The dancer’s body

The New Neo Posted on by

Meet Misty Copeland, a soloist at American Ballet Theater, one of the premier dance companies in America:

Because the dancer’s body is her (or his) instrument, the fact that Copeland is black becomes more of an issue than it would be in other artistic endeavors. So, that’s what people tend to talk about when they talk about Copeland.

To me, though, it’s far more interesting that she has an atypical sort of physique for a ballet dancer than that she has an atypical color skin. Copeland is more chesty than almost every other professional ballet dancer on earth, as well as more mesomorphic.

And how tall do you think she is?

The answer, very surprisingly, is 5’2″. That’s an example of what I was talking about years ago when I wrote:

But in the dance world in general, height does not make right. The stage adds height to dancers rather than subtracting it, so audiences might be very surprised to learn how miniscule some of their towering favorites actually are.

Because of her muscularity and proportionately broad shoulders, Copeland comes across as especially tall. According to this New Yorker article, she went through puberty late and her body changed after she had already attained a high level of achievement, making it necessary for her to relearn how to deal with a new center of gravity. That is very hard, but she had already done something almost unheard of—begun the study of ballet at the ancient age of thirteen. She’s strong and athletic, not delicate at all. She’s a good dancer rather than a great one, in my opinion, but the same could be said for most dancers today. I saw American Ballet Theater perform on my recent trip to New York, but unfortunately she wasn’t on the program. I’d like to see her in person and make my decision that way; videos don’t quite tell the whole story.

[NOTE: The following is a bit of inside baseball. But as far as floor barre goes, I don’t know what the woman’s talking about in the New Yorker article, because back in my day a teacher named Zena Rommett was known far and wide for her floor barre in NY. It sounded so easy—do your exercises lying down on the floor rather than standing up—but I found it confoundingly difficult to do when I tried it in my twenties while rehabbing from my first back injury.

Also the author says that Copeland’s hyperextended knees leave her more vulnerable to injury. But hyperextended knees are extremely common among dancers, almost standard (I have them too, although not to the same degree as Copeland). My guess is that it was Copeland’s late start in ballet that has made her more vulnerable to injury.

On researching Rommett for this article (I hadn’t thought much of her since the 1970s), I learned that she taught ballet until three months before her death at the age of 90. Strong lady, like so many other dancers.]

First aid

The New Neo Posted on by

Now people who initially give aid at the scene of trauma such as the recent shark attacks in North Carolina have three tasks. The first and second are to administer first aid and have someone call 9/11. The third is something we don’t ordinarily think about, and it’s a relatively new one: protect the injured person from the prying eye of the ubiquitous cell phone camera.

Two teenagers face a long recovery after being bitten in separate shark attacks off Oak Island Sunday evening.

Dr. Borden Hooks, the surgeon who operated on the pair Sunday night, said Monday afternoon that the prognosis for both was good.

A 12-year-old girl was bitten near the Ocean Crest Pier just before 5 p.m., and the attack on the 16-year-old boy happened about an hour later near the 55th Street beach access, authorities said. Both were in waist-deep water about 20 yards from shore, Oak Island Town Manager Tim Holloman said…

“When we first got to the beach, a lot of the bystanders were helping,” said Tracy Carnes, a Brunswick County paramedic. “They helped carry our stuff to the beach and then a lot of them were just helping shelter her from photos being taken of her.”

It’s a natural human impulse: to document. Now almost everyone has the tools at hand most of the time. These attacks were especially grisly, and remain mysterious. Why were two people attacked, when shark attacks are so rare to begin with? And attacks by such a large shark are also especially rare in such very shallow water.

Who are the escaped murderers in NY, and why…

The New Neo Posted on by

…oh why were they given the prison privileges they appear to have been given?

The answer to the first is: among the most psychopathic, cold-blooded killers in the prison population, and that’s saying something. Both of them have been known to be criminals since adolescence and have never looked back. What’s more, the report of those who knew them is of relentless exploitation of other people, and hardly a glimmer of anything you might call a conscience.

