Ugly outfits are not all alike

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are two very ugly outfits that don’t resemble each other at all.

One is not exactly a dress; it’s what I think is called a jumpsuit, meaning an all-in-one pants outfit that makes it very hard to use the ladies room and looks good on almost no one and yet periodically returns to the fashion world. This one combines the jumpsuit esthetic with the current trend for peekaboo breasts held up by something more physician-enhanced than the designs of Mother Nature.

Cara-Delevingne

This one is quite the opposite. First, there’s the color, a yellow that almost no one can wear successfully with the possible exception of redheads. The dress is an attempt at ballgown formality crossed with modern ironic casualness, and it succeeds on neither level, giving the viewer the impression that the wearer has either put on a dress too big for her or has failed to fasten some important element of the garment.

Katie-Holmes

The jumpsuit reminds me somewhat of Rudi Gernreich’s monokini, which those of you of a certain age may remember:

Think of something in your life that took 1/60th of a second to do. Now, imagine having to spend the rest of your life talking about it. I think it’s a beautiful photograph but, oh, am I tired of talking about it.”

But I guess that she liked the notoriety at the time:

Gernreich1964

1964, I remember it well. Fifty years ago.

French Prime Minister manages to say what Obama won’t

The New Neo Posted on by

From France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a declaration of war that is surprisingly specific:

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” Mr. Valls said during a speech in é‰vry, south of Paris.

It remains to be seen what France is willing to actually do in that war. But naming the enemy is at least a first step.

Here’s an interesting fact:

Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State militant group.

I’m not sure what “large numbers” means, but it’s a very disturbing development. Does the French government know the names of these people? If so, is it prepared to strip them of their citizenship?

Connecting the dots with the Charlie Hebdo terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

All three perpetrators in the recent terror attacks in France—the two Kouachi brothers at Charlie Hebdo, Coulibaly at the kosher market—were known to French authorities. And not just known, but well known to be jihadis who supported the Islamic terrorist cause. They also knew each other, and Cherif and Coulibaly had been convicted of terrorist-related offenses and had served time for them.

A summary:

Said, the elder of the Kouachi brothers, spent several months in Yemen in 2011, receiving weapons training and working with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to U.S. officials.

His younger brother, Cherif, has a long history of jihad and anti-Semitism, according to documents obtained by CNN. In a 400-page court record, he is described as wanting to go to Iraq through Syria “to go and combat the Americans.”…

Cherif was a close associate of Coulibaly, a Western intelligence source told CNN.

Here’s a lengthy article about their known ties, both to each other and to other terrorists. It’s an impressive list. Read the whole thing and you’ll end up wondering, as the author of the article does, how they could possibly have slipped through the radar screen:

It’s not as if, 10 years ago, the threat posed by these young men was unrecognized. “Those who aren’t dead and who come back will be the future chiefs of al Qaeda or Zarqawi in Europe,” French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard said at the time. But then, as now, there was no clear way to end it.

In Kouachi’s case, the court sent him to prison from January 2005 to October 2006, and there he began a new stage in his radicalization in the company of a new mentor, Djamel Beghal, who had plotted an attack on the U.S. embassy in Paris in 2001. After Kouachi got out, he was accused of joining a plot to free one of the most notorious terrorists held in France, Smaé¯n Aé¯t Ali Belkacem, who is serving a life sentence for his role organizing the bombing of a commuter train in central Paris in 1995.

It goes on, and on, and on. Why is it so hard to regard people like this as ticking time bombs who must be deported (if non-citizens), watched like hawks if they haven’t yet committed a crime and are citizens, or put away for a long, long, long time if they have committed one*? Why aren’t crimes of terrorism given penalties that are longer than a year or two, which is obviously way too short?

The fact that there may be too many of these people in a country like France (or the US, for that matter) to properly monitor them is no excuse whatsoever. Two of these three people were actually in the prison system and were then let out prematurely, and that could be seen even without the hindsight of knowing what they were about to do subsequently.

[NOTE: *I also have written a lengthy post arguing that in some cases, citizens who join terrorist causes should be stripped of their citizenship.]

Coco’s choice

The New Neo Posted on by

Do you remember the William Styron book Sophie’s Choice? First published in 1979, it was a literary sensation and became a movie starring Meryl Streep. Sophie was a Christian Polish woman who ended up in a concentration camp during World War II, and was forced by the Nazis to make an agonizing split-second decision about which child of hers to save and which to sacrifice.

To me, the theme of the book was how, in a situation of dire peril in which those bent on destructive evil are in charge, ordinary people are placed in situations in which they are required to make moral and ethical decisions when under extraordinary duress. And not just in the camps, either, because during the war everyone had to decide about the extent of their collaboration with evil (for example, join the Resistance, or keep a low profile?).

No one knows in advance how brave he/she will be. In the case of the fictional Sophie, she suffered for the rest of her life from the emotional consequences of the decisions she made, although she would have suffered no matter what decision she made because there really was no good one.

