Obama and 2016: a dream is a wish your heart makes

The New Neo Posted on by

And Brian Beutler has a dream, which he unveils at TNR:

The challenge, then, is to make sure Clinton’s age and ethnicity don’t discourage Obama’s youthful, diverse supporters from turning out in November 2016. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make sure that doesn’t happen. Clinton simply has to select Barack Obama as her running mate…

As a purely textual matter, the Constitution merely prohibits Obama from being elected to a third term. It doesn’t necessarily prohibit him from actually being president again, should Hillary Clinton no longer be able to serve. And were he on the ticket, Clinton’s potential liabilities with Obama loyalists would disappear.

Beutler may be joking. Or maybe not. But he’s creative; I’ll say that for him.

Conservatives have long been wondering how Obama could contrive a third—and fourth, and fifth—term as president. The leading theory has always been the idea of his engineering or exploiting some sort of crisis and declaring a national emergency that requires the suspension of the rule. Or, alternatively, having Michelle run. Beutler is helpfully offering still another option, although one that would probably be discouraged by the huge egos of both Hillary and Obama, as well as their mutual enmity.

In terms of popularity, though, I bet it could work. There are still enough voters who would happily follow Obama over any cliff.

As Caleb Howe points out at RedState, however:

Beutler’s whole idea misses a pretty big point. The last sentence of the 12th amendment reads “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”

That might seem to forbid the whole endeavor, since the 22nd Amendment forbids Obama from running for president again. I’m not entirely sure, however, whether “constitutionally ineligible” is the same as “barred from being elected.”

Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.

Are men eager to call themselves “handsome”?

The New Neo Posted on by

In my post about the video featuring women who had to choose between doors marked “beautiful” or “average” and opted mostly for “average,” commenter “Molly NH” wrote:

All the men would head for the handsome door, even the ones who look like Elton John!

But I disagree.

Women tend to think of the word “beautiful” as describing a desirable and very laudable state, one they yearn for. But men (at least in my experience) don’t feel the same way about “handsome.” There’s something mildly effeminate or at least not-quite-admirably macho about it for men (at least, there used to be; I may be out of date here). It’s not that men don’t want to be attractive to the opposite sex; they do. But “handsome” is a little too much, suggesting a male model or something that doesn’t denote action and strength, someone who preens and spends too much time combing his hair.

On the other hand, men do tend to overestimate their body attractiveness and have much better body images than women. But that’s not quite the same as designating oneself with the word “handsome.”

Commenter “Anna” elaborated:

I was once told the same thing re: “handsome” and effeminacy by a man. He was of the opinion that “cute” and “sweet” were worse, though.

He also claimed what I alluded to in my previous point, but unlike me he was sure convinced about it, claimed it in no uncertain terms. He said that men are “beautiful” (or “pretty”, or “handsome”, or what have you) only insofar as they possess more of the qualities that are *proper to women* (i.e. that the degree of that which we call “beauty” in a man is directly proportional to that which they call effeminacy)…

I think, however, that some exceptional female beauty also has a certain androgynous touch to it ”“ a female form so sharp in its quality that it ceases to be fully female, some feature of it breaches out. I was never quite sure how to explain it and for all the art history I have studied nobody has been able to put it into words coherently, although many have agreed on the general point (“beauty”, as one extreme end of aesthetic experience, having an androgynous quality to it).

As often happens on this blog, the commenters say things that are more interesting than the original post itself.

I will add that the male movie stars I’ve liked over the years have never been conventionally handsome, except for Paul Newman, who was in a class all by himself. Among my favorites was Steve McQueen—not exactly a pretty boy, but incredibly magnetic.

Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

Running.

Let the cheering and the coronation begin! The MSM is certainly doing its part.

Liberals will vote for her, and it does not matter what her record is or how much it implicates her in corruption or lies or even just really really bad decisions. As I said to a liberal I know recently, she covered herself in shame while acting as Obama’s SOS. And that’s just a small, small part of it.

