they previously criticized him) makes them hypocrites. There is no good way out for Rubio (whom the GOP might need to run in Florida in order to have a chance of preserving their Senate majority)—none. He has even more reason than, for example, Rick Perry or Bobby Jindal (both of whom endorsed Trump after excoriating him, with Perry even saying he’d be willing to be his VP) to moderate his previous stance on Trump.

I don’t harshly judge anyone who supports Trump at this point, now that Trump the nominee is virtually a fait accompli. Nor do I harshly judge anyone who doesn’t support him. Both groups have my sympathy—and my understanding, because of my own struggles. And I’m tired of people expecting a rectitude (and degree of martyrdom) from politicians that is completely unrealistic.

Let’s do something novel and take a look at what Rubio actually said rather than what Philip Klein and others say he said [emphasis mine]:

“Yeah, my sense is I’m gonna go to the convention,” Rubio said. “And I don’t know if I’ll have a role in the convention, but I have a lot of people going there that are supporters.”

“Yeah,” Rubio responded when asked if he would speak on Trump’s behalf at the convention. “I wanna be helpful. I don’t wanna be harmful because I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president.”…

“Look, my policy differences with Donald Trump ”” I spent 11 months talking about them so I think they’re well understood. That said, I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president,” he continued. “If there’s something I can do to help that from happening and it’s helpful to the cause, I most certainly would be honored to be considered for that.”

He also said he would release his delegates, though his campaign “basically, technically” has already done so, he explained, “because Donald is gonna have a majority number and at that point it’ll be irrelevant.”

“So, if we haven’t done so already, we will,” he said.

Despite how far he’s willing to go to support the billionaire, it stops at joining his ticket. “In my view, that wouldn’t be the right choice for him,” Rubio said of being chosen as Trump’s running mate. “He’s earned the nomination and deserves to have a running mate that more fully embraces the things he stands for.”

What does Klein expect Rubio to do, repeat again that Trump’s a con man at the same time he says that he’s nevertheless going to support him? That would be absurd. Rubio certainly doesn’t seem to be taking back any of his original criticisms, nor does he praise Trump as a fine man and a wonderful candidate, as people usually do when they support someone.

And no, Rubio did not say he’d be honored to speak on behalf of Trump (unless I missed something; I can’t find a full text), he says he’d be honored to speak in furtherance of the cause of stopping Hillary Clinton from becoming president. Take a look once again:

“I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president,” Rubio continued. “If there’s something I can do to help that from happening and it’s helpful to the cause, I most certainly would be honored to be considered for that.”

Pretty explicit, pretty clear. Rubio is doing this in order to stop Hillary, period.

The hiker and the compass

The New Neo Posted on by

Here is a terribly sad story:

An Appalachian Trail hiker whose remains were discovered last year survived at least 26 days after getting lost, kept a journal of her ordeal and ultimately resigned herself to the idea she was going to die and it could be years before her remains were located, according to investigatory documents…

“When you find my body, please call my husband George – and my daughter Kerry,” Largay, who was 66 years old, wrote in a page that was torn out of her journal. “It will be the greatest kindness for them to know that I am dead where you found me – no matter how many years from now.”…

[Geraldine] Largay, who went by the nickname Inchworm, got lost after leaving the trail on July 22, 2013, to relieve herself and set up her final camp the next day, wardens said. Her texts to her husband warning that she’d become lost were never delivered but were retrieved from her phone after her body was found.

I don’t recall this story from 2013, although it has a local New England angle because Largay got lost in Maine and a huge and lengthy search was mounted, to no avail. Until her body and journal were found, no one knew the cause of her disappearance or whether she had met with foul play.

If you read many of the comments to that article or others on the same topic, as I did, you’ll see that interspersed with the notes of sympathy and prayer are ones that question her judgment. How could she have gotten so badly lost that way? Why did she continue to hike alone after a friend she had started out with bailed?