Which brings us to the woman, nickname “Coco,” who tapped in the security code that allowed the Charlie Hebdo killers to enter the magazine’s office and do their nefarious work.

As soon as I read about her I was struck by her dilemma. She was with her young child, and both were explicitly threatened by the armed killers. Probably the “right” thing, if looked at objectively, would have been to sacrifice her life and the life of her child. But none of us knows what we would actually do in such a case and we hope we’ll never face any decision even remotely like that.

Richard Fernandez has written an essay on the subject that says exactly what I would have said if I could write like Richard Fernandez. I suggest you read every word, but here’s an excerpt:

The assailants gained admittance by forcing a cartoonist to enter the door security code at gunpoint. A large percentage of people ”” maybe nearly everyone ”” would have done the same thing, yielded to that threat, in a moment of fear. A certain smaller percentage, perhaps 2 percent, would for some reason refuse; and refuse unreasonably without quite knowing why. Which of the two groups one belongs to nobody knows until the day…

Years ago there was a story about an Israeli security guard who grappled a suicide bomber outside a supermarket where they both blew up. It is doubtful the guard did it for his salary; nobody dies for a pittance. It is doubtful that he even knew what he was going to do until he did it. It was just one of those things you find out about yourself in a moment.

“Well, whadda ya know?” Boom. It’s nice to know you’re made of stern stuff. But it’s a helluva way to find out.

Fernandez then goes from a discussion of individual bravery to one of cultural and institutional courage. It’s our lack of the latter that could really do us in. Here’s how he puts it:

Leftist orthodoxy now accepts the innocence of Islamism as an article of faith,…They are too completely invested in multiculturalism, social deconstruction and redistribution to doubt the faith now…

And therefore they will cling to their dogma, however improbable it might be, long past the point when any reasonable Leftist would have doubted it. This is the most dangerous aspect of the crisis facing the West. Not only are we in danger of tearing our politics apart, we must. It has now become a case of destroying our civilization in order to save it…The cultural elites of the West are going to hang themselves in the morning according to a schedule that they themselves have devised.

Do you think our elites won’t punch the door buttons to let the killers in to shoot us? They already have. They already have.

It’s that last sentence that sends the chill up my spine. It’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking for over a decade. Our own failure to tell the truth about what’s happening and the nature of the enemy, and to face the seriousness of the task ahead of us, has been made clear since shortly after 9/11. In fact, it was probably clear long before that, but after 9/11 it became undeniable.

Congress’s next step on immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s planned for the new Congress:

The House plans to vote next week on legislation that would defund President Obama’s executive action on immigration.

Republicans also plan to include language rolling back a 2012 order from the Obama administration that gave legal status to illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children.

The two measures would be considered as part of a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security through September. An earlier government-funding measure approved last month only funded that agency through February…

Mulvaney said Republicans debated in their closed-door meeting whether to focus solely on Obama’s move to shield illegal immigrants from deportation, or whether to attack the president’s policies on multiple fronts.

Some more moderate, swing-district Republicans “wanted the rifle shot, … maybe didn’t want to muddy the waters,” Mulvaney said. “But there were other voices in the room who said they wanted a chance to get at DACA, to get at the Morton memos” that relaxed some immigration laws in 2011.

Apparently the latter group won—for now.

However, there’s the Senate:

Even if the funding bill passed in the House, it’s unclear whether Senate Republicans would be able to muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a likely Democratic filibuster.

And the White House:

The White House has repeatedly said President Obama wouldn’t sign a spending bill for DHS that undermines his executive actions, and Democrats quickly went on the attack.

The first step is Republican unity, and that seems to be in place. But it’s only the first step. Unfortunately, the Republicans don’t have the numbers to overcome a filibuster or a veto, so they need to either enlist enough Democrats to make a difference (good luck with that), or do something more “creative,” perhaps involving changes in the filibuster rule? Either way, they also must be prepared to have a showdown over a possible government shutdown.

The election of 2014 was merely the beginning of a fight that will be long and hard, and will require much intestinal fortitude on the part of Congressional Republicans. I have no idea whether they have the stomach for it, but I fear they don’t.

Reporting from France

The New Neo Posted on by

The fog of war is operating in France right now, but reports are that the Charlie Hebdo killers have themselves been killed in a shoot-out with police, and the hostage they took has been freed.

However, a related French terrorist/hostage situation seems to have not ended so well:

The police also killed another hostage-taker, described as an associate of the brothers, in a separate assault on a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Three hostages were killed and five injured at the market, although it was not immediately clear how many of those may have been shot in the final assault. Five hostages were reported to have been freed unharmed, a senior French police official said.

Some news outlets are reporting that four hostages were killed at the market. At this point all of this information is subject to change, although the death of the Kouachi brothers and freeing of their hostage seems to have been confirmed by a police spokesman, who said:

The special counterterrorism forces located where the terrorists are and broke down the door. They took them by surprise. It lasted a matter of minutes.