None of it matters, except to those to whom it matters. The real questions are whether there are enough moderates, swing-voters, and low-information voters to whom it will matter—and who her opposition will be. There are many people who don’t think all that much of Hillary but who would never, never ever vote for a Republican.

So that’s where we are.

Pregnant again—at 65

The New Neo Posted on by

Annegret Raunigk of Berlin, Germany is sixty-five, and she decided that having a baby would be just the thing.

It’s not that Raunigk lacked for children; she’s got thirteen (by five different fathers), and the youngest is nine. Not to mention seven grandchildren.

But her 9-year-old wanted “a little brother or sister,” and so Annegret took the plunge via artificial insemination. But since a 65-year-old ordinarily cannot be made to ovulate, even with all the hormonal priming in the world, both donor eggs and donor sperm were used. That means that, although Raunigk is now pregnant with quadruplets (as happens more often with artificial insemination, because multiple embryos are usually implanted in order to heighten the odds of ending up with a baby), none of them are her biological children.

I can understand surrogate mothers who gestate a baby that isn’t their own because they are trying to help a couple in which the woman for some reason cannot carry a baby to term. But why would a 65-year-old with thirteen children feel she just must have the pregnancy experience again, and be willing go to such great lengths to do so? More importantly, how on earth can she get a doctor to cooperate?

Oh, I know, I know; there appears to be something compulsive going on here on the part of the woman, and something unethical and/or money-grubbing on the part of the doctor.

Plus, it’s Germany. Who footed the bill? The state? No article I’ve seen seems to offer that little detail, or even ask the question. The research I’ve done only goes up to 2008, but it appears that it would be Raunigk herself who would have to pay out of pocket, even in Germany.

As someone with libertarian leanings, I guess I shouldn’t care if a woman such as Reunigk decides to do this, especially if she pays for it herself. On the other hand, it seems to me that there should be some limits on medical interventions that could endanger a person’s life (as I believe this probably does, even though Raunigk is sure she’ll be fine and I suppose she’s more likely than not correct) for seemingly no reason other than whim. This should not be considered good medical practice, but I suppose you can always find a doctor willing to do almost anything, and that’s probably what happened with Raunigk.

You can’t look up the risks for a 65-year-old woman in pregnancy and delivery, because there are no statistics. And you really can’t look up the risks of a 65-year-old woman having quadruplets, because there really are no statistics. Raunigk seems to be it. But she’s not quite alone:

At present, the oldest woman to have given birth to quads is Merryl Fudel, who was 55 at the time.

The oldest woman ever to give birth is Indian Omkari Panwar, who was believed to be 70.

Raunigk should hope she doesn’t go the way of Fudel, though. The article about Raunigk doesn’t go into what happened to Fudel and her children, but in a separate article I found this:

One quadruplet, Brooke, lived just eight days…

Fudel surrendered two of the quads, Brianna and Brittany, for adoption, according to one of her ex-husbands.

The fourth child, Dario, remained with his mother, who could not be located for this report.

“I am not surprised she kept the boy and gave away the girls,” said her third ex, Thomas Cunningham, 81, of San Diego. “She was nutty as a fruitcake.”

Nothing is known about the surviving kids’ current health, but, born three months prematurely on April 18, 1998, they began life with a host of serious problems. Their medical tab hit $2 million in just four months. It was paid by the state-funded MediCal program because Fudel was unemployed.

All of these older mothers who become pregnant were carrying babies conceived with donor egg and sperm. And lest you think they are all rich or Western, think again and take a look at 70-year-old Omkari Panwar and her 77-year-old husband:

To pay for the IVF treatment vital to producing a male heir to the family’s smallholdings, the retired farmer sold his buffalos, mortgaged his land, spent his life savings and took out a credit card loan.

And it all paid off when Mrs Panwar gave birth to twins – a boy and girl – by emergency Caesarean section in hospital in Muzaffarnagar, seven hours drive north of the Indian capital New Delhi.

The twins, born a month premature and weighing 2lb each, are healthy, according to doctors.

