Here are the answers

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are the things on that list I’ve done, and those I have yet to get around to:

”“bought a new car

A lot of people thought I’d surely done this. But no. Probably never will, either, although about four years ago I bought my dark green Fusion used. Still looking mighty spiffy, if I do say so myself. I like to buy slightly used cars because they tend to be a really good deal.

”“painted my toenails

Yes, indeed. I do it myself, though. Never had a pedicure. I don’t like people messing with my feet.

”“been fired, or fired anyone

This one still holds.

”“had my horoscope done

Nope. Don’t believe in it, although it would be sort of fun.

”“eaten anything bigger than my head

That would be hard, wouldn’t it? But this Christmas holiday I ate enough lebkuchen to sink a ship. And the last piece tasted as good as the first.

”“lied about my age

Alas, to my great shame, I uncharacteristically succumbed to the temptation under a special set of circumstances. But not again.

”“worn a T-shirt that said anything

Yes, a borrowed one.

”“kissed a man with a beard

Yep.

”“seen any of the “Godfather” movies

One evening I figured enough was enough and decided it was time to get with the program and fulfill my cultural obligations as a red-blooded American. So I watched the first two in quick succession, a regular Godfather marathon (didn’t watch the third because I’d heard it was dreck). They were intermittently interesting, and I love Al Pacino, although much less so Marlon Brando. But did I feel the movies are among the all-time greats, as so many seem to think? No, no, a thousand times no. Violent and cold, why should I care about this gangster family? I realize that 90% of Americans may disagree with me, in many cases quite vehemently.

”“owned a cat, or wanted to

No, and no, and probably never. I am a dog person through and through.

As for your guesses: no one got all five right, but many people were pretty darn close. The big stumbling block seemed to be the new car. Doom and LB both got four right, but Doom guessed the car instead of the toenails and LB guessed the car instead of the bearded man. Both NeoConScum and southpaw got four but guessed the car instead of the T-shirt. Parker got four, too, but guessed the cat instead of the age.

Somehow, after all these years of writing this blog, I bet you sense a lot about me.

Another missing airliner

The New Neo Posted on by

Sadly, an AirAsia flight leaving from Indonesia and bound for Singapore has gone missing with 162 souls on board.

Unlike the still-disappeared Malaysian flight, the AirAsia flight lost contact in a specific area and had reported bad weather immediately prior to the vanishing, so there is hope that we will know more in the not-too-distant future about what happened.

10 things I’ve never done—not

The New Neo Posted on by

I was looking for something else last night and instead came across this post from early in my days as a blogger, nearly ten years ago. It was written in answer to one of those memes that used to be tossed around among bloggers when the whole blogging endeavor was relatively new: a request that I list 10 things I’d never done.

The first thing I noticed about the post is that it was Norm Geras who gave me the meme. He was a big blogger back in the days, and very helpful to a lot of us when we were first starting out. But alas, Norm is no longer with us; he died a little over a year ago (my tribute to Norm is here).

As for that list, here it is again:

10 Things I’ve Never Done

”“bought a new car
”“painted my toenails
”“been fired, or fired anyone
”“had my horoscope done
”“eaten anything bigger than my head
”“lied about my age
”“worn a T-shirt that said anything
”“kissed a man with a beard
”“seen any of the “Godfather” movies
”“owned a cat, or wanted to

What a difference almost ten years makes. It turns out that since then I’ve done 5 of the things on the list. Which ones do you think they might be?

Ludwig von Mises has some things to tell us (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

I read a tremendously relevant quotation from the philosopher and economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) the other day and decided I’d have to learn more about him:

Mises’s greatest contribution [was] his demonstration that socialism cannot function as a rational economic system and that private ownership of the means of production is necessary if value is going to be maximized and waste is going to be minimized in the production process.

…He demonstrated that it was impossible to know whether a particular production process was wise (resource-optimizing) or unwise (resource-wasting) in the absence of prices for the means of production. His socialist critics accepted this, and Oskar Lange suggested that a statue of Mises be given a place of honor by the socialist Central Planning Board…

Mises’s arguments, and the arguments of those who have followed him, do not merely undermine arguments for pure, global socialism. They also undermine arguments for interventionism more generally. Economists take a lot of heat for focusing on market exchange and material prosperity, and it is fashionable in some circles to say that “there is more to life than economic efficiency” as if that decides an argument in favor of intervention. Not so: people respond to incentives, even when you don’t want them to, and the knowledge-destroying and incentive-distorting effects of interventionism all too often bring with them unintended consequences that not only reduce economic efficiency but also harm precisely the intended beneficiaries of the intervention.

