Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Red flags: protection vs. liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

Omar Mateen was adorned with red flags, absolutely festooned with them.

We already know that law enforcement was warned about Mateen, investigated him, and decided there was nothing they could do because he had not acted on his beliefs.

But were you aware of this?:

According to Omar Mateen’s fifth-grade classmates, the 10-year-old future terrorist was once suspended for two weeks after he threatened to bring a gun to school and kill all of his classmates.

Leslie Hall ”” one of Mateen’s classmates at Marisopa Elementary School ”” told TMZ that Mateen was a bully and frequently harassed both students and teachers.

Mateen reportedly told a group of students that he planned on bringing a gun to school to kill everyone there, a threat which “was not received as a joke.” Multiple former classmates confirmed the incident to TMZ.

Or his high school behavior?:

Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s troubled school days included an incident where he was charged with battery and another where a school official said he was suspended for cheering the Sept. 11 attacks two days after they took place.

On Thursday, the Martin County School District released records showing Mateen was suspended 15 times when he attended junior high and high school from 1999 until 2003. At least two of those suspensions were the result of violent incidents.

Mateen’s final suspension was on Sept. 13, 2001, and was issued by a school administrator named Evelyn Stettin. In a conversation with Yahoo News on Thursday, Stettin said Mateen was suspended for celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which occurred two days earlier.

He was very pleased to see it happen,” Stettin said of the attacks. “We took him out of class, and we were trying to, you know, talk with him, and we had a school psych present, but basically he didn’t show any remorse. Nothing. I mean he was pretty happy it happened.”

Stettin said school officials discussed Mateen’s reaction to the terrorist attacks with his parents. She suggested Mateen’s parents were unconcerned by the incident.

“We spoke to the parents and they didn’t really do very much about it, let’s put it that way,” Stettin recounted.

And this guy Mateen was later accepted to become a prison guard, and then a security guard:

When he applied for the Department of Corrections job, Mateen had to explain a 2001 criminal charge for battery and disturbing a school function.

In a one-page handwritten letter to prison officials, Mateen said he was charged following a May 2001 fight with another student in his math class at Martin High School. The letter, dated Sept. 26, 2006, says the disruption charge was later dismissed and that he received probation for the battery charge.

Mateen was later let go for other reasons. And I suppose that, in the absence of other evidence, that note of his could have been convincing. It does happen, after all; people do reform, they do see the light. But put it all together—which no one did—especially the 9/11 cheering, and you get a very bad picture of an explosive human ready to go off, and already in sympathy with Islamic terrorists.

And he later fulfilled that early potential through action, with terrible consequences.

The problem is that, even knowing all this, it’s unclear what could have been done to have prevented it. We don’t do preventive detention for thoughtcrime or speech in the absence of criminal acts. Mateen was born here as a citizen and could not be deported. You might say that his parents should not have been let into this country back in the 80s (that’s the ideological test for immigration that I’ve suggested before), but once it had already happened it couldn’t be remedied without violating his rights as a citizen.

Whether it’s a terrorist or a “regular” mass murderer, when you look back there are almost always these sorts of signs, often beginning in childhood. For example, how often do we hear of a mass murderer that he had long been perceived as a dangerous person, and yet until he (it’s most often a “he,” so I’m not being sexist here) acts out some violence there is little to be done that wouldn’t compromise liberty, because any proactive remedy is likely to be overused and/or misused against others.

Remember how the Soviets misused their mental health system to incarcerate dissidents.

How do we separate the truly dangerous from those who are verbally threatening but won’t do much? How can we do it without compromising our basic liberties? We must figure out how to protect ourselves, but protection and liberty are often at odds, and it can be very difficult to know where and how to draw the line when a threat of this magnitude presents itself. But the threat is to liberty itself, in the end.

Quite a conundrum.