The second question is probably more easily answered: lots of hikers hike alone, and Largay had hiked many times before (although I couldn’t discover whether she’d ever hiked alone before). As far as the first question goes, a great many people mentioned that in the heavily-wooded east if you go off the trail even a little way it’s very easy to get hopelessly lost unless you have the tools to get unlost. So I noticed in the comments sections that there were a lot of hikers asking why Largay hadn’t carried a compass, a very basic directional tool that could have helped her get out of the terrible mess she was in.

That seemed an excellent question, and I wondered whether she in fact had taken along a compass and if there had been some problem with using it. It took me a while to locate any information on that, but I struck pay dirt here:

Also in the report – testimony from friends and family including Largay’s husband George, and Jane Lee – her best friend who was initially supposed to hike with Largay, but was called away for a family emergency.

Lee told wardens that Largay had a poor sense of direction, and she wasn’t sure she even knew how to use a compass.

What does this mean? Largay was a very experienced hiker. I am not one, to say the least, so my question for all of you out there who might be experienced is: is it not standard to carry a compass? It’s small and easy to use, right? Would a compass not make it a relatively simple matter to get out of a situation such as Largay unfortunately found herself in? And if a person doesn’t carry one, why would that person choose not to do so? My tentative theory is that many of us have grown so reliant on things like cell phones to get us out of a jam that many of the older, more obvious, and simpler things are being neglected.

RIP.

Four warning signs

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re like me, you keep getting spam emails with enticing come-ons like “Would you like to know the four subtle warning signs that you’re near death from [fill in the blank]?” Or, “Would you like to know how to look 30 years younger in 10 seconds?” or “…how to lose your belly fat?”

Well, who wouldn’t?

Have you ever fallen for it and clicked on the link? In moments of weakness, I have. The ensuing experience is always the same. Someone—a doctor, a spokesperson—appears in a video and tells you what he/she is going to tell you. “I’m going to tell you this heretofore secret information about how you can energize/smooth out/avoid…” and he or she goes on and on and on till you find yourself shrieking, “Don’t tell us what you’re going to tell us. Get on with telling us, already, you friggin’ torturer!!!

Every single video also uses the following format: nowhere does it say how long it is, or how many minutes have elapsed and how many are left. There’s no sense of time at all. The person has all day—don’t you? And the longer he or she goes on telling you what he will soon be telling you (soon, soon!!), the more reluctant you are to leave—abysmally stupid though you now feel for having been sucked into this mess—because you have already invested way too much time in this worthless endeavor, and you are surely at least getting closer to the revelation of the secret, right? But first, this person in the video—whom you have grown to detest—is determined to give you the whole furshlugginer story and then some, complete with little squiggly diagrams.

I have never lasted to the bitter end of any of them. Perhaps I’ve never even lasted till the middle—but since we don’t know how long they really are, I have no way of knowing where the middle is. Perhaps they just play in an endless, sadistic loop.

Donald Trump has clinched…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the GOP nomination—which is not really news, is it? We’ve known this was pretty much inevitable ever since Indiana.

What a long strange trip it’s been.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s email troubles seem to be deepening. The weaker she becomes as a candidate, the more it is likely that (a) she will be replaced (although I’ve always said this almost certainly won’t happen, I could be wrong); or, if she is not replaced, that (b) Trump will be the victor in November. The latter possibility is one I’ve always seen as a longshot, too, with the caveat unless Clinton significantly weakens.

Which she is doing.

However, the Hillary-supporters I know (some are reluctant supporters), would never vote for Trump no matter what she was found to have done. I don’t know how typical they are, but there doesn’t seem to be anything all that unusual about them.

What a long strange trip is it likely to remain.

The menace of political ignorance

The New Neo Posted on by

How can voters make informed decisions without knowing how our government works? The answer is—they can’t.

How ignorant is the American public? This ignorant:

An October Farleigh Dickinson survey found that only 34% of Americans can name the three branches of government, and 30% cannot even name one. Studies routinely find that large numbers of voters do not know which officials are responsible for which issues, a circumstance that makes it hard to hold them accountable for their performance. All too often, voters reward and punish incumbents for outcomes they do not control, including such things as droughts and even victories by local sports teams.

The biggest determinant of most electoral outcomes is the very recent performance of the economy, even though experts recognize that incumbents usually have little control over short-term economic trends. Such ignorance weakens political accountability, and incentivizes politicians to pursue dangerously misguided policies that prove popular with poorly informed voters…

Because there is only an infinitesimally small chance that any one vote can influence the result of an election, even most smart people usually have little motivation to follow politics closely.

Ilya Somin, the article’s author, thinks the level of political ignorance is due to the fact that people aren’t motivated to learn much because with only one vote a single person doesn’t determine much. I find this to be a weak argument. Those who learn a lot about politics and government have the same one vote, and it doesn’t stop them from being interested and motivated. The incentive to learn can’t depend on the number of votes a person has. It depends on the degree of his/her intrinsic interest in the topic, how much else is distracting him/her, the accuracy of that person’s sources of information, and last but not least the school system.

The three branches of government is a topic so basic that everyone should know about it. But is Civics still taught in school? Not so much (see also this).

And here’s a 2012 article from Harvard Magazine:

When was the last time anyone, politician or university president, echoed what Noah Webster said in 1788?

“It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”

More on the decline:

At old colleges like Harvard, moral philosophy, with civic education a major component, was once a capstone course required of all seniors. But the subject went into decline after the Civil War, as science became ascendant and universities gave pre-eminence to research. As science either marginalized or helped transform other subjects, citizens’ responsibilities for the public good were squeezed out of the mission of higher education. Moral philosophy became a marginal specialty within philosophy departments. At Amherst College, for example, the president still taught moral philosophy to all seniors in 1895; by 1905, it was but a single elective offering.

If you think about it, it’s not at all surprising that the generations coming up are so ignorant about our political system. And this is not the result of accident.

The war between Silicon Valley and the goverment

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a race against time for the companies:

Start-ups are particularly wary, Andreessen said, of legislation proposed recently by Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would compel tech companies to build technical methods to share customers’ encrypted data, at a court’s request.

“They believe there’s this window of opportunity that if we build strong encryption now, we can make it a fait accompli. But if we let five years pass, it may never happen,” Andreessen said.

In the past two years, more companies have embraced encryption, which scrambles information so that it looks like a stream of unintelligible characters to an outsider who accessed it without permission. What’s changed more recently, industry officials say, is that companies are encrypting data and throwing away the key to prevent their gaining access, a move that started with Apple but is spreading across the Valley.

This latter tactic is the most worrisome to law enforcement. Government officials have said repeatedly they do not want to outlaw encryption; FBI Director James B. Comey has called strong encryption a vital means of protecting the public’s personal information from hackers.

But officials insist that there must be a technical means to access that information when companies are served with warrants. Otherwise, there will be “profound consequences for public safety,” Comey told Congress in March. Terrorists and criminals are already using messaging services to which tech companies have thrown away the key, he said. Investigators say two such services, WhatsApp and Telegram, were used by terrorists in the Paris attacks last November.

I have very mixed feelings about all of this. I see the point of both sides of the argument. Distrust of government is, unfortunately, both rampant and in some cases justified. But there are very real dangers associated with encryption and lack of government ability to break it under certain circumstances. Basically, companies are now trying to put the keys in the hands of the user and keep themselves out of it to a large extent, in order to avoid a situation where they’ll be in a row with the government such as the one Apple faced earlier this year.

While we’re talking about traveling…

The New Neo Posted on by

And we were talking about traveling, weren’t we?

So it’s probably time to revisit this Jenna Marbles video about packing. This is me, unfortunately—a “just in case” packer. Plus, just my hair products alone weigh several pounds:

I used to send boxes ahead of time for longer trips. But in recent years, the price of sending a box has become exorbitant, so I’ve stopped doing that. Now I just take an extra suitcase if need be (still only $35 on Jet Blue and free on Southwest) and rent one of those cute little carts at the airport.

This next one is apropos of nothing, but I like it so much I’m just going to throw it in:

Actually, maybe it does have something to do with travel. When I returned my rented car at the airport on my most recent trip, in the flurry of activity I left my black coat on the black rear seat. I needed that coat for my Boston airport arrival, and luckily Enterprise got it right back to me, dispensing someone to drive it over to the departure drop-off area where I stood (with my cart and my suitcases), waiting. Now that’s service.

Lastly, if you—like me—sometimes skirt the 50-pound limit on your luggage, this is a great purchase I recently made and am very happy indeed with it:

I’ve figured out a new way to do Amazon links; if you click on that photo above, it leads you to Amazon. I can’t find the exact size I got, which was about a 28-incher and weighs 5.3 pounds, far lighter than other suitcases of its size and yet very strong. The zippers and the wheels glide like dreams, too, and it comes in a myriad of colors and sizes. On Amazon (and sometimes at TJ Maxx) you can find them quite inexpensively.

Come fly with me

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently flew from coast to coast. I remain in awe of how fast and well it is usually done, really a marvel of modern machinery and manpower. I’ve driven coast to coast many times in years past, and I know just how wide the country is. But when I watch that little cartoon airplane on the Jet Blue screen travel across the map of the US, it seems to be moving from state to state with such ease and rapidity it might well just be a piece on a board game like checkers.

But still, I’ve got the following observations:

(1) If airlines tell you to get to the airport at least 3 hours early because of TSA lines, they also should have someone at the departure desk to take checked luggage 3 hours early. At one airport where I complied with the suggestion, they did not—and we passengers stood in line there for about an hour, before ever getting anywhere near the TSA lines (which, by the way, were non-existent).

(2) How is it that so many people can fall asleep on the redeye and remain asleep through everything? Do they all take heavy-duty sleeping pills? Or have they just adapted better than I have to modern life?

(3) Why do so many flight attendants these days make all their announcements in an extremely rapid monotone? It sounds like they’re reciting the possible side effects on a prescription medication ad on TV.

(4) What can a person do if—as happened to me on my most recent flight—the passenger next to them snores in a truly alarming fashion, with loud snorts and choking and gurgling sounds and in no particular rhythm? And when that snoring next-seat-neighbor has some sort of restless leg syndrome as well, and keeps vigorously encroaching on your leg space with their leg, even while snoringly asleep? Oh, let me add that the flight was completely full, so movement to another seat didn’t seem possible.

(5) On the other hand, those Terra chips are pretty good for freebies.

Bill and Donald: with friends like these…

The New Neo Posted on by

For years, the Clintons and Trump used to be friends—or what passes for friends these days among the rich, famous, narcissistic, and hypocritical.

That’s one of the reasons why, early this primary season, a lot of people thought Trump was just a stalking horse for Hillary. I didn’t ascribe to that theory, and it seems even less likely to be true now that Trump has been reviving and re-airing some of the most sordid Bill Clinton allegations from the past.

In the 90s, Trump was a big defender of Bill:

“He defended Bill Clinton for years. He said the same allegations that [he is] talking about now were a waste of time, were wrong, were hollow, that Bill Clinton was a terrific guy. That he was a great president, that the impeachment was wrong, that it was a waste of time”¦” the host of CNN’s New Day Chris Cuomo rattled off.

But as Trump supporter and attorney Michael Cohen has explained:

[In the 90s Trump] was a private citizen who was friendly with the Clintons and he was trying to protect a friend. Now, it’s a different game. It’s 2016, he is the Republican presidential nominee.

Yes, it’s a different game. One of Trump’s most salient characteristics is that he is willing and able to turn on a dime without an ounce of shame—friend one minute, enemy the next, depending on whether you are in his way or not. We saw that phenomenon demonstrated during the Republican primaries.

Now, Hillary Clinton is an interesting—even unique—candidate in many ways. Not only is she (like Trump) unpopular to an unprecedented degree for a party’s almost-certain nominee, but she first entered the national consciousness as First-Lady-to-be and later drew attention as First Lady saddled with a philandering husband. When Bill was first running for president, Hillary said she wasn’t just some little woman standing by her man:

And yet the public had the experience just a few years later of watching her turn into exactly and precisely that, in the most humiliating way possible.