Obviously a man to be reckoned with, although even some on the right have felt he was too extreme, and later he become fairly isolated within the profession. He marched to nobody else’s drummer, and had the courage of his convictions and then some. He’d seen the Nazis come to power, and wasn’t about to be cowed by a bunch of his fellow economists.

Somewhere along the line I lost the original quote that prompted me to read about him, but since Mises is eminently quotable I had no difficulty whatsoever finding more of his writings that appealed to me. I don’t agree with everything he wrote, but I found so many quotes to admire and ponder that I’m going to break this post into two parts, in order to give you time to savor how brilliantly stated and apropos they are to today. And remember, most of them are from the 1920s through the 1960s:

How one carries on in the face of unavoidable catastrophe is a matter of temperament. In high school, as was custom, I had chosen a verse by Virgil to be my motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito. Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. I recalled these words during the darkest hours of the war. Again and again I had met with situations from which rational deliberation found no means of escape; but then the unexpected intervened, and with it came salvation. I would not lose courage even now. I wanted to do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in saying what I knew to be true.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

The social system of private property and limited government is the only system that tends to debarbarize all those who have the innate capacity to acquire personal culture.

Seen from the point of view of the particular group interests of the bureaucrats, every measure that makes the governments payroll swell is progress.

A government enterprise can never be commercialized no matter how many external features of private enterprise are superimposed on it.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.

History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

No civilized community has callously allowed the incapacitated to perish. But the substitution of a legally enforceable claim to support or sustenance for charitable relief does not seem to agree with human nature as it is… The discretion of bureaucrats is substituted for the discretion of people whom an inner voice drives to acts of charity.

Since the third century Christianity has always served simultaneously those who supported the social order and those who wished to overthrow it. . . . It is the same today: Christianity fights both for and against Socialism. [That was written in 1922, by the way].

[To be continued…]

The guilty police

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of the recent furor over some of the incidents in which black people have died at the hands of police is understandable. The death of Eric Garner was a situation in which it is not a stretch to say that police may have been at fault, and the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice pointing a BB gun that looked like a semiautomatic weapon at people was likewise a complex and controversial judgment call.

But the continuing outrage at the death of Michael Brown, who was clearly attacking a police officer, and the recent shooting death of a Berkeley Missouri man who was pointing a very real gun at a policeman, indicates that at this point there may be no killing of a black person by police that would be acknowledged to be justified by a certain segment composed of leftists and many black activists.

To them, there is literally no behavior by a black person that would justify police self-defense. Police are defined as racist and abusive until proven innocent, and the bar to proving innocence is extraordinarily high and perhaps even insurmountable. Have we gotten to the point where all perps are innocents, and police are expected to be willing to die as sacrifices to avoid even the barest possible whisper or accusation of racism?

It is strangely similar to the situation we have arrived at with President Obama, in the sense that there now appears to be practically nothing Obama could do that would lead to impeachment, or even to the black community (or liberals) turning on him. The rejoinder towards his critics is always racism, and Obama himself has encouraged this from the very start.

It is, to say the least, an over-correction.

Picture time

The New Neo Posted on by

This sort of thing always intrigues me.

It’s a series of photographs of the four Brown sisters, taken every single year for the last forty years. My guess is that the sisters are very roughly my age, and it’s a sobering series to look at. I’m just going to reproduce the first one and then the most recent photograph for your perusal; you can study the rest at the link:

brownsisters1975

browns2014

For many people, one of the hallmarks of aging is weight gain, which can make a person look even older, and a woman more matronly and frumpy. The Brown sisters seem to be on the naturally slim side; I don’t see a whole lot of weight gain in the photos, and yet time has not spared them.

Perhaps they live an exceptionally outdoorsy life without much sunscreen. Perhaps makeup—which all four seem to have eschewed for their entire lives—would help, especially as the bloom of youth wears off.

Maybe some of it is where the photos have been taken. Outdoor natural light is okay if it’s not direct sunlight, but the latter is harsh and especially unforgiving. In fact, as time progresses in the photo series, sometimes it seems to go backward and the women look younger in a later photo than an earlier one, which I attribute to the vagaries of lighting.

But much of what I notice has to do with emotions. The commentary at the article talks about the physical closeness of the sisters as the years go on, and the assumption is this expresses an emotional closeness. And perhaps it does. I don’t have sisters myself, but I don’t perceive so very much closeness when I look at the photos. It’s as though the closeness expressed by the touching is overriden by some other coldness I sense.

Perhaps it’s the New England thing. In general, having lived here for many years, I have to say the trend is for people to not be as touchy-feely-warm as those in more southern climes (and nearly all climes in the US are more southern).

But I wonder whether my perception about the sisters’ closeness is actually because of the complete absence of smiles in the photos. It’s not only the light that’s rather harsh in these photos, the affect is as well.

This is a decision the women must have made early on. We will not smile! Why that is I don’t know. Perhaps they wanted to defy convention and expectations for portraits. Perhaps they wanted to exhibit a gravitas despite their youth. Perhaps they realized they were making a document for the ages. Perhaps they’re just not a naturally smiley bunch. Perhaps the photographer (the husband of one of the women) suggested the seriousness. Perhaps they wanted to do something different. Well, they succeeded.

Why am I harping on the passage of time and the advent of aging in the photos? It’s almost unavoidable because of the format; you might say it’s the series’ theme. We know virtually nothing about the women other than their sisterhood, their New England setting, their clothing, and the fact that we see in stark highlight the passing of time reflected in the human face and form.

One of the ways in which age announces itself isn’t just lines and wrinkles and sags in the face and body, it’s also that instead of looking more like each other over time, the sisters resemble each other less as they grow older. Time etches a different tale in the face of each, and although we can’t read it clearly, we can see that each has become more distinctly herself, with her own private and public sorrows and joys marked on features that were once smooth despite their solemnity.

On Seeing Weather-beaten Trees

Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

Columbia is investigating Rolling Stone re Erdely’s UVA piece

The New Neo Posted on by

This Slate article makes the point that there’s a lot we don’t know, and need to know, about Erdely’s article and the “research” behind it, as well as the decisions made by editors at the publication Rolling Stone. Another issue is what UVA knew and how it treated the allegations even before the article was written.

The Slate author wonders:

In his editor’s note, Wenner still hangs on to the notion that the story accomplished an important goal even if the central narrative was false. Before mentioning the inaccuracies, he points out that “the article generated worldwide attention and praise for shining a light on the way the University of Virginia and many other colleges and universities across the nation have tried to sweep the issue of sexual assault on campus under the rug.” The problem is that the story’s central narrative and Rubin Erdely’s assessments of the university’s behavior are interwoven, so it’s impossible to fully trust her conclusion. The media has mostly been focused on Jackie, but in some ways this is the more important question: How accurate is Rubin Erdely’s description of what the university did or didn’t do?

The university listened to Jackie and told her what her options were. It was Jackie who failed to take the story further, and subsequent revelations about Jackie’s duplicity have borne out the wisdom of UVA’s decision, at least in the Jackie case: Jackie didn’t go to the authorities because her story was a fabrication, as it turns out.

Yes, it would be interesting to know whether the university investigated further (how hard they tried to find the elusive and unnamed head perp who in fact didn’t exist, for example). It would also be interesting to know whether officials at UVA suspected that Jackie was lying, and if so why.

But why continue to act as though UVA is guilty of something here? I know, I know; people on the left want that to be the case.

And forgive me if I don’t think that the Columbia Journalism School, the designated investigator, is going to be an unbiased font of objectivity.

Merry Christmas…

The New Neo Posted on by

…from Yaacov Ben Moshe at Breath of the Beast:

It was those fiercely independent Protestants who set the tone for the nation in which we now live. Their adamant spiritual presumption of the liberty of the human soul is, still today, the great central mast that lifts the canopy of democracy and holds it above us as a sanctuary from the extremes of despotism and effete decay that afflict most of the rest of the world.

‘Twas the Blogger’s Night Before Christmas

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This small poetic effort of mine has become somewhat of a holiday tradition at neo-neocon. So here it comes again—just like the holiday itself. Merry Christmas Eve to you all!]

‘TWAS THE BLOGGER’S NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the ”˜sphere
Bloggers were glad to see Christmas draw near.
Their laptops were turned off and all put away
The bloggers were swearing to take off the day.

Their children were nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of extra time danced in their heads
With a father or mom not distracted by writing
No posts to compose, and no links to be citing.

But we all know that vows were just meant to be broken
And the vows of a blogger can be a mere token.
There’s always a chance that some sort of temptation
Will rise up to make them of fleeting duration.