What did Paul Ryan really say about suing Trump over his proposed Muslim immigration ban?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the debate about Paul Ryan’s supposed threat to sue Donald Trump if Trump were to issue an executive order banning Muslim immigration, let’s start with what Ryan said—not what we imagine he said based on our pre-existing opinion of Paul Ryan, or what some pro- or anti-Trump blog or media outlet said he said, but what he actually said. Here’s the first exchange, which originally occurred on June 14:

QUESTION: Speaker Ryan, you said that Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims coming into the country was not (inaudible). Chairman McCaul has said that (inaudible) rhetoric (inaudible) helps the recruiting of ISIS. Was Donald Trump wrong to double-down on his Muslim…

Paul D. Ryan: No, I stand by my remarks. I’ll bet you do, too, as well. I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interest. I do not think it is reflective of our principles not just as a party, but as a country. And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test and not a religious test.

QUESTION: Constitutionally, do you think Donald Trump, if he were president, could enact a ban on (inaudible)?

Paul D. Ryan:That’s a question — that’s a question about immigration law. And you can go into the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act to determine whether or not the president has that kind of discretion of not.

No threat to sue there. The lawsuit remark occurred in a HuffPo interview two days later:

In a sit-down interview in his ceremonial Capitol Hill office on Thursday, Ryan told The Huffington Post that Trump does not have “a blank check” with his endorsement. “I don’t know what that line is,” Ryan said, “but right now, I want to make sure that we win the White House.”

So, what he is saying is that even a Republican president cannot just do whatever he wants; that the imperial presidency needs checking on either side, but that his priority is to get a Republican president in the White House.

He continued:

On the topic of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his statements that he could enact such a policy without Congress, Ryan noted that Republicans were releasing part of their agenda on executive overreach that very day, and, in news that’s sure to please Trump, Ryan suggested that he and the House of Representatives were prepared to sue a Republican president if need be.

“I would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers,” Ryan said.

It’s unclear, however, if Ryan thinks Trump enacting a ban on Muslims entering the country would actually exceed presidential powers. “That’s a legal question that there’s a good debate about,” Ryan said, pointing to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.

So as far as I can see, it’s later writers who have been suggesting that Ryan said he’d sue Trump over Muslim immigration and then claimed to not be sure if a Muslim ban violates the law. But Ryan does not appear to have said that at all, at least not so far as I can tell from rather lengthy research trying to get a copy of the actual interview text (if you can find one, please let me know). What I see here is probably a clever piece of suggestive writing by the HuffPo author, suggesting that Ryan said what he said about executive overreach in a discussion “on the topic of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his statements that he could enact such a policy without Congress.” What appears to have happened, as best I can reconstruct amidst the twists and spin, is that it was the interviewer who was discussing Trump’s Muslim ban, and Ryan countered by saying he reserved the right to sue any president for executive overreach, and that Congress agrees, and that it is not at all clear that Trump’s Muslim ban would be a case of executive overreach. But it seems that some conservatives fell into the “Ryan is an anti-Trump POS” trap.

What does Ryan appear to have actually said? I would love to get my hands on a transcript to determine that, but from what I’ve read it appears that he said what I’ve just summarized him as having stated. I would think most conservatives would agree with his general statement on restricting executive overreach when it occurs—unless they want a dictator who is our dictator, but then I wouldn’t think the word “conservative” should apply. As far as a ban on Muslim immigration goes, Ryan has expressed disagreement with it and prefers an ideologically-based ban (I am in agreement with that idea of a ban based on ideology, and have been for quite some time; see this post from last December).

This incident has been reported, however—and later spread around the blogosphere—as though Ryan had said something like “I disagree with Trump’s ban on Muslims and if he does anything of the sort I’ll sue him—and by the way I have no idea whether what he is proposing is legal or not.” What he apparently did say is more like this, “I disagree with Trump’s Muslim ban and I’d prefer a ban on certain ideologies,” and on a separate occasion: “I want a GOP president, but I’m prepared to sue one if he oversteps, as I would sue a Democrat who oversteps. But on the Muslim ban question, that needs researching because it may or may not be overstepping.”

Talking Points Memo, a blog on the left, titled its article about this, “Paul Ryan On Stopping A President Trump’s Muslim Ban: We’ll Sue Him!” That’s what they want you to think Ryan said. TPM almost certainly knows that pro-Trump and anti-Ryan blogs and pundits will pick up on it and spread the word around as though that’s what Ryan said, and that it will become accepted as truth. I’ve seen the right fall for this type of ploy many many many times: picking up on the spin of the left about someone on the right, and reacting in rage.

