The New Neo

The US and China: wishin’ and hopin’

Posted on November 12, 2014 by neoNovember 12, 2014

The US and China have signed an emissions agreement that, as far as I can tell, is a lot of hot air.

It’s about what each would really like to do—actually, what they’d like their successors to do:

Today, the Presidents of the United States and China announced their respective post-2020 actions on climate change, recognizing that these actions are part of the longer range effort to transition to low-carbon economies, mindful of the global temperature goal of 2â„ƒ. The United States intends to achieve an economy-wide target of reducing its emissions by 26%-28% below its 2005 level in 2025 and to make best efforts to reduce its emissions by 28%. China intends to achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030 and to make best efforts to peak early and intends to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030. Both sides intend to continue to work to increase ambition over time.

…The United States and China hope that by announcing these targets now, they can inject momentum into the global climate negotiations and inspire other countries to join in coming forward with ambitious actions as soon as possible, preferably by the first quarter of 2015. The two Presidents resolved to work closely together over the next year to address major impediments to reaching a successful global climate agreement in Paris.

What would they like to do? Obama wants to cut US emissions, China wants to keep going till 2030. And this just might be my favorite phrase: “Both sides intend to continue to work to increase ambition over time.”

Well, some people are very impressed:

“This is, in my view, the most important bilateral climate announcement ever,” said David Sandalow, formerly a top environmental official at the White House and the Energy Department. “It sends the signal the two largest emitters in the world are working together to address this problem.”

It certainly sends a signal that they’re willing to pay lip service to it. Still not sure exactly what China is even paying lip service to here, but maybe that’s just because I’m a “stupid American,” as Jonathan Gruber would say.

But I’m not so stupid that I don’t know that Obama already wanted to do this in the US, and that he has long planned to do it through—you guessed it!—executive action:

The coming rollout includes a Dec. 1 proposal by EPA to tighten limits on smog-causing ozone, which business groups say could be the costliest federal regulation of all time; a final rule Dec. 19 for clamping down on disposal of power plants’ toxic coal ash; the Jan. 1 start date for a long-debated rule prohibiting states from polluting the air of their downwind neighbors; and a Jan. 8 deadline for issuing a final rule restricting greenhouse gas emissions from future power plants. That last rule is a centerpiece of Obama’s most ambitious environmental effort, the big plan for combating climate change that he announced at Georgetown University in June 2013.

…And on top of all that, the administration is expected in the coming weeks to pledge millions of dollars ”” and possibly billions ”” to help poor countries deal with the effects of climate change…

The kicker for Republicans eager to stomp* all over the president’s agenda: Congress has little immediate recourse..

The word from the Hill “is that McConnell really is interested in trying to show that Republicans can get things done, so I think they’re going to try to come up with some narrow bills where the President could sign,” Holmstead said.

Among other possibilities, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) hopes to bring up legislation that would shift authority away from EPA on regulating coal ash ponds. Given the agency’s previous reluctance to deal with coal ash at all, the White House might not fight him too hard…

Former Sen. Tim Wirth, a Democrat who served as the Clinton administration’s top international climate negotiator, thinks Obama will push through his main agenda regardless of what Republicans come up with.

“He’ll just do what he’s going to do anyway,” Wirth said.

Indeed.

Most of these regulations were carefully postponed till after the 2012 and 2014 elections, for obvious reasons.

[ * NOTE: The use of the word “stomp” there is rather typical of the way the MSM writes these days about Republicans. It expresses the idea of stopping or destroying something, of course, but it also conjures up the vision of a child having a temper tantrum, or an angry person out-of-control in a fit of rage. It also makes it personal: they are “eager” to “stomp all over” the President’s agenda. They’re not just against these policies and also outraged at the president’s by-passing Congress; no, that wouldn’t convey enough vindictive petulance.]

Veterans Day, Armistice Day

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to just barely remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans.

Since then, the original name has largely fallen out of use—although it remains, like a vestigial organ, in the timing of the holiday, November 11th, which commemorates the day the WWI armistice was signed (eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month).

I’m also old enough–and had a teacher ancient enough—to have been forced to memorize that old chestnut “In Flanders Fields” in fifth grade—although without being given any historical context for it, I think at the time I assumed it was about World War II, since as far as I knew that was the only real war.

You can find the story of the poem here . It was written by a Canadian doctor who served in the European theater (there is no separate URL for the discussion of the poem, but you should click on the “John McCrae´s Poppies in Flander’s Fields” link on the left sidebar). It’s not great poetry by any means, but it was great propaganda to encourage America’s entry into what was known at the time as the Great War.

The poem’s first line “In Flanders fields the poppies blow” introduces that famous flower that later became the symbol of Armistice—and later, Veterans—Day. Why the poppy?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.

Now a day to honor those who have served in our wars, Veterans Day has an interesting history in its original Armistice Day incarnation. It was actually established as a day dedicated to world peace, back in the early post-WWI year of 1926, when it was still possible to believe that WWI had been the war fought to end all wars.

The original proclamation establishing Armistice Day as a holiday read as follows:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

After the carnage of World War II, of course, the earlier hope that peaceful relations among nations would not be severed had long been extinguished. By the time I was a young child, a weary nation sought to honor those who had fought in all of its wars in order to secure the peace that followed—even if each peace was only a temporary one.

And isn’t an armistice a strange (although understandable) sort of hybrid, after all; a decision to lay down arms without anything really having been resolved? Think about the recent wars that have ended through armistice: WWI, which segued almost inexorably into WWII; the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine; the Korean War; and the Gulf War. All of these conflicts exploded again into violence—or have continually threatened to—ever since.

So this Veterans/Armistice Day, let’s join in saluting and honoring those who have fought for our country. The hope that some day war will not be necessary is a laudable one—and those who fight wars hold it, too. But that day has clearly not yet arrived—and, realistically but sadly, most likely it never will.

[This is a slightly edited reprint of a post originally published on Veterans Day 2005.]

A look at Valerie Jarrett

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

From a lengthy article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic:

While aboard Air Force One at the end of the 2012 campaign, Jarrett turned to Obama and told him, “Mr. President, I don’t understand how you’re not getting eighty-five percent of the vote.” The other Obama aides in the cabin looked around in disbelief before concluding that she’d been earnest.

Jarrett worships Obama without a smidgeon of a sense irony or balance. In that, the two are well-matched, which may account for some of their closeness. It dovetails nicely with her 2008 statement:

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. ”¦ He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability ”” the extraordinary, uncanny ability ”” to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ”¦ So, what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. ”¦ He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do

The TNR piece presents both Obama and Jarrett as alike not only in their high opinions of Obama, but as similar in other ways: drunk with power, and personally petty and vengeful.

(The article doesn’t go into it, but I can guess the identity of the little birdie who whispered in obama’s ear to write that letter to Ahmadinejad.)

The piece also describes how, slowly but surely, Obama replaced the few independent thinkers who were his early advisors, those with a substantial amount of expertise and a reputation of their own (for example, Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel) with what the author calls “ciphers.” For example, “Obama’s top economic adviser is [now] Jeff Zients, a former management consultant and Jarrett pal who had no experience in government before joining the administration.” This was probably done not just for the obvious reason that Obama wants no one with enough moxie and expertise to challenge him. It’s also probably because Jarrett wants no one with enough moxie and expertise to challenge her. The narcissist and his adoring worshipper are flip sides of the same coin— hubristic, petty, ignoranct, isolated, stubborn, intolerant of criticism, secretive, defensive, maximally political, and remarkably adept at offending almost every person with whom they deal. And Scheiber’s descriptions of the meetings that Jarrett was in charge of, with gay activists before Obama made his big gay marriage announcement, describes the ghastly way the gay activists were treated.

Jarrett is his most trusted person on earth, despite (or probably because of) all of this:

According to a former high-level aide, there is no longer a daily meeting between the president and his top advisers. Under the old system, if the president waved off one adviser’s objection to his preferred plan of action, another could step in to vouch for the objection’s merit. The advice Obama gets now, though, comes more regularly through one-off interactions with the likes of Jarrett and Denis McDonough, who don’t have anyone else to back them up. In the second term, observes the former aide, “Maybe the president says, more often than in the past, ”˜We’re doing it.’”

The result is that Obama has become even more persuaded of his righteousness as the years have gone on. His belief that he can win over opponents is unshaken.

The whole piece by Sheiber seems split and confused. He describes horrible dysfunction, two terrible people making bad decisions and treating people like dirt. But he detests the Republicans who would thwart them, and thinks that, if anything, Obama and Jarrett are insufficiently to the left. And Scheiber ends this way:

It’s no surprise that Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett would govern as reasonable people. It’s who they are. The tragedy is that we live in surpassingly unreasonable times.

Oh, the pretzel knots into which Scheiber must tie himself. Two and two equals five.

[NOTE: The TNR article on Jarrett seems to be part of an orchestrated and coordinated press campaign against her by Obama supporters to get him to fire her. Ha! Dream on.

Jarrett is the new designated fall guy (gal) to explain what went so terribly wrong with the Lightworker. But she has been an integral part of Obama’s political success. She’s been with him from the early days of his political career, advising and assisting in a myriad of ways. I believe he is very dependent on her psychologically, and she on him.]

Jonathan Gruber, man of the people, explains the passage of Obamacare

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

The way I see it, this video of Jonathan Gruber merely exposes the so-called Obamacare architect admitting what everybody who’s been paying any real attention already knew: the intentional duplicity with which the law was passed on the part of the Democrats. The only surprise is how open Gruber is about it.

He must have thought he was among friends, and I suppose he probably was. Or maybe he just thought everybody already knew what he was saying, anyway. And if they didn’t, they should have:

Here’s the text of what he said:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in ”“ you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed”¦ Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Gruber had been painted by the MSM as a neutral expert of some sort, but he’s always been very very partisan. Some people seem to think Gruber is describing his own strategy for framing and passing the bill, but I read it more as his description of the general Democratic strategy. What Gruber specialized in was making pseudo-scientific predictions about how wonderful Obamacare would be for people, and then having to backtrack:

Gruber has admitted that his model has a catastrophic flaw: it can’t model the impact of Obamacare’s requirement that insurers take all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions.

In the video, Gruber describes pretty accurately what liberals did and how they lied in order to make Obamacare seem much more attractive that it actually is. But he did make one glaring error.:

Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass

Aside from Gruber’s condescension here about those stupid proles, he’s just plain wrong about what happened. The peons are actually smarter than he thinks: they never bought that steaming pile of manure. The people have been against this from the start, and nothing has changed in that regard.

Obamacare was not passed by referendum, it was passed by House and Senate. The people tried desperately to make their wishes known, but the Democratic representatives who were in the majority at the time refused to listen. Their leadership whipped them into line, and although a few were “allowed” to vote against, Pelosi and Reid made sure it wouldn’t be enough of them to actually derail the bill. Why did they allow some to vote against Obamacare? Because they knew just how very unpopular it was, and how those who voted for it in districts where it was unpopular were very much at risk of not being returned to Congress in the next election.

And that’s exactly how it went. 2010 was a protest election that returned the House to Republican hands. What were the people protesting? Why, Obamacare.

So who’s stupid, Gruber?

Guccifer, the hacker

Posted on November 11, 2014 by neoNovember 11, 2014

This is a disturbing and yet somehow entertaining article about Guccifer, the Romanian email hacker who’s in jail for hacking into the email accounts of the rich and famous.

Why did he do it? His motive doesn’t seem to have been money; he didn’t get any. Maybe he did it just because he could.

One would think he was some sort of computer mastermind. But no, not at all. He merely was a genius and/or incredible persistent at learning and/or guessing the answers to security questions (“security questions” became an Orwellian phrase when Guccifer was involved):

The hacker who signed off as Guccifer (pronounced GUCCI-fer) ”” a nom de guerre coined, he said, to combine “the style of Gucci and the light of Lucifer” ”” turned out to be Marcel-Lehel Lazar, a jobless 43-year-old former taxi driver. He had no expertise in computers, no fancy equipment, only a clunky NEC desktop and a Samsung cellphone, and no special skills beyond what he had picked up on the web…

Instead of burrowing into his victims’ email accounts using computer worms and other hacking tools, the prosecutor said, Mr. Lazar trawled the web for information about his targets and then simply guessed the right answers to security questions. “He is just a poor Romanian guy who wanted to be famous,” said the prosecutor, who leads a cybercrime team in Romania’s organized crime unit.

I guess “infamous” will do just as well. Although, come to think of it, he’s still not exactly a household word.

What was that again about gay marriage and religious freedom?

Posted on November 10, 2014 by neoNovember 10, 2014

Ah, yes:

The Giffords, who own the bucolic Liberty Ridge Farm in upstate New York, were ordered to pay a total of $13,000 ”” a $10,000 fine to the state and another $1,500 to each member of a lesbian couple to compensate them for “mental anguish.’’ All because the Giffords, devout Christians, refused to hold a same-sex wedding ceremony on the property on which they live, work and have raised a daughter, 17, and a son, 21.

“This is scary,’’ Cynthia Gifford said. “It’s scary for all Americans.” Fifteen years ago, Cynthia, 54, and Robert Gifford, 55, opened to the public their farm in upstate Schaghticoke, near Albany, where they’ve lived for 25 years. They host an annual, family-friendly fall festival, which ends Tuesday, offering such countrified fare as a corn maze and pig-racing shows.

In summer, wedding ceremonies and receptions also are held on the farm. But once already-booked nuptials take place, the Giffords will no longer schedule new ceremonies. Only receptions ”” including same-sex ones ”” will go on.

Oh, and by the way, the lesbian couple who sued the Giffords may have known what was going to happen, because they recorded their initial conversation with the Giffords. During the call:

Gifford said she told [caller Melisa Erwin], politely, that she would not book a same-sex wedding ceremony at the farm.

She didn’t know it at the time, but the woman’s then-fianceé, Jennifer McCarthy, recorded the conversation. The pair then filed a formal complaint with the state Division of Human Rights. And this past August, an administrative law judge from The Bronx, Migdalia Pares, decreed that the farm was a “public accommodation’’ and ordered the penalties, after ruling that the Giffords had violated state law by discriminating against the two women…

They were devastated when they heard that Liberty Ridge Farm would not take their business because of who they are,’’ the ladies’ lawyer, Mariko Hirose of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told me.

No doubt they were surprised, as well, right? They just happened to choose the Giffords, and they just happened to record the call.

First Amendment rights seem to stop at the door of the right of gay couples to marry, as most critics of the latter recognized early on would happen. Now it’s playing out as expected.

[NOTE: By the way, New York is a “one-party consent” wiretapping state, which makes the plaintiffs’ action lawful in recording the conversation without the Giffords’ knowