Tom Cotton: quite a resume

The New Neo Posted on by

Newly-minted Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas got a lot of attention for this hard-hitting exchange yesterday:

I hadn’t seen Cotton in action before, and my first thought about him on seeing this (after noticing his laserlike intensity, which seemed to confuse his interrogatee) was, “That guy is very, very, very smart.” My second one was, “He must be a lawyer.”

So of course I had to look him up. A very interesting background indeed:

(1) At age 37 he’s presently the youngest US senator.

(2) He defeated his opponent, sitting Democrat Senator Mark Pryor, by a margin of over 16 points (in 2008, the GOP didn’t even field a candidate against Pryor).

(3) He is a lawyer, and a Harvard Law School lawyer at that (Liz Warren was one of his professors). Actually, he’s a Harvard guy all the way—got his BA there magna cum laude in government.

(4) He’s a combat veteran in both Iraq and Aghanistan:

As an infantry officer and platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division, he was deployed to Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom on May 19, 2006. In Iraq, Cotton was responsible for a 41 man air assault infantry platoon in the 506th Infantry Regiment, and planned and led daily combat patrols. He completed his first combat tour in Iraq on November 20, 2006…

In June 2006, Cotton gained public attention after he wrote an open letter to The New York Times criticizing the paper’s publication of an article detailing a Bush administration secret program monitoring terrorists’ finances in which he called for three journalists, including the Times’ editor, Bill Keller, to be imprisoned for espionage…

Following his deployment in Iraq, Cotton was assigned as a platoon leader at The Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery,[10] where he was responsible for conducting military honor funerals for veterans. In 2008, he volunteered to return to combat duty, was promoted to captain on August 1, 2008, and deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 15, 2008.

In Afghanistan, Cotton was assigned to Laghman Province, just north of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. He was assigned duty as the operations officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he planned and resourced daily counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations for an 83-member joint and interagency team. He returned from Afghanistan on July 20, 2009.

No wonder he’s intense.

(5) His father is a Vietnam vet.

(6) And although this last bit isn’t really relevant to my point, he got married last March, and his wife looks a little bit like a young Bonnie Raitt, only prettier.

Jordan fights back

The New Neo Posted on by

Jordan makes good on its threats to ISIS:

State TV showed footage of the attacks, including fighter jets taking off from an air base and bombs setting of large balls of fire and smoke after impact. It showed Jordanian troops scribble messages in chalk on the missiles. “For you, the enemies of Islam,” read one message.

The military’s statement, read on state TV, was entitled, “This is the beginning and you will get to know the Jordanians” ”” an apparent warning to IS. It said the strikes will continue “until we eliminate them.”

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was paying a condolence visit to the family of the pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, in southern Jordan when the fighter jets roared overhead.

The king pointed upward, toward the planes, as he sat next to the pilot’s father, Safi al-Kaseasbeh.

Do you recall President Obama visiting the families of James Foley or Steven Sotloff or attending their memorial services? I don’t, nor can I find anything about any such visits when I Google the subject. But he had time for an audience with the family of Bowe Bergdahl, because he thought (wrongly) that it would gain him some political advantage.

It will be very interesting to see what else Jordan does now.

The banality of Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

The New Neo Posted on by

I get weary when I read things like the text of President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast:

And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

As Charles Krauthammer so aptly said, that sentence was simultaneously both banal and offensive. That’s a neat trick, isn’t it?

But Krauthammer also said he was stunned. I might have been stunned at one point, but that point would have been a long, long time ago. Now, as I said, I’m weary, because I have come to expect this sort of kneejerk moral equivalence from Obama, this stretching way into the past in order to condemn Christianity and accomplish a neat balancing act.

It’s especially ironic when so very many of the current targets of ISIS jihadis are Arab Christians being persecuted—murdered, tortured, converted, raped—for nothing more or less than their Christian faith.

Rush Limbaugh offers a riff on why he thinks Obama did this:

We have a guy, we have a man who really has a problem with this country…

The US was founded as a racist, slave, bigoted nation, and we still haven’t paid the price for that as far as he’s concerned. Why on earth would you go to the National Prayer Breakfast with thousands of Christians from across the spectrum and insult them?

I agree with Limbaugh’s assertion that Obama has a big, big problem with this country. It’s not only apparent now, it was apparent even before he was elected the first time (this remark of Michelle’s was one of the tip-offs). Remember, also, good old Reverend Wright and his problem with America; it seems Obama may have listened to a few of those long-ago sermons after all.

But I have something to add to Limbaugh’s observation. Obama’s remarks were, as Krauthammer said, banal, and they are banal because they are absolutely commonplace in academia and non-academic liberal circles, boilerplate and kneejerk. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been among liberals and when anything remotely critical of modern-day Islamic terrorists comes up their response is, “Well, of course, all religions…” Or the crusades. Or some guy who’s killed an abortionist in the name of Christianity. Or Baruch Goldstein. Always the futile balancing attempt: the introduction of the ancient versus the present, the isolated incident versus the overwhelming numbers.

Many of the people speaking have themselves rejected their own religions of origin (I’ve observed that quite a few were brought up in fairly religious Catholic households, for what it’s worth). Some were not raised with any religion at all, but seem to hate all religions and consider religious people stupid and even evil. I once had a lengthy argument with a man who claimed that all the wars of the 20th century were religious wars. He is by no means an outlier, either; I’ve often heard that religions have been responsible for most of the evil in the world since time immemorial.

But some of those so eager to condemn Christianity vs. Islam are in fact religious Christians—of the leftist persuasion. There are plenty of such people. And I bet some of them were at that very Prayer Breakfast, nodding and clapping at President Obama’s remarks.

[NOTE: Much of the liberal coverage of the story is of the “conservatives attacked Obama for his remarks” variety. The reaction of the right becomes the story, and Obama becomes the persecuted one.]

[ADDENDUM: Bobby Jindal responds [emphasis mine]:

“It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

Hat tip: Ace.]

Sex and the Duggars: the fundamentalist Christian vs. the liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or may not be familiar with the Duggar family of the reality TV show “19 Kids and Counting.”

I don’t watch the show often, but I’ve seen it now and then, and one theme that began a while ago—the courtship of two of the young adult daughters of the clan—fascinated me into watching quite a few episodes that dealt with it.

The Duggars are Christians of a strict sect practicing modesty and sexual abstinence before marriage, and who believe in giving birth to as many children as God sees fit to bless them with after marriage and not to use birth control. Thus, the 19 kids of the title.

Not everyone would want this, nor could everyone handle the extremely major task of parenting that the Duggars have taken on, but I’ve been impressed by their intelligence and organizational skills. I’m no fundamentalist Christian, but what I perceive in this family is a grounded, loving, thoughtful, and respectful environment. Their courting rules seem extreme, and they are. Lots of people mock and revile them online for them, and consider their kids to be brainwashed and their methods repressive. But what they ignore is the context of love and the fact that these people are not at all anti-sex.

Au contraire. It’s because they have such great respect and awe for sex’s power and force that they want to harness it in the service of the spiritual and transcendent. Does the opposite—engaging in uncommitted sex with perfect “freedom”—invariably make people sexually happy? Of course not, although I suppose it does for some, especially for a while. But postponing all sex—including even kissing or frontal hugging, as the Duggars do, until marriage (their first kiss is on the altar after the ceremony)—while most definitely not for everyone, serves to build sexual desire to a peak most of us probably can hardly imagine. Then, after marriage, with the blessing of family, friends, and church, that desire can be fully indulged.

From what I see of the three young couples in the Duggar family so far (and the parents), they are very happy indeed within marriage, and sex is the least of their problems and constitutes a deep and lasting bond. It’s not their only bond, however. Their overtly-stated reason for sexual postponement while courting is the realization that sex is so powerful it can cloud the issue of whether two people are compatible enough in other ways to have a successful and lasting and happy marriage, and their abstinence gives them time and space to fully explore the extent of that mental, emotional, and spiritual compatibility. Watching the couples together, it is hard to avoid seeing their great love and attraction for each other (it doesn’t hurt that the Duggars are all very attractive physically, as well).