Many of us remember. But enough years have passed that younger voters probably don’t know much about it at all, and so Trump is kindly reminding them (and us) of the history. He’s also serving notice that those who would criticize him for his affairs should take a good look at the sins of the opposition, and that there’s a price to pay for taking up that line of attack against him.

Traditionally, candidates’ spouses have been considered off-limits from attacks by other candidates during campaigns (although we’ve had the Melania/Heidi wars this time). But Bill Clinton is as special a spouse as Hillary is a candidate. Maybe even more so. After all, he was the president, and a very popular 2-term one at that. He also was proven to have boldly lied to the American people back in the days when lying actually would have been thought to have meant something, and yet he remained very popular.

In a recent thread, commenter “Mrs Whatsit” wrote this:

…it seems to me that after the past eight years and what’s clearly coming next ”“ the election, either way, of an impossible disaster to the presidency and then the necessary consequences, whatever they may be ”“ some central assumption or understanding is already irretrievably gone, some shared idea that was once organically part of who we are but, once lost, can never be artificially recreated.

I agree. I’ve been searching for what it might be, and I’ve decided it’s not one thing but many. However, one very important shared idea that we’ve lost is the notion that presidents should be people of integrity. And if we discover they’re not, more of us used to be shocked and disappointed and disapproving. I think very few on right or left care about that sort of thing any more, and Bill Clinton was just one step along the way. I sometimes think that “integrity” (like “honor”) has become an obsolete word.

Rousseau, the left, and Islamist terrorism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a somewhat-edited version of a post that first appeared in December of 2006.]

Make no mistake about it: if those leftists who defend Islamist terrorists and the regimes that sponsor them and deplore US efforts to stop them had their way, the other side (Islamist totalitarianism) might get its way and become victorious in its goal of a worldwide caliphate. Then not only would there be no sites left like this, but such people would find their own freedom curtailed so forcefully that they would no longer be able to be trolls on conservative blogs. And that would be the least of their (and our) worries.

I’ve often wondered about the failure of the Left to understand this very simple fact. Surely, they are interested in the Enlightenment values of reason, human rights (such as for homosexuals and for women) and individual freedom? Surely they understand what sharia law is all about? Surely they understand that these people are quite serious?

But no; a rather large segment of the left attributes all third-world violence and ills to the always-dastardly doings of those twin repositories of all that’s really evil: the Great and Little Satans, the US and Israel. Yes, yes, yes, of course; it’s the corruption of the US and Israel that is the cause of all the flaws of the Arab world, and if those things went away all the other problems would magically go away—(or perhaps “wither away,” in the old Marxist phrase).

What’s going on here? I believe that at least part of the answer lies in the philosophical underpinnings of Leftist thought. One of these days I hope to write a long post on its origins in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had a similar reductionist theory of human nature and history (a while back I waded through this book on the subject, which I highly recommend).

To Rousseau, civilization and society (and reason itself, to a certain extent) were corrupting influences, and must be reformed to better reflect the condition of pre-civilized humanity—supposedly a happy state of nature in which people were at peace and non-exploitative towards each other. Civilization led to power inequities and private property (very important to Rousseau, as well as to his heirs, the Jacobins, the Left, and the Communists) and all sorts of unfairness that needed redressing by a state that was not afraid to use Draconian measures and subordinate the people to its will.

In Rousseau’s seminal Social Contract (which, along with Hobbes’ Leviathan, we were made to read in public high school; somehow I doubt whether that’s still the case) he writes [my emphasis]:

…whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body [the public and the state]; this means merely that he will be forced to be free…[if the leaders of the state say to the citizen] “it is expedient for the state that you should die,” he should die.

So the resemblance of the Left to Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism isn’t such a stretch after all. The similarity is their profound dislike of modernism, jettisoning of individual freedom for a sort of mythical collective freedom that will be expressed in the general will, the embrace of violent methods for achieving this heaven on earth, and the glorification of feeling over reason. It’s all there in the left’s hero, Rousseau–whether they’ve read him or not.