Here’s Sweat’s story. It’s not a pretty one. And Matt’s is, if anything, worse:

Age: 48

Early life: He grew up in the small city of Tonawanda, New York, near Buffalo. Classmates told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle that Matt was often in trouble as a child. “He would terrorise kids on the (school) bus,” Randy Szukala told the newspaper. As a teenager, he ran away from home on a stolen horse. Eventually, Tonawanda police Capt Frederic Foels told the Democrat and Chronicle, he became a “small-time thug”.

Previous crimes: Matt had been known to law enforcement for years, committing numerous offences, but his most serious crimes appear to have started in the late-1990s. In 1997, a fisherman found the dismembered body of William Rickerson, a Buffalo businessman, in the Niagara River. Investigators zeroed in on Matt – one of Rickerson’s former employees. But Matt fled to Mexico before he could be arrested. While there, he reportedly killed an American man in a bar, landing him in a Mexican prison. He was eventually sent back to New York in 2007. Matt was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life with no chance of parole before 2032.

Matt falls into a particular category of psychopathic killer known as the escape artist. It’s a potentially more lethal combination than “psychopathic killer” alone, for obvious reasons. This is Matt’s escape history; it’s impressive.

As for Sweat:

Age: 34

Early life: His mother, Pamela Sweat, told the Press & Sun-Bulletin of Binghamton, New York that her son had a troubled childhood and had violent tendencies. “I don’t want nothing to do with him,” Ms Sweat told the newspaper. “He has tormented me since he was nine years old, and now he’s 34 and I feel like he’s still doing it.”

Previous crimes: In 2002, a New York sheriff’s deputy caught Sweat and his cousin, Jeffrey Nabinger, with stolen guns. But when the deputy, Kevin Tarsia, tried to arrest them, the pair shot Tarsia 15 times and ran him over with their car…

So, tell me: why were Matt and Sweat given the following prison privileges? Are the prison authorities insane, stupid, or both?:

The killers seemed the wrong match to put in adjoining cells, a combustible combination promising no good. They were both callous, early adopters of a life of lawlessness. They could be wily. One had demonstrated escape skills. The other was a systematic schemer, reading blueprints, sketching maps, mulling over the fine details of crime…

They served their time on the so-called honor block, housing gained through good behavior that allows greater freedom of movement, the right to cook meals and the benefit of wearing street clothes in your cell.

Read the whole thing; it will make your blood run cold.

Remember that:

When [Matt] returned to New York in 2007 [to stand trial], authorities exercised extreme caution. The New York Times reported that measures included staffing the courthouse with double the usual number of deputies and making Matt wear an electric stun belt.

Quote: “He is the most vicious, evil person I’ve ever come across in 38 years as a police officer.” Gabriel DiBernardo, a retired captain with the North Tonawanda Police Department, told the New York Times.

Matt not only has a history of creative and repeated escape attempts, he has also made explicit threats to a detective who worked on the case:

And now that Matt’s on the run again, a retired detective who helped lock him up is sleeping with one eye open ”” and his finger on the trigger.

“I stayed up pretty late last night, and I’m armed with guns,” former Tonawanda cop David Bentley, 67, said Sunday. “I had a tough time sleeping, knowing he could come around.”

Bentley, who has a home security system and a watchdog, also said, “We have patrols keeping an eye on some of the retired guys who dealt with him.”

The night before his 2008 conviction for the grisly murder of William Rickerson, Matt wrote a chilling letter to Bentley.

“You lied in court to [expletive] me over for the DA,” Matt wrote. “You also make it very clear that we are not friends. I’ll remember both . . .”

At the time, Bentley said the three dots suggested “there’s more to come.” On Sunday, he said he hadn’t forgotten the warning.

“This is a tense situation ”” he’s absolutely capable of anything.”