Look, you can hate Paul Ryan all you want, but hate him for something he actually did or said, not what the left says he said. And if you can find something from his own mouth that contradicts my reconstruction here of what actually happened, please present it. My goal is finding the truth rather than repeating the spin of others, or protecting or attacking Paul Ryan. I would hope that’s your goal, too.

[NOTE: One other related issue was discussed in the comments section recently. There were quite a few comments on the general subject, but I’ll stick to an exchange I had with commenter “Frog,” who brought up the Paul Ryan lawsuit question here by writing:

Paul (the goat from Janesville) Ryan says “We” will sue Trump as POTUS if he exceeds what the goat believes allowable about Muslims and Mexico. He sure hasn’t sued Hussein yet.

My answer can be found here. At the time I wrote my reply to Frog, I had not yet found the original articles about Ryan and the lawsuit and what he said, and did not yet realize that Ryan had not actually threatened to sue Trump because of the Muslim ban. In my reply to Frog, I pointed out that Ryan was indicating a disagreement with any process that meant a president would be exceeding his powers. And then I took up the question of whether Ryan, as Frog wrote, “sure hasn’t sued Hussein [Obama] yet,” and the history of that:

Paul Ryan has been Speaker only since Oct. 29, 2015, which is about seven and a half months. But his predecessor—a man you probably detested as well, John Boehner—has sued Obama. The topic had to do with the same issue, executive action that was inappropriate and a violation of the separation of powers.

The history of the first Boehner lawsuit is here (it had to do with Obamacare). Then in 2015 Boehner said he planned to sue Obama again, this time for executive overreach on immigration. But (at least as far as I can determine) before it got to the Senate, the lawsuits by Texas and 25 other states against Obama got an injunction (in Feb. of 2015), and so Congress’ lawsuit was put on hold.

In addition, in late February 2016, Paul Ryan threatened to sue Obama if he closes Gitmo:

“We are making legal preparations if the president tries to break the law,” Ryan said on Wednesday.

The Wisconsin Republican said what “boggles” his mind is that Obama would be directing the military to knowingly break the law by transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. prisons in an effort to close the detention center.

“Our law is really clear,” Ryan said, adding that it was Democrats who first wrote the language barring detainees from coming to American soil.

So, Boehner sued Obama over questions of presidential power re Obamacare, and came close to suing over the same issue with immigration but appears to have stopped because other lawsuits resulted in an injunction. Since Ryan has become Speaker, which was fairly recently late last October, he has threatened to sue Obama over the same issue of limiting presidential power, this time regarding closing Gitmo. This was a direct and specific threat to Obama by Ryan over that issue, unlike his very general recent statement reserving the right to sue a Republican president who overstepped, as well, the one that was spun by the liberal media into a specific threat to sue Trump over a specific issue.

By the way, Ryan’s threat to sue Obama over any executive order to close Gitmo may have worked, because (if you can believe Obama, which is always iffy) the White House indicated four days ago that Obama will not issue such an executive order.]

Criticizing Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been surprised at the number of people in the comments section who suggest it’s wrong at this point to criticize Trump, because all it does is help Hillary.

Note that they’re not usually suggesting that the content of the specific criticism is incorrect or in error, just that it’s strategically (or is it tactically?) counterproductive if the goal is to stop Hillary.

Well, that’s one of the goals. But I continue to think that truth is another goal, too, as well as airing opinions and ideas in the back-and-forth of discussion. Isn’t this what blogs are for? If I had wanted to become a mouthpiece for a certain candidate or a certain party, I would have done so long ago, but that’s never been my aim. No, my criticism of Trump comes from the idea that struggling towards the truth—weighing the pros and cons in the light of evidence—will ultimately lead us to the correct decisions, both for ourselves and for the country.

It’s not as though I influence tons of people, either. This is a great blog, and I do have a group of wonderful readers, but it’s only a few thousand, and most of you have pretty independent minds.