For instance, there might be found under the tree
A sleek Mac; well, what better sight could there be?
And who could neglect it and wait the whole day?
It cries to be tried out, one just can’t delay.

Or maybe somewhere there’s a fast-breaking story
Important, and possibly leading to glory.
It can’t be ignored, there’s really no choice,
So add to the din every blogger’s small voice.

And then there are some who may just like to rhyme
(I’m one who at times must confess to this crime),
And it’s been quite a while since Clement Clarke Moore
Wrote his opus (though authorship’s been claimed by Gore)””

So it seems about time it was newly updated
And here’s my attempt””aren’t you glad you all waited?
Forgive if it sounds a bit awkward to read.
In writing, I set a new record for speed.

I had to get under the wire and compose it
Before Christmas Day. Now it’s time that I close it.
But let me exclaim (or, rather, I’ll write)
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!

Here’s a video of the original, with some 50s-type nostalgia for those who remember. There are a few odd anomalies (“safe in their beds” instead of “snug in their beds”). But it brought back memories of pincurls, and the days when parents were assumed to sleep in twin beds (even though I don’t recall that most people did).

I think I had the book on which this is based. The illustrations look very familiar:

The rent-controlled apartment market in NYC is crazy

The New Neo Posted on by

This is the sort of thing you get:

An unemployed Upper West Side woman using Airbnb to rent out rooms in her huge Central Park West apartment has been ordered to stop doing it by a Manhattan judge.

Supreme Court Justice Carol Edmead said in a decision that Noelle Penraat, 62, appears to have made a substantial income over the past two years through Airbnb and that’s a violation of both rent control and zoning laws.

Penraat, a photographer who has been mostly unemployed since 2006, said in a court affidavit that she was forced to use Airbnb to pay her $4,477 monthly rent and other mounting bills.

Penraat qualified for rent control because the apartment had been owned by her father (who was, by the way, a Dutch architect who during the war saved “406 Dutch Jews from the Nazis by smuggling them from the Netherlands to France where the Resistance got them out through Spain”). She inherited the rent-controlled apartment.

This is much the way rent control works in NY, or in San Francisco as far as I know (the two big centers of rent control in the US). It seems arbitrary in the sense that it’s based on when you first got the apartment. It hamstrings landlords and pits them against tenants. It encourages tenants to cling to apartments and discourages turnover. And it distorts the market by artificially lowering some rents and forcing landlords to raise the rates even higher on the others.

Penraat’s apartment, by the way, was not only rent-controlled but her rent was also subsidized by a special program for the elderly who make less than 50K a year. The unemployed Penraat apparently made considerably more than that, but only through the mechanism of renting her rooms out to strangers. The apartment itself, a four-bedroom deal on the Upper West Side, was probably mighty nice—that’s is extraordinarily spacious by New York standards.

Note that, despite rent control, the rent was about four and a half thousand a month. With the small subsidy from the elderly program, Penraat was apparently paying about $4,200 a month. That’s quite a chunk of change, about $50,000 a year just for rent. And remember, that’s for a rent-controlled apartment. Without rent control, estimates are that her digs would cost about four times as much.

If you’re curious, here are the rather complex rules governing rent control and rent stabilization (two different programs) in New York. You will note that rent control only affects about 2% of units in the city, but rent stabilization affects about 40%. New York City, of course, involves five boroughs that have wide differences in the housing stock they offer; I couldn’t find a borough-by-borough breakdown in order to isolate the situation in Manhattan from the others (my guess is that the percentage of apartments under rent control are somewhat higher in Manhattan than in most of the other boroughs).

Here’s an article that talks specifically about Manhattan rent stabilization (the far more common and less extreme program) and its effect on the rental market:

And in Manhattan, the price gap between a rent-stabilized and a market-rate unit has never been greater, according to a study released this spring by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

Even before the spike in market-rate rents over the past year, rent-stabilized rates were, on average, $1,245 a month cheaper.

“The competition for a $4,000 one-bedroom is now fierce,” said Yuval Greenblatt, a vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman. “So you can imagine how strong competition is for something below market value.”

The study also found that, despite the widespread impression that stabilized apartments are meant to provide affordable housing (and they certainly keep housing prices stable for hundreds of thousands of people), many of those fortunate enough to land one in recent years have been relatively well off.

Like most liberal programs, it doesn’t quite do what it supposedly set out to do, does it?