Actually, I know the argument for allowing a man like that to benefit from the usual rewards for good behavior in prison. It goes like this: he’s there for life, or at least many many many years, and there needs to be some possibility of rewards for his cooperation or he’s going to make the place miserable the whole time. Having no rewards at all increases his dangerousness because he has nothing to lose by acting just as bad as he can, and nothing to gain by acting better.

But surely there should be some limits to what a man like that can gain by cooperation. Psychopaths tend to be smart and very good at conning people, and this guy was also an escape artist. He should never, for example, have been placed in a unit where he could wear civilian clothes. And yet he was—that, and more.

Most of the coverage of Matt and Sweat’s escape has focused on the sex, and on the charm they exercised on prison employee Joyce Williams, who assisted them in their escape. But it was a crime of opportunity. If they hadn’t found Williams, they’d have found another Williams. And another, or another. Maybe they did; who knows at this point how many people helped them with the breakout? The entire escape episode was nearly inevitable—and that’s another crime.

You may notice…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that I haven’t written much about Jeb Bush throwing his hat into the ring yesterday.

Nor will I write about Trump joining the crew today.

I’m tired of both of them already. In fact, I was tired of both of them quite some time ago, but for different reasons.

I’ve written about Bush recently, here. ‘Nuff said—except to reiterate that he is boring, and that I have said ever since this election season began that I don’t think he’ll win the nomination.

Trump is a lot of things, but one of them isn’t boring, although he’s become tedious. He’s just not a serious candidate. However, he sucks a lot of air out of the room with his gift for publicity.

[ADDENDUM: And a candidate I’m far more interested in, Carly Fiorina, went on “The View” today and reportedly did very, very well.

Smart. “The View” is a place where she’s going to get the hard, hard questions and face a group of women arrayed against her, but she also gets the opportunity to reach a lot of other women who might be shocked enough at her poise and brains to take a serious look at her.]

The most popular poem…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in the English-speaking world—and perhaps the world as a whole—has quite a backstory:

Frye, who was living in Baltimore at the time, wrote the poem in 1932. She had never written any poetry, but the plight of a young German Jewish woman, Margaret Schwarzkopf, who was staying with her and her husband, inspired the poem. Margaret Schwarzkopf had been concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, but she had been warned not to return home because of increasing anti-Semitic unrest. When her mother died, the heartbroken young woman told Frye that she never had the chance to “stand by my mother’s grave and shed a tear”. Frye found herself composing a piece of verse on a brown paper shopping bag. Later she said that the words “just came to her” and expressed what she felt about life and death.

Frye circulated the poem privately, never publishing or copyrighting it. She wrote other poems, but this, her first, endured. Her obituary in The Times made it clear that she was the author of the famous poem, which has been recited at funerals and on other appropriate occasions around the world for 60 years…

What makes poetry “great”? “Do Not Stand…” would not be on any of my lists of great poems in terms of poetic craft. In fact, I don’t know that I’d ever encountered it before yesterday. But in terms of a demonstration of poetry’s ability to reach people and convey something deep and meaningful, one would be hard-pressed to come up with one more “great.”

On the biological underpinnings of the idea of race

The New Neo Posted on by

A previous thread led to a discussion of just what the word “race” means—whether it refers to something fixed and physical, or whether it’s one of those “socially constructed” ideas.

“Race” is a convenient way to refer to human variation. It refers to collections of traits that people long ago observed to cluster differently in different populations in different parts of the world. But if you plot each trait separately (such as skin color, for example), you’ll find that there is a lot of variation within each race and across races, and that the traits are often independent of each other. In other words, traits that describe a certain race when in combination (such as skin color AND blood group AND head shape AND nose shape) do not have the same distribution geographically, and they tend to have no lines of demarcation but to slowly segue from one trait to another.

However, it’s also true that, on average, the traits do have very different distributions within the different races, and that certain traits (such as skin color) have come to seem emblematic of each race—so much so that many years ago the races were commonly designated by colors and this language persists to a certain extent.