Another goal is yes, to stop Hillary. But we disagree on how best to do that. Most people here who don’t like Trump would vote for a Trump alternative. Trump supporters (enthusiastic or reluctant) who say a Trump alternative cannot win are saying something that might be right or wrong, but there is plenty of evidence (see this, for example) that this year really is different, and that there is enough bipartisan support for a potential alternative to both candidates that either a third-party candidate or a non-Trump GOP replacement has a fighting chance and would not be acting merely as a spoiler.

As commenter “Big Maq” writes:

…some keep arguing that Trump is somehow “acceptable” (despite his acknowledged flaws and the risk that comes with them) as a realistic alternative to Clinton.

It is an argument resting on an assumption that is soon to become self-fulfilling ”“ that the choice is a binary one.

Want to stop Clinton and avoid the problems with Trump ”“ we have two choices:

1) Support a GOP convention reversal (within the rules).
2) Support a third party.

That’s the reasoning. You may not agree, but those who criticize Trump feel that there is still time to avoid a certain disaster with him, whether he wins or loses—and they think it virtually certain that he will lose.

Mateen was just a troubled youth who grew up in Trump’s neighborhood

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a typical and actually relatively subtle case of liberal propaganda about the Islamic terrorist Omar Mateen. Do they teach this stuff in journalism school, or does the press learn how to do it afterwards? Or does it just come naturally?

Here are the first few paragraphs, with my interpolations (some of them sarcastic) in brackets and bold:

If Omar Mateen was a disciple of “radical Islam,” as Donald Trump angrily [oooo, the mean Trump is angry!] described him, and “one of the soldiers of the caliphate,” as the Islamic State approvingly deemed him, he wasn’t a very impressive one, ideologically speaking. Mateen didn’t observe Islam terribly faithfully or seem to know much about what Islamists call the “true path.” [Why is his degree of observance the least bit relevant? Now someone has to be doctrinally pure and theologically knowledgeable in order to be a bona fide Islamic terrorist?] According to FBI Director James Comey, in the past few years Mateen confusingly expressed support for both the Islamic State and Hezbollah””even though the latter group is an avowed enemy of the Islamic State and is fighting against it in Syria on the side of Bashar Assad. [Oh no, I guess this “confusion” means he had nothing to do with Islam and couldn’t really have supported both of these two groups, who after all share the same anti-American, anti-infidel, anti-Western, anti-Israel, pro-Islamic supremicist, pro-terrorist bias.] The night he slaughtered 49 people in Orlando on Sunday, Mateen swore allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the last minute and with apparent self-doubt. Mateen called 911 twice, hanging up at first before finally fulfilling ISIS’s injunction to self-starter terrorists to declare allegiance to the group publicly before they act. [Again, does that mean he wasn’t a real jihadi?]

Based on the accounts of his aquaintances [sp.] and family, Mateen also appears to have been a deeply conflicted and possibly self-loathing homophobe who drank heavily, took drugs, dated men, frequented the same club he later attacked, Pulse, and used a gay dating app””not the sort of behavior one would expect of a faithful soldier of Islam. [Actually, homegrown terrorists often have a similar biography, because it’s when the temptations of the West interact with the restrictions of traditional Islam that a person is at his/her most vulnerable to the terrorist call. What’s more, there is evidence that Mateen’s contacts with gays were for the purpose of scouting the territory in order to plan his attack rather than any actual gay tendencies.]