Which brings us to the need to tear down and mock them. I understand that their position is so extreme that few would embrace it or be able to go through with it even if they wanted to, and it invites satire. But I contend that much of the satire comes not only from a misunderstanding of the Duggars and why they take the stance they do, and/or a hatred of religion in general, but an envy for what is so obvious—their personal happiness in the sexual, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their lives.

[NOTE:Here’s an example of the sort of thing I mean, which appeared in The New Yorker.]

Liberals to SCOTUS: why, you can’t change Obamacare now!

The New Neo Posted on by

It was inevitable that this sort of pressure on the Supreme Court would increase as the Obamacare subsidy case draws near—the alarmist attempts to convince the Court that overturning Obamacare would be an unprecedented and catastrophic act on their part:

The court has permitted itself to be recruited into the front lines of a partisan war. Not only the Affordable Care Act but the court itself is in peril as a result.

Author Linda Greenhouse goes on to say that by now so many people are depending on Obamacare subsidies that removing them would be extremely disruptive. That’s not a reason to decide a case a certain way, of course, and it also assumes that Republicans don’t have their own ideas for remedying the situation (such as this, to take one example). But Greenhouse’s article is written to give heart to the liberal troops who are understandably upset that Obamacare is threatened still again, and to intimidate the swing members of the Court if possible (that would be Stevens and Roberts, I assume).

If you remember the unseemly haste with which Obamacare was passed, and then the arguments about how it’s now settled law and therefore cannot be changed, it’s obvious that this was always the plan: ram it through and then say it’s inviolate because so many people have become dependent on it.

Hard to believe it’s been almost five years since the thing was passed.

I don’t like to make predictions, but I’m going to make one, just as I did before the Sebelius ruling. Back then I wrote (and when reading the following and applying it to the currenct situation, just exchange the words “state subsidies” for “mandate”):

…[E]ven though I don’t usually make predictions I’ll go on record here as saying my gut feeling is that the Court will not strike down the mandate. Why? Because the Court is exceedingly reluctant to invalidate a major act of Congress, even one passed with such shenanigans and unsupported by the American people…

This case is a bit different. Striking down the subsidies wouldn’t be invalidating an act of Congress, it would be interpreting the words in that act as they were written. Of course, the people who passed it back then now say that those words didn’t actually mean what they seem to mean.

At any rate, my point is that I don’t think SCOTUS will rule against the subsidies, although I think by rights they should. I think the swing justice[s] will get cold feet because the repercussions of the decision frighten them, and I think the Democrats and Obama were always counting on that fact. Actually, they were surprised SCOTUS had the guts to take the case in the first place.

[NOTE: More from William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.]

[ADDENDUM: I see that this isn’t the first time I’ve made the prediction that SCOTUS will get cold feet on its decision about the state subsidies. I already said it last July, in a post that discusses some of the law on the subject.]

So, what’s up with Brian Williams?

The New Neo Posted on by

capitano

First, a disclaimer: I don’t know what caused Brian Williams to lie about his helicopter experience in Iraq, and I don’t know what caused him to continue the lie. The lie was egregious, repeated, and seemingly reckless.

Seemingly reckless, because why would he think he could get away with it? There were witnesses there who could correct the record. And yet he must not have been so very reckless after all, because after all it took twelve years for the people who knew the truth to finally have had enough of his braggadocio and to expose him.

So one thing that probably was going on with Williams was a sense of entitlement and impunity. Who would dare correct him, and would they be believed?

Williams’ lie is no ordinary one. But it is of a surprisingly common type, and it even has a name: il Capitano, or the braggart soldier, one of the stock figures in commedia dell’arte, as Roger Simon referenced years ago in connection with John Kerry. There seems to be a longstanding compulsion on the part of some people to either embellish or make up from the whole cloth events of military derring-do in their lives that actually never happened. Williams most definitely appears to have succumbed to that temptation:

Il Capitano often talks at length about made up conquests of both the militaristic and carnal nature in attempts to impress others, but often only ends up impressing himself. He gets easily carried away in his tales and doesn’t realise when those around him don’t buy his act.

Well, I guess it doesn’t fit too well, because those around Williams—which includes the viewing public—bought his act. Apparently it was very convincing (disclaimer: I don’t watch network news, so I never saw it and until yesterday I can’t say I paid much attention to who Williams was), because it seems to have been widely accepted as the truth until now.