The Jews of Paris have been leaving for years, as the climate there becomes more and more hostile to them. These recent incidents are a sign as to how right they were to do so, and I wouldn’t be surprised if emigration from France goes up a notch once again.

There are many questions remaining about these attacks that may never be answered, but here are a few that seem important:
(1) How on earth did the Kouachi brothers evade surveillance long enough to plan and execute these killings? They were well known to authorities. The gap here must have been the size of the Grand Canyon.
(2) How on earth was security lax enough at Charlie Hebdo for them to succeed? The fact that the periodical was a huge target was well known to authorities.
(3) How did the woman perpetrator at the kosher supermarket escape, if the site was ringed by police?

And above all is the overriding question: what on earth will it take for the West to wake up?

Independents rising

The New Neo Posted on by

The number of US citizens who call themselves “Independents” has risen in recent years. Here’s the graph:

independents

You can see that the increase in Independent affiliation has come at the expense of both parties, although slightly more from Democrats during the Obama years. However, Democrats had spiked right before Obama’s election, so the number had been especially inflated.

What does it all mean? Who are Independents, anyway? For example, I am an Independent, but the truth is that I don’t vote Democratic and can’t envision doing it again. Most people lean more one party or another, and probably choose the designation “Independent” more to signify disillusion with the party of their choice and/or both parties than much of anything else:

The decline in identification with both parties in recent years comes as dissatisfaction with government has emerged as one of the most important problems facing the country, according to Americans…

Although independents claim no outright allegiance to either major party, it is well-known that they are not necessarily neutral when it comes to politics. When pressed, most independents will say they lean to one of the two major parties. For example, last year an average of 17% of Americans who initially identified as independents subsequently said they “leaned” Republican, 15% were independents who leaned Democratic, with the remaining 11% not expressing a leaning to either party.

Since partisan leaners often share similar attitudes to those who identify with a party outright, the relative proportions of identifiers plus leaners gives a sense of the relative electoral strength of the two political parties, since voting decisions almost always come down to a choice of the two major-party candidates. In 2014, an average 45% of Americans identified as Democrats or said they were Democratic-leaning independents, while 42% identified as Republicans or were Republican-leaning independents.

That the three-point Democratic edge was down from six points in 2013, and among Democrats’ smaller advantages the past 25 years. Democrats usually hold an advantage in this combined measure of party affiliation. In fact, the only year Republicans held a notable edge since Gallup began tracking independents’ political leanings was in 1991, the year Republican President George H.W. Bush’s approval ratings soared after the United States’ victory in the Persian Gulf War…

A year later, Clinton became president, so that margin didn’t mean all that much, did it? Of course, the 1992 election featured a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, who siphoned away some of Bush’s support. Politics is unpredictable; who could have foreseen that in 1991?

The Charlie Hebdo terrorists and Western tolerance

The New Neo Posted on by

The still-at-large suspects in the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France fall into the dreaded category of native-born jihadis. The brothers Kouachi, one of whom had served time for trying to get to Iraq to fight the Americans, apparently fell off the radar screen afterwards—or at least enough off the radar screen to have successfully perpetrated the heinous attack yesterday.

Or did he? I was wondering how, considering that the assailants were masked, the brothers had been identified so quickly by police. This is the only information I’ve seen that sheds any light on that subject:

It said that the police had identified the suspects after one left his identification papers in the abandoned Citroé«n vehicle used to escape after the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

To me that seems rather odd. Why would either suspect be carrying ID in the first place, under the circumstances? And why would that ID have been kept in the car? It’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility, of course. But it’s also at least remotely possible that the ID was a plant of some sort in order to deflect attention from the real perpetrators.

Islamist terrorist perpetrators in Europe rely on the tolerance of Western countries in order to operate. That tolerance takes several forms. The first is a tolerance of immigration; the Kouachis were born in France, but they are of Algerian descent, and most terrorists so far have either been immigrants or the children of immigrants. The second is, of course, religious tolerance; Islam is not the traditional religion of the West and yet Muslims are not discriminated against and are allowed to practice their religion freely. The third is freedom of speech, and that is the one that terrorists utilize when it serves their purposes but fight when it allows speech they consider offensive and/or blasphemous.

That’s the hallmark of the Muslim presence in the West: take advantage of the tolerance they need, and fight the tolerance that bothers them, relying on the goodwill of the locals to accommodate their contradictory demands. The Charlie Hebdo attack was not an act of terror perpetrated on random individuals; it specifically targeted freedom of speech and of the press, two of the pillars of Western society. Will this function as any sort of wake-up call for Europe?

It will be very interesting to see how France—and the rest of Europe—reacts. If the brothers are captured alive, will they be tried as murderers or terrorists? France has abolished the death penalty—would there be calls to reinstitute it?