Yes, Mateen was a terrorist””but what kind of terrorist? He had no known ISIS or Al Qaeda connection [of a formal sort, but who cares? He had plenty of exposure to and interest in them, and declared his allegiance. That certainly should be enough.]; he wasn’t getting operating orders from abroad; he hadn’t gone overseas to be trained [but he was recently in Sauda Arabia and authorities are just now investigating whether he might have made side trips to Yemenn or elsewhere for some training]; he followed no predicable course of radicalization [actually he followed an utterly predictable course of home-grown, internet-generated, radicalization followed by quite a few citizen children of immigrants from Muslim and/or Arab countries]. Mateen appears, in fact, to have been less a soldier than yet another deeply disturbed American [an American of the Muslim religion, born of immigrant parents from a Muslim country, however] (born in Trump’s own home borough of Queens) [egad, what possible significance does that have, except as an attempt to somehow create some equation with Trump?], who was full of hatred and uncontrollable anger””an example of what law enforcement officials describe as an aspiring violent criminal searching for a larger justification for the acts he’s desperate to commit. [He didn’t have to “search” very far, did he? In addition, all violent and sick ideologies always appeal most strongly to violent or sick people. I doubt that Hirsh would minimize the Nazi influence on individual Nazis who were “searching for a larger justification” for their acts, or for that matter the influence of ideology on individual white supremacists who might be moved to kill people of another race. No, I’m pretty certain that their ideologies would be front and center as motivation. Most human acts are determined by multiple factors, and to minimize the influence of Mateen’s declared Islamist and ISIS-inspired ideology is to either be a fool or a knave, or both.]

I will stop there; the article is very very long. But I will summarize the rest of it by saying that as it continues, Hirsh demonstrates that he actually is well aware of many aspects of Mateen’s radicalization by ISIS and of the FBI’s failure to discover it—or more importantly to be able to do anything about apprehending or stopping him before he acted. It’s an article with a split personality, in which Hirsch goes back and forth between propaganda and a sober and knowledgeable discussion of the problems inherent in the radicalization of violent Islamic terrorist “known wolves” who are citizens of Western countries such as the US.

It’s as though Hirsh feels the need to get the propaganda part over with at the beginning (that’s the part most people read), and then allows himself to get into the real reporting later.

[NOTE: In case you’re wondering who Hirsh is, he’s national editor for Politico and former foreign editor for Newsweek, as well as former member of the former JournoList.]

Polls: I just don’t see Trump winning

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want to look at some depressing polls on Donald Trump, see this and this.

Things can change, I know.

It’s early, I know.

But Trump’s abysmal showing in the polls against another weak candidate, Hillary Clinton, has been remarkably consistent, with only a few minor and transient upswings. This is something Trump supporters deny or explain away (and by the phrase “Trump supporters” I mean the diehards who supported him in the primaries over the other GOP candidates, not the reluctant ones who only support him now that it appears to be him or Hillary).

To accomplish their negation of the bad news on Trump, they usually cite what happened in the primaries. He started low and finished strong there, didn’t he? Yes, indeed he did. But early on—back in August—I noted with alarm that Trump had a decent chance of winning the GOP nomination, because it was becoming clear. I do not think the same about the general election.

In the primaries, Trump had a certain appeal to about 30-40% of GOP voters. With the remainder of the GOP voters, the field was split many ways. But now we have the general, not the primaries, and with a different and more diverse voting population that includes Democrats and Independents he faces off against only two people at the moment: Hillary Clinton and Gary Johnson. His popularity is in the tank, and he will have trouble not only with Democrats but most definitely with Independents and even with many Republicans.

It’s a recipe for disaster. That’s not to say it couldn’t turn around, but I just don’t see it happening. I say that with no joy. I see this campaign year as a tragedy, and I’ve felt that way for a long long time because I’ve taken his candidacy and his chances of winning the nomination very seriously. Even back in August of 2015 I wrote that Trump could end up becoming the GOP nominee:

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

I think the Democratic nominee’s fears have been assuaged, because voter rejection of Trump seems to be picking up speed right now. That fact gives me no joy whatsoever. Much as I detest Trump, I have been edging closer to the incredibly distasteful act of voting for him, for the obvious reason that on the whole I think Hillary Clinton could be worse (believe me, it’s a close call). To me, this is a lose/lose election, and a Donald Trump loss is something like an unfunny version of the old joke “the food is bad, and such small portions.”

As for the GOP, there are plenty of articles about how the Republican Party has destroyed itself (see this and this for two examples). But in my opinion those authors have the wrong focus. Trump never was the choice of the majority of Republican voters, except in a few states towards the end when a combination of weariness and momentum finally put him over 50% in those states. Trump’s nomination is the result of being the preference of a minority of party members (plus another unspecified number of non-party crossovers) who had become extremely angry at the GOP over a period of many years. Call it an insurrection, a hostile takeover, a rebellion, a civil war, it never was the party itself and in fact such voters had declared themselves to be at war with that party.