So my guess is that Williams’ motivation to lie was the same as that of anyone who chooses to go the route of il Capitano: stolen valor, stolen glory. It ought to have been enough for him that he went to Iraq in the midst of a war, but I guess it wasn’t.

I’m not at all sure of what I’m about to say, but I think it at least possible that at some point Williams may have come to believe his lie. I don’t know at what point that happened (if in fact it did happen), but repetition of a story can sometimes do that with people whose attachment to the truth is tenuous at best. By the time his story was exposed as a lie, Williams may have been genuinely shocked that it wasn’t true. At any rate, he certainly must have been shocked that the truth was revealed after all these years of getting away with the lie.

But not shocked enough to actually level with us; even in his apology he is lying. The guy appears to be a pathological and compulsive liar.

The question now is: what next? NBC should fire him, of course, and issue a public apology. Many people have predicted that’s what will happen, and I don’t see much defense of him so far in the press or in comments around the blogosphere. But so far (unless I’m missing something), NBC has been mum. I wouldn’t be surprised if Williams kept his job, although I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if he got the boot, and rather soon.

Iraq: hard-won gains squandered

The New Neo Posted on by

I think this comment at Hot Air on a thread about ISIS burning the Jordanian pilot is of particular interest:

That ISIS IS the same crowd is exhibit two billion and seven of the morally bankrupt media who refused to report these atrocities at the time, and vindication for those of us who said during the Iraq war that this was NOT just a sectarian war, that we WERE killing terrorists in Iraq, and anyone attempting to draw a moral equivalence between what the American military was doing versus the barbarism of our enemy is unworthy of inclusion in any discussion between intelligent adults. On our worst day we’re a thousand times better than they are. But we haven’t been allowed to say that, much less draw the necessary proofs to demonstrate it.

If the American people had known at the time that THIS is the face of the enemy, maybe we could’ve pulled that last bit of determination to finish the job. Instead the American people were drummed out of the war by their own media and we have lost everything we fought for. I can’t even begin to convey to you what it’s like to see pictures of the damned ISIS flag over Ramadi and Fallujah. I was THERE. The people ISIS is killing are the people who, by and large, supported us. They warned American troops about IEDs and ambushes, and we abandoned them. I don’t even have words to tell you how furious I am about that. We could’ve finished the job, if the truth had been reported.

Well, there’s the truth. A man burned alive in a cage while terrorists hopped up on meth, hash, and coke chant religious verses and watch him burn. THAT is the enemy. They have already done that, and WORSE, to Americans.

New generation, meet the old generation—the Vietnam vets who had to watch all they’d fought for get thrown away in the 70s. Except that, bad as that was, what’s happening in Iraq is worse. This time we pretty much had it under control (of course, many people say that was true in Vietnam, too, by the mid-70s). And this time the enemy is intent on coming to our shores. In fact, al Qaeda had already done so even before the Iraq or Afghan wars began.

[NOTE: Discussion of Vietnam, Iraq, and terrorism got me to thinking back to this field execution photo. The more things change, the more they remain the same.]

Why does this start to sound familiar?

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who said she’d been raped, the university administration had dealt with it wrongly by exonerating the accused, and that therefore she was going to carry a mattress around on her back as an art project to publicize the outrage until the accused either was dismissed from Columbia or left voluntarily?

Cathy Young has written an extensive and explosive article on the case that has appeared in The Daily Beast. Read it.

The facts are quite different from the UVA rape Rolling Stone story. For example, in the Sulkowicz incident, there is no doubt that the accused exists. His name is Paul Nungesser, and he tells his story in Young’s article. There is also no doubt that sexual contact between Sulkowicz and Nungesser occurred on several occasions, and that some of it was consensual.

But some of the takeaway from the case is similar:

Journalism has become propaganda; the coverage of the Sulkowicz case has hardly been fair and balanced.

Colleges should not be adjudicating rape charges. Rape charges need to go through the police.

In these areas of consent given and then withdrawn, the truth is fiendishly difficult to determine, and it will almost always be a he-said she-said situation.

Women do sometimes lie. Men sometimes lie. What else is new?

Our race-politics-obsessed president

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama sees everything through the prism of race combined with whatever political advantage he can obtain from the use of race in his rhetoric.

Thus, an early political utterance (June, 2008) emphasized his race and insinuated that his opponents were obsessed with it and would make use of it to harm him, when they hadn’t done anything of the sort. He stirs up race consciousness while pretending to deflect and reject it, and manufactures it if it hasn’t occurred:

Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:

“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences…

In the final sentence of the paragraph he slyly encourages a phenomenon I’ve noticed happening more and more: the charge that any criticism of Obama emanates from racism. If the racism isn’t overt and clear, as in the emails, then it’s covert; “inexperience” (a valid concern based on the objective facts of his history) becomes a code word (wink wink) for hidden racism and fearmongering.

This is dangerous demagoguery…

No, it turns out that most of them haven’t mentioned he’s black, except in approving terms. But they don’t have to nowadays to be racists; Obama has taken care of that.

I wrote that in June of 2008, and I see no reason to change a word of it. That’s the Obama we’ve all come to know. That’s the m.o. that has held him in good stead for a long, long time.

Which brings us to the latest manifestation of the genre. This one was reported by David Axelrod in his new memoir, but he’s not only quoting Obama, it is also highly likely the release of this information was approved by Obama. After all, never miss an opportunity to paint a Republican as racist, even if that Republican has already pulled out of the 2016 race (which Romney hadn’t yet done when the book was written).

Here it is:

President Obama was shocked and irritated by Mitt Romney’s concession call in the 2012 presidential election””and claimed Romney insinuated that Obama won only by getting out the black vote, according to a new book by presidential campaign strategist David Axelrod.

Obama was “unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over,” Axelrod writes.

The president hung up and said Romney admitted he was surprised at his own loss, Axelrod wrote.

“‘You really did a great job of getting the vote out in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,’ in other words, black people,'” Obama said, paraphrasing Romney. “That’s what he thinks this was all about.”

Even in the flush of victory Obama is petulant, spiteful, race-obsessed, blaming.

But beyond that, there are other interesting aspects to this story. Does Obama not admit that part of his victory was his success in getting out the black vote? I thought that was understood, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with it. When a candidate has over 90% support from a demographic group, it behooves that candidate to do his/her best to get those people to the polls. None of this is any kind of secret to anyone who knows the first thing about politics in the US and the 2012 election in particular.

But are “Cleveland” and “Milwaukee” code words for “black”? Not in my book; perhaps in Obama’s, but then in Obama’s everything that could be said about Obama is a code word for “black.”

But since my knowledge of the demography of those two cities is not exactly cutting edge I decided to look it up. Cleveland’s population breakdown is 53.3% black, high but nothing like some others. In fact, if you look at this chart, Cleveland is surpassed by many many other US cities in its black population (its rank is #17), and its percentage of blacks in the metropolitan area (as opposed to city proper) is only 20%. If you wanted to talk about getting out the black vote, there are many many other cities from which to choose (Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, for starters).

As for Milwaukee, it’s almost laughable as an example of a code word for “black.” It’s not on any of the lists of cities with a high percentage of black people or with a high number of black people. It’s 40% black within the city limits (27% for Milwaukee County).

If a person wanted to use code for “black cities,” he/she would do well to mention one of these 25 instead.

But of course that’s not what Romney was doing. Does Obama know that? Is he really that racially paranoid? Or was he just using it for political advantage? My guess is that yes, he really is that racially paranoid, and he likes to use it for political advantage.

Prosecutor Nisman had drafted arrest warrants for Kirchner and Timerman

The New Neo Posted on by

For those of you who’ve been following the death [murder] of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman, this is significant news:

Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor whose mysterious death has gripped Argentina, had drafted a request for the arrest of President Cristina Ferné¡ndez de Kirchner, accusing her of trying to shield Iranian officials from responsibility in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center here, the lead investigator into his death said Tuesday.

The 26-page document, which was found in the garbage at Mr. Nisman’s apartment, also sought the arrest of Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister. Both Mrs. Kirchner and Mr. Timerman have repeatedly denied Mr. Nisman’s accusation that they tried to reach a secret deal with Iran to lift international arrest warrants for Iranian officials wanted in connection with the bombing…

Some legal experts suspect that Mr. Nisman decided against requesting the arrest of Mrs. Kirchner because such a move would have been viewed as a political attack on the president in a case that had already polarized the nation.

Moreover, Mrs. Kirchner and Mr. Timerman have immunity as members of the executive branch. They could have been arrested only if a judge handling the case were to authorize a political trial similar to an impeachment process and ask Congress to lift their immunity, Ms. Ciruzzi said.

Two judges have refused to take the case put forward by Mr. Nisman, raising the possibility that his criminal complaint could languish in Argentina’s legal system if another judge is not found to continue it. A federal chamber is expected to decide who should take the case.

It wouldn’t be surprising if no one wanted to touch this case at this point.

[NOTE: More at Fausta’s, including this.]

ISIS atrocity; Jordan responds

The New Neo Posted on by

ISIS has released a video showing the murder of the Jordanian pilot they had captured. Instead of beheading, they burned him alive in a cage.

In response, Jordan announced that tomorrow it would make good on its threat to execute Sajida al-Rishawi, a female terrorist imprisoned in that country, as well as other captives “who attacked Jordan’s interests.”

This is not some tit-for-tat extra-judicial revenge slaying. Rishawi and the other four have been under sentence of death for quite some time, but their cases have been moving slowly through the appeals process there. It is that latter process that has been ended sooner rather than later.

Most of the articles about Rishawi call her a “would-be” suicide bomber. Hardly. She was actually an attempted suicide bomber whose suicide vest malfunctioned, while her husband’s fully-functioning vest managed to kill 38 of the 60 people murdered by terrorists in the Amman hotel bombings of 2005 (it would have been more, had Rishawi had her way):

At the Radisson SAS Hotel (now known as the “Landmark Hotel”), two suicide bombers (a husband and wife team””Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari and Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi)””entered the Philadelphia Ballroom, where Ashraf Akhras and his bride, Nadia Al-Alami, were celebrating their wedding with around 900 Jordanian and Palestinian guests. Sajida al-Rishawi was unable to detonate her belt. Her husband Ali al-Shamari, apparently admonished her and told her to get out of the room. As she was leaving, the lights went out in the ballroom, Ali jumped onto a dining-room table and detonated himself. Among the 38 people killed in the explosion were the fathers of the bride and groom.

As for Jordanian pilot Moaz Kasaesbeh, his murder apparently occurred a month ago. But that didn’t stop ISIS from pretending he was still alive, in order to try to bargain with Jordan for Rishawi. “The deal fell through after the jihadists were unable to provide Jordan with proof of life of the pilot…” Now we know why they had so much trouble doing that—he was already murdered.

The videotape was apparently only in Arabic; no English subtitles, which has led analysts to believe that this particular message is mainly for the Arab world. Jordan’s reply:

“Jordan’s response will be earth-shattering,” Information Minister Mohammed Momani said earlier on television, while the army and government vowed to avenge the pilot’s murder.

“Whoever doubted the unity of the Jordanian people, we will prove them wrong,” said Momani, who is also government spokesman.

[NOTE:Obama, of course, would have released Rishawi and the four others for Bowe Bergdahl.]

[UPDATE 10:37 PM: Two of the executions have occurred. The identities of the prisoners are reported to be Rishawi and Ziyad Karboli, an Iraqi member of al Qaeda who was convicted of murdering a Jordanian in 2008.]

Ballet dancers and pointe shoes

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article on the laborious and idiosyncratic complexity of the relationship between pointe shoes and the ballet dancer. The shoes are hand-made (and for professional ballet dancers, custom-made) but they are not worn as is. There is a lengthy process of personal shoe preparation that varies from dancer to dancer but is absolutely necessary in order to perform.

When you watch ballet, it’s probably something you don’t think about; perhaps it’s best that it remain that way. But I find it fascinating, having been through my own version of it, although long long ago.

In fact, I used to dream about pointe shoes quite often back when I was dancing. I would dream I had found a new brand and put them on, and suddenly I could spin and balance with enormous precision and flair. I had found my magic and transformative shoes!

[NOTE: I’ve written about pointe shoes before, here.]