The Panwars already have two adult daughters, and five grandchildren, but the latest arrivals are what they have been waiting for – not least because a son will benefit from a dowry when he marries and will be able to work their land.

There is apparently no real impediment to finding a doctor willing to cooperate in such a task. My next question, though, is: who is donating the eggs and sperm? Sperm I can understand; that’s easy. But egg donation is a complex endeavor:

The egg donation cycle itself usually takes about 3-4 weeks, and you will be administering self-injections of hormonal medications to help your ovaries produce multiple eggs. During this phase, you will have frequent office visits to monitor your progress. When our physicians determine that your eggs are ready for ovulation, you will trigger ovulation with a different type of injection, and egg retrieval is performed on the next day…

Egg retrieval is always performed under ultrasound guidance. However, there is always a risk that a needle may puncture surrounding tissue or organs causing injury, bleeding and/or infection. There is also a small risk (less than 5%) of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. During ovarian hyperstimulation, the ovaries become enlarged and fluid may collect in the abdominal cavity causing bloating; a weight gain of 5-10 pounds and severe pelvic pain may occur. Hospitalization may be required if ovarian hyperstimulation progresses to a severe state. In addition, certain studies have suggested that some ovulation drugs are associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer…

Are the women donating their eggs told they will be helping a childless couple finally achieve their lifelong dream? Or are they told that someone like Raunigk or Panwar could be the “new” mom of any embryo conceived with their donated egg? And would they care?

By the way, donors receive $8,000 for their pains.

Oh Brave New World that has such people in it!

A taxing task

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of an old post. But it’s still true for me, because—although each year I decide that next year, next year it will be turbo-tax-time or hire-an-accountant-time for me—by the time the day actually rolls around I find that I have continued to think that this year I finally have it under control and don’t need any of those aids that are really for sissies.

Ha! Once again, this year I was wrong, wrong, ever so wrong. But next year…]

I noticed—in this piece that purports to tell us what jobs are probably not going to go out of style in the near (or even distant) future—that “accountant” led the list.

Well, that’s awfully nice—for accountants. But having been up last night till the wee hours of the morning (and even the not-so-wee hours) doing my taxes, I know that, despite the advantages and the job security, an accountant I’ll never be.

What a headache-inducing, cold-sweat-creating, frustration-inspiring chore! Of course, I was more emotionally involved in last night’s endeavor than an accountant would be for a client because, after all, it was my taxes, and my ever-dwindling store of money, that were being taken away. But I also know that doing taxes is an activity I utterly loathe, and I’m not sure you could pay me enough money to take it up as a profession. And I suspect (actually, I know) that I am hardly alone.

My father was a CPA, and I well remember the drill. My parents would go away in mid-February in an attempt to store up some relaxation for the coming assault. But from the time of their return in late February until that long-awaited date in the middle of April, my father would sit at a small table in our living room every night when he came home from work, filling out large sheets of checkered paper and stacks of tax returns. He did this till bedtime, and then got up in the morning and set out to do it again.

Nowadays this is all computerized. But in my father’s era it was a matter of his own brainpower doing the computations and then entering everything by hand. I don’t think he trusted calculators anyway; he trusted himself.

We children tiptoed around him even more than usual because we knew it was tax time. After the magic Ides of April things improved, but till then you stayed away and stayed quiet.

I think my father enjoyed the neatness of math, and took pride in his reputation as one of the best accountants around. He also was a lawyer, and so he didn’t do this all year, although for a few months it seemed to take over everything.

I think some people have an affinity for seizing the messiness of life and trying to impose order on it through numbers, and some of those people are called accountants. The rest of us can either pay them to do our taxes, or gnash our teeth every April as we do our own—and reflect in awe on those for whom this is an everyday event.

accountantpaper.jpg

Last call for donations!

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, not really last call.

It’s never last call for donations; not as long as I’m blogging. The Paypal door is always open, and you can walk right in.

But this is the last day I’ll ask you for donations. For a while, anyway. If every regular reader of this blog gave just ten dollars (or more if you’re feeling flush), it would add up quickly and be a tremendous help to me.

Many many thanks again to everyone who’s already given. And thank you to all my readers for coming here and being part of it all.

Here we go again

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP: I’m only going to keep the official pledge drive going through this weekend (that means tomorrow). Many many thanks to all who’ve already donated. There’s definitely room for more, though!]

passhat

Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves, doesn’t it?

But it’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit.

Every single donation— large or small—adds up, and helps me a great great deal in continuing the blog. If each and every reader gave even a few dollars, it would be a glorious thing. But whether you decide to donate or not, please keep visiting and keep commenting. I appreciate all of you. Comments and readers are a very big part of what makes this blog work.

I thank you all in advance. I’ll probably repeat this notice every now and then for the next week, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat.

Another change story—sort of, anyway

The New Neo Posted on by

This article is an excellent demonstration of how hard—how really really hard—it is to change one’s political mind.

It’s written by Mitch Ginsburg, a man who appears to be some sort of military expert—at least, expert enough to work for The Times of Israel as military correspondent. He was a huge Obama supporter in 2008, with high hopes, so much so that he wrote letters to wavering relatives talking up how wonderful an Obama presidency would be:

I spoke about the horrors of the American prison system and the plague of racism that continue to rot America from the inside; I spoke about drugs and how only people of color are incarcerated for using and dealing them, while people like George W. Bush and every other person I knew in college was free to pull bong hits, take acid, and boil ”˜shrooms to his or her heart’s content. I think I spoke about African-American role models and education and gay rights.

Ginsburg did not think much of Sarah Palin. He felt that McCain was too old and too sick, and:

Something could happen to McCain. In walks the moose hunter.

And then there was Israel:

As for Israel, I said with all the authority I could muster, it didn’t really matter. No president has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The United States believes in a two-state solution. The occupation of the West Bank and its subsequent settlement with civilians made sense historically, emotionally, but was a horrid piece of irony…

The article goes on to talk mainly about Obama’s foreign policy, most particularly his policy in the Middle East. Ginsburg describes how each step of the way, Obama’s actions as president slowly, very slowly chipped away at Ginsburg’s hopefulness and then even his equanimity about Obama. Despite certain warning signs that were pretty much ignored, it was really only Obama’s reaction to Egypt in 2012 (prior to the US election) that caused Ginsburg to experience the “first crack in my devotion,” when Obama seemed to be naively trusting the Muslim Brotherhood.

But Ginsburg was reluctant to see what was already so plain:

Still, though, I told myself, the president of the United States of America could not possibly believe that political Islam, as practiced by the Brotherhood, was a necessary stage on the path to true democracy.

That’s where the article got especially interesting to me, because Ginsburg is describing something that happens to a lot of people when their previous beliefs are challenged, which is that they cling to those beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary rather than face the dual pain of realizing they had been wrong and comprehending that they’ve been betrayed by someone they had trusted. The first is a blow to the ego, the second a blow to the sense of safety. The first engenders guilt and/or shame, the second anger, doubt, and fear.

Not very pleasant, to be sure. Much easier to shake it all off and say no, it can’t be that way. And that’s exactly what Ginsburg did, because he voted for Obama again in 2012.

This is how he describes that vote:

In November, with no fanfare and…with dwindling conviction, I voted for him again. I believed Obama when he told Goldberg that, insofar as the military option against Iran in concerned, “as president of the United States, I don’t bluff.”

That lackluster, hope-against-hope vote can only be understood in terms of “hope dies hard.” Ginsburg doesn’t explain it any further. Did he even look at Romney (a non-moose hunter), who was saying all the right things about foreign policy? Did Ginsburg even give Romney a moment of serious thought, or did he dismiss the evil Republican out of hand? It is impossible to know, but that’s my guess—“binders of women” and all that.

The rest of Ginsburg’s article is a long list of the bad things that Obama has done in the Middle East since then, “a flurry of events [that] turned my waning and rather lonely support of the president into a clammy and bewildering sense of betrayal.” Aha! “Clammy” usually means sweaty palms, clammy with fear. “Bewildering”—he’s confused, puzzled, and having trouble processing what’s happening. But the all-important word is “betrayal.” Ginsburg feels lied to, and indeed he was.