Once this sentiment found expression in support for Trump—which happened pretty early on in this primary season—it was check and then checkmate. The GOP only had one chance to save itself, which was to somehow winnow the field drastically and quickly, and even then it probably was not a way out for the party for the simple reason that Trump voters had already defected. They were not going to support the party’s nominee unless it was Trump. And without their support, that nominee would probably lose. But if the nominee were Trump, the party would probably lose the votes of the many Republicans who felt (and still feel) him to be an outrage and a danger for conservatism.

Lose/lose.

The problem was that the civil war had begun many years earlier, and for many many Trump supporters (remember how I defined that phrase earlier in this thread) he is merely the “tool” with which to dismantle the party. Revenge, ain’t it sweet? Those on the right who say they cannot support Trump are accused by many of his supporters of betrayal and of wanting Hillary to win, or at least not caring whether she wins. But I think it’s actually the other way around for a great many Trump supporters, who for months and months during the primaries declared that their goal was to destroy the GOP and then to rebuild it in their own image. If you destroy the opposition party, isn’t it logical to think that the other party (in this case, Hillary Clinton) will almost inevitably win the election?

The other Pavlova…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is Nadezhda, a Russian ballet dancer who burst onto the scene in the 70s dancing with the Perm Ballet and then the Bolshoi, and who revolutionized the “look” of ballet. I remember the first photos I saw of Pavlova, she of the extraordinarily hyperextended legs and exaggerated extensions.

Nadezhda was an excellent dancer, strong and expressive. But to me her line seemed somewhat distorted and gymnastic rather than balletic, the type of thing that had been frowned on previously as circus-like.

But she was a sensation, and the beginning of what I call “extreme ballet,” a trend that has persisted to this day and has replaced the more classic and restrained lines, and the emphasis on expression, of the dancers of my youth (not that Pavlova wasn’t also in my youth, but it was a relative youth by that time).

Here she is in rehearsal clothes, and you can see the exaggerated curve of her hyperextended legs and her large, dramatically arched feet:

npavlova

It almost seems impossible that she can hold her balance so well, because the sway of her legs (both of them, but especially the supporting one) would tend to throw her torso off-center and make it hard to find a balancing point over her hips. But somehow she did it, and the effect was electric.

[NOTE: I have hyperextended legs, too, so I can attest to how hard they are to manage. But mine are fairly mild compared to Pavlova’s.]

ADDENDUM: You might want to see a demonstration of how Pavlova’s hyperextensioned legs worked in motion, and also of her style. Here’s a clip from 1977. Pay particular attention to her supporting leg:

John Kasich “just can’t” support Trump…

The New Neo Posted on by

…right now:

“You know, it’s painful. It’s painful. You know, people even get divorces, you know? I mean, sometimes, things come out that, look, I’m sorry that this has happened,” the Ohio governor said in an interviewaired Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “But we’ll see where it ends up. I’m not making any final decision yet, but at this point, I just can’t do it.”

I’ll tell you what’s painful—the fact that, during the primaries when it mattered, Kasich had no trouble supporting Trump by staying in the race himself long long past his pull date.

Main wreckage of EgyptAir Flight 804 located in Mediterranean

The New Neo Posted on by

They seem to have found the site of the wreckage of the EgyptAir flight that came down about a month ago in the Mediterranean, killing all 66 people on board.

Previously there had been parts of the airplane and some bodies, but this is the main area of debris, which has now been photographed:

Ships and planes from Egypt, Greece, France, the United States and other nations are searching the Mediterranean Sea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria for the jet’s voice and flight data recorders, as well as more bodies and parts of the aircraft.

Egypt’s civil aviation minister has said he believes terrorism is a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event. But no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet…

Wednesday’s announcement came after Egyptian investigators said that time is running out in the search for the black boxes. They said on Sunday that only five days remain before the batteries of the flight’s data and cockpit voice recorders expire and they stop emitting signals.

…Finding them without the signals is possible but more difficult.