All races can mate with members of the same race and of all other races and cause mixtures of traits in the offspring. The reason black people who reproduce with each other tend to have black children re skin color is that (a) we define a VERY wide range of skin color as “black”; and (b) genes for very light skin, although possible in black people, are exceedingly rare (albinism, although also very rare, occurs somewhat more frequently, but is not particularly relevant to this discussion).

This teaching on race is not just a recent PC innovation, either. It was very well known back when I was in college and I remember studying it in depth (although I certainly don’t recall the details) in physical anthropology. See this for some charts/maps of traits and their variation geographically. See this for more, as well.

Race has pretty much always been political, and it remains so. The effort to tease out the science of race is dogged by political considerations, too. For example, the idea of a Hispanic “race” seems incorrect in the physical sense, but in the political we know that it has gained quite a bit of traction.

Carly Fiorina wears well

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve come to the conclusion that Carly Fiorina is the sort of person where the more you hear, the more you like. Her manner is exceptionally composed, unruffled. She criticizes without undue polemics, and yet she manages to be hard-hitting. She doesn’t flinch from questions, and although her answers are careful and measured they don’t come across as the usual self-serving, mendacious, political claptrap.

In short, I think she will be getting more attention as time goes on—and not just because the fact that she’s a women makes her an excellent counter to Hillary Clinton.

Want to go gray?

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a vogue for it among young women, apparently.

The process is simplicity itself. All you have to do is:

Lesson #1: Start with healthy hair and scalp.

…It turns out that you need to have a healthy head of hair before bleaching or stripping your hair. “If we bleach your split ends, they will fall off,” Javier told me matter-of-factly…

Lesson #2: Don’t wash your hair at least five days before your appointment.

When you are going platinum you want as much natural oil in your scalp as possible…So I tied my hair up in a greasy ponytail for a week. “Use dry shampoo sparingly and only if you have to,” Javier advised me.

Lesson #3: The darker and coarser your hair, the longer it takes to go platinum.

Before you can gloss your hair gray or silver, you have to go platinum. This is a time- and chemical-intensive process where your colorist slowly strips the dark pigments from your hair until you look like Goldilocks. I arrived at Sally Hershberger Downtown at 9 a.m. and I didn’t leave until 9 p.m. We started bleaching my hair the moment I arrived at the salon, but we didn’t finish the bleaching until about 5 p.m. The chemicals burn and itch a bit on your scalp, which is why you need a healthy scalp to begin with. By the time your hair is blonde, it will be noticeably drier and potentially of a different texture than you’re used to…

Lesson #4: You need to gloss every two weeks.

Once you’ve processed your hair blonde, you need to gloss your gray, and re-gloss every two weeks because while your hair is permanently removed of pigment (until it regrows), your pigment gloss will eventually wash off. ..

Lesson #5: It’s high-maintenance and it’s not cheap.

I was always a fan of dollar store shampoos and conditioner. I didn’t care because everyone liked my long voluminous hair regardless. Now that my hair has become more fragile and prone to breakage after bleaching, I have to follow the following rules:

A) Wash hair once a week using products formulated especially for color-treated hair…

B) Be gentle with your hair.
When you’re lathering up in the shower, you need to gently massage your scalp. Always air dry your hair when possible. “Treat your hair like a newborn baby,” Javier says. “It’s really fragile…

C) Use a leave-in conditioner to lock in color…

D) Gently rub oil into your ends.

OR—

You can just wait a few decades and save yourself the hassle. I can assure you that sooner or later, if you live long enough, it will happen.

By the way, the effect achieved by the lengthy and difficult process described in the quote is not anything like real gray hair, although I suppose the women doing this don’t want “real” gray hair. I once mentioned to a friend of mine that gray hair isn’t gray, it’s a mixture of depigmented (white) hairs and whatever your natural color might be in the hairs that still retain their pigment. Slowly, over time, the color mix of the hair lightens as a larger percentage of the hairs become white. She was flabbergasted; she had thought that hair went gray in some uniform way—that grey was a stage each hair passed through on its way to white.

[NOTE: Some photos here of the results of the gray-dying process on the young.]

Yes, the seemingly-white can be black

The New Neo Posted on by

At least, people who have (as Rachel Dolezal falsely claimed to have) at least one biological parent who is black can actually look unequivocally white. It shows you how strange the topic of racial affiliation is, and how there’s quite a bit of crossover in phenotype.

Does a white-looking person with a black biological parent identify solely as white on the basis of phenotype? Or does cultural identity play a role? Why do we even care, or do we—or should we?

A good example of what I’m talking about is Eartha Kitt and her biological daughter and granddaughter:

eartha

Here’s another—actress/dancer Victoria Rowell and her biological daughter and son (her daughter’s father was white and her son’s father was black; Victoria herself is mixed-race):

"Annie" Opening Night to Benefit CASA of Los Angeles - Arrivals

There are many many more examples that show the vagaries of heredity and race. But if you’re inclined to mock the Spokane NAACP for being so gullible as to accept Dolezal as a bona fide black person, it’s instructive to remember the people pictured above. How do they identify themselves? Biracial? They in fact do have one black parent.

The most intriguing examples of racial phenotypes being tricky (particularly regarding skin color) are fraternal twins where one of the pair looks black and one white. There are a number of twins featured on YouTube that fit that description—for example, these sets:

Biology shows how arbitrary many of our racial classifications can be. There are clusters of traits that vary across the globe in different combinations to create the shorthand categories known as race. As we move about more and more, and the gene pool becomes more mixed, the categories will become more fluid.

By the way—we have the heritage of Alexander Pushkin, father of Russian literature:

Ossip Abramovich Gannibal’s father, Pushkin’s great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696”“1781), an African page kidnapped and brought to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. Abram wrote in a letter to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, that Gannibal was from the town of “Lagon”. Largely on the basis of a mythical biography by Gannibal’s son-in-law Rotkirkh, some historians concluded from this that Gannibal was born in a part of what was then the Abyssinian Empire. Vladimir Nabokov, when researching Eugene Onegin, cast serious doubt on this origin theory. Later research by the scholars Dieudonné Gnammankou and Hugh Barnes eventually conclusively established that Gannibal was instead born in Central Africa, in an area bordering Lake Chad in modern-day Cameroon. After education in France as a military engineer, Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually Général en Chef (the third most senior army rank) in charge of the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.

That black ancestry is a lot more distant than a parent, but it’s still interesting; I learned about it in college, long ago. Here’s a portrait of Pushkin:

pushkin

On the subject of the fast-track trade bill…

The New Neo Posted on by

… otherwise known as Obamatrade, I trust Jeff Sessions far more than I would trust Ryan. Sessions claims:

If, as promoters amazingly suggest, the President had more powers without fast-track, he would veto it. The authority granted in “Trade Promotion Authority” is authority transferred from Congress to the Executive and, ultimately, to international bureaucrats. The entire purpose of fast-track is for Congress to surrender its power to the Executive for six years.

Not a good idea at all.

If Obama is so hot for the bill to pass, it is difficult indeed to believe it would be one that limits his powers rather than expands them, although that’s what Ryan would have you believe.

Sessions explains the bill’s impact:

Finally, it must be observed that this is not a “free trade” deal. It is, as Daniel DiMicco explained, a ”˜unilateral trade disarmament’ and ”˜the enablement of foreign mercantilism,’ whereby we open our markets to new foreign imports and they keep their non-tariff barriers that close their markets to ours. President Obama refuses to answer questions about the impact on unemployment, wage stagnation, and trade deficits. He refuses because the answer is all three will get worse.

Although the House voted the bill down decisively yesterday, the fight’s not over. Apparently the plan is to bring it up for another vote next week. But I’m not sure there are enough twistable arms to get this bill to pass. Its rejection was strongly bipartisan, although for different reasons for each party.

It reminds me a little bit of the Enabling Act in Germany in 1933—not in degree, because the Enabling Act had an enormously broad sweep compared to the narrow one of the trade bill. But the upshot of the trade bill would be that Congress itself would be voting to give Obama more power.

To extend the somewhat-strained analogy, McConnell would be acting in the role of Ludwig Kaas, the head of the Centre Party and an opponent of Hitler who in 1933 nevertheless acquiesced in the Enabling Act and helped it to pass.

The Enabling Act is famous for being the mechanism by which the Reichstag effectively voted itself out of power and out of relevance. Hitler wouldn’t have needed it if he’d had a strong enough majority in the legislature, but his party had been unable to obtain it through the previous election despite tons of intimidation by the Nazis towards the opposition and the populace. So he decided to finesse the public by cobbling together enough of a coalition to give him powers that would make it unnecessary for him to worry about how the Reichstag would vote thereafter. One coalition, one time, and his troubles were over. A combination of threats, arrests (of the Communists, for example), physical intimidation, and lying promises did the trick. Kaas (who was a priest) was lied to, although it’s not clear whether he believed Hitler’s promises or just didn’t see any alternatives to succumbing:

Later that month, from 15 March, [Kass] was the main advocate supporting the Hitler administration’s Enabling Act in return for certain constitutional and, allegedly ecclesiastic guarantees. Hitler responded positively via Papen. On 21 and 22 March the Centre leadership negotiated with Hitler on the conditions and reached an agreement. A letter, in which Hitler would confirm the agreement in writing, was promised by the government but never delivered.

Kaas – as much as the other party leaders – was aware of the doubtful nature of any guarantees, and, when the Centre fraction assembled on 23 March to decide on their vote, he still advised his fellow party members to support the bill, given the “precarious state of the fraction”, saying: “On the one hand we must preserve our soul, but on the other hand a rejection of the Enabling Act would result in unpleasant consequences for fraction and party. What is left is only to guard us against the worst. Were a two-thirds majority not obtained, the government’s plans would be carried through by other means. The President has acquiesced in the Enabling Act. From the DNVP no attempt of relieving the situation is to be expected.”

A considerable group of parliamentarians however opposed the chairman’s course, among whom were the former Chancellors, his nemesis Heinrich Bré¼ning and Joseph Wirth and former minister Adam Stegerwald. The opponents also argued in regard to Catholic social teaching that ruled out participating in an act of revolution. The proponents however argued that a “national revolution” had already occurred with Hitler’s appointment and the presidential decree suspending basic rights, and that the Enabling Act would contain revolutionary force and move the government back to a legal order. Both groupings were not unaffected by Hitler’s self-portrayal as a moderate seeking co-operation, as given on the Day of Potsdam of 21 March, as against the more revolutionary SA led by Ernst Ré¶hm.

In the end the majority of Centre parliamentarians supported Kaas’s proposal. Bré¼ning and his followers agreed to respect party discipline by also voting in favour of the bill.

On 23 March, the Reichstag assembled at midday under turbulent circumstances. Some SA men served as guards, while others crowded outside the building, both to intimidate any opposing views. Hitler’s speech, which emphasised the importance of Christianity to the German culture, was aimed particularly at assuaging the Centre Party’s sensibilities and almost verbatim incorporated Kaas’s requested guarantees. Kaas gave a speech, voicing the Centre’s support for the bill amid “concerns put aside”, while Bré¼ning notably remained silent.

If you look at Hitler’s speech before the vote, it will probably send a shiver of dread down your spine for its duplicitous and soothing message to those of a religious bent. Also, in Orwellian fashion, the Act was actually called (in German, of course), “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich.”

Only one person, the leftist Otto Wels, spoke against it. What happened next was telling:

After [Wels’] speech ended, Hitler took to the podium once more, working himself into a rage and dropping the mask of pacifism. In his final appeal to parliamentarians, he asked them to “sanction that which we could have taken anyway.”

Doesn’t that say it all?