But it took Obama doing something especially egregious—actually, a series of egregious lies and false promises that constitute betrayals—to get Ginsburg to say the word and to feel in his gut what it actually means. And even now, Ginsburg backtracks a little and says that maybe, just maybe Obama’s “soft power” approach will end up “prevail[ing] before the regime pushes toward the bomb.” Having just listed a host of things that are wrong with that approach, he doesn’t really try to explain why or how that better result might occur. But he clings to that remnant of hope.

Ginsburg ends the piece with a statement that in 2016 he won’t be writing any more letters “imploring” people to vote (he doesn’t say for whom, but I assume he means for the Democrat and not the Republican). But he stops short of saying he’s considering voting for a Republican himself. If I had to lay money on it, I’d say he won’t; at this point he still can’t. Eight years of Obama and he’s barely halfway there.

That’s how difficult a mind is to change.

The beautiful average

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a fuss being made about this Dove video, in which women are asked to choose whether to walk through a door labeled “beautiful” or one labeled “average”:

The idea, of course, is that too many women think of themselves as un-beautiful, and that beauty is a choice, a state of mind of which we all can partake. I suppose there’s a certain truth in that, if we’re talking about inner beauty, beauty of spirit, or even just the fact that, as in the old song, “everybody’s beautiful in their own way.”

But actually, “beautiful” and “average” are words with meanings. “Beautiful” as applied to a woman usually has to do with extraordinary rather than average looks, as in “movie-star beautiful.” And “average” is a mathematical concept more or less equivalent to the mean, a middle point around which most people will fall closer rather than further away. It has no good or bad value attached to it except that it is “more ordinary” as opposed to “extraordinary.”

The video misses the fact that, if everyone is beautiful, then “beautiful” becomes “average.”

Something that’s missing is a door marked “below average.” Such people have to be around, right? Or do they hide inside their homes? But their existence, and the fact that quite a few people must fall into that category, can’t be acknowledged. Other missing doors are “plain” or “unattractive.” That’s because the entire thing is about self-esteem, so those doors can’t even exist in people’s minds. A healthy amount of self-esteem is good. But a realistic appraisal of who and what one is—one’s actual attributes, good, bad, indifferent, or average—is a pretty healthy thing to have, too.

The odd thing about women and self-esteem these days is that, at least as far as I can see, it seems to come in two extremes. “Everyone is beautiful”—and I see women all the time with such great self-esteem that they wear (for example) extreme low-rise jeans from which huge guts protrude (men, i.e. plumbers, have been doing the same for a long, long time). It’s their right to do so, but wouldn’t it be nice to get in line with some sort of reality and dress to enhance our attractiveness rather than hinder it? On the other side of the spectrum, I see women who are lovely as well as slim who fixate on an ounce of fat that no one but they themselves can even perceive, and diet to within an inch (literally) of their lives to lose it. Not the least bit healthy, either.

So how about a celebration of “average”? When Garrison Keillor closes his radio show with this quote, it used to be a joke:

Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Whoever thought the concept would catch on for real?

Feelin’ the Gompertz Law

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s the Gompertz Law?:

What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it ”” 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.

This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly minuscule 0.03% ”” about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth ”” my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

Well, we all know our chances of dying increase as we age. Duh. But the regularity and predictability of the increase is startling, as well as its universality:

Surprisingly enough, the Gompertz law holds across a large number of countries, time periods, and even different species. While the actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that “your probability of dying doubles every X years” holds true. It’s an amazing fact, and no one understands why it’s true.

The body’s defenses seem to have a certain rate of decay, and that’s that.

Why am I writing about his? You can probably figure it out. I’m of the age when more and more people I know—my contemporaries—are wearing down. I had a few friends die in their forties, a few more in their fifties. But they were tragic exceptions, outliers. Now? Trailblazers.