I hope they hurry up and succeed in finding them; we don’t want another airplane crash mystery. I strongly suspect that some sort of terrorism was involved.

Failure to connect the dots on Mateen

The New Neo Posted on by

We already know that the FBI had investigated Orlando shooter Omar Mateen twice, and that although he had made very suspicious remarks to his colleagues at work, nothing raised enough red flags to cause the authorities to take him off the job or even to continue to monitor him.

This is why:

Mateen first came to the FBI’s attention in 2013, when he was a security guard and co-workers heard him say he had connections to al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and that he hoped to martyr himself in a confrontation with the law, according to Comey. The FBI opened a preliminary investigation, which allows agents to conduct limited surveillance and searches, but not to use its most aggressive tools (like FISA or Title III warrants)”¦

Let’s just think about that for a moment. My first reaction is that this should have been more than a “preliminary investigation,” especially because this man was not employed at Burger King, he was a security guard in sensitive situations. But I suppose it might have mattered whether it was one person making the report (which could have been just a grudge thing, as far as the FBI was concerned) or many. In Mateen’s case it was obviously “many,” so the FBI doesn’t have that excuse.

This is what happened then:

Preliminary investigations of terrorist suspects can run for six months in search of evidence the person is a member of a terrorist group or is planning a specific terrorist attack. The agent on the case can get a six-month extension if he or she thinks there might be more to find”¦In Mateen’s case, the FBI got one extension of the preliminary investigation, then closed the case after a total of ten months.

Are they merely looking for official membership and/or a specific attack? Apparently there must be acts or plans for acts—sympathies are not enough, even for someone in a security position such as Mateen’s. It sounds rather similar to what happened with Nidal Hassan, the Ft. Hood shooter.

Now, I’m all for protecting citizens’ liberties and for innocent till proven guilty, and I don’t think thought-crime should be a charge. But somewhere along the line there must be more that can be done with people in positions of trust who have engaged in such obviously suspicious behavior. Should they lose their security clearances? Not be allowed to buy firearms? Is this a compromise of liberty that we should tolerate in the name of protection, or does it go too far and can be too easily abused?

At the very least, should they not be followed, rather than closing the investigations? Here are the current guidelines, which I think are obviously inadequate:

Murphy, the FBI’s former number two who worked with then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni in revising the bureau’s investigative guidelines, says they discourage agents from monitoring potential terrorists over the long-term. Those guidelines retained the requirement that any preliminary investigation that did not produce evidence of a crime must be closed after six months. “Someone should have been monitoring [Mateen’s] social media 24/7,” Murphy says. “but under the guidelines that is not allowed,” he says.

We are very sensitive to government intrusion, and I think we should be. But when someone has indeed expressed sympathies with violent terrorist groups and has demonstrated communication with members of such groups, I think ongoing monitoring (particularly of social media, which is not a private but a public thing) is absolutely warranted. If the problem is money, more funds need to be allocated. But the problem seems to not be money, but will.

I doubt that will change after Orlando.

Here’s another dot that was not connected:

The owner of a Florida gun store said Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen tried to buy body armor and bulk ammunition from his store just a few weeks before the shooting but his staff turned him away.

“We knew by the questions he was asking he was suspicious,” Robert Abell, a co-owner of Lotus Gunworks in Jensen Beach, Florida, told ABC News…

An an alert salesperson refused to sell to Mateen, and Abell said he contacted authorities about Mateen before the massacre. The local sheriff’s office said it was unaware of the incident at the gun store, and other local authorities, including the local FBI office, have not responded to ABC News’ requests for comment.

Mateen got weapons (not body armor) from another store, as we know. But here’s a huge red flag that should have been connected to the previous red flags of the FBI investigations. Why not? Is it mere disorganization? Or is there another prohibition on putting two and two together and acting on it? Either way, this is a systemic problem that needs correction but probably won’t get it.

I feel a sense of outrage and frustration. It’s one thing to say that hindsight is always 20/20 and you can’t predict in advance. It’s true. And I want to protect our liberties. But this was the proverbial smoking gun, several times over. And it ended up with actual smoking guns and a lot of dead bodies of innocent people.

[ADDENDUM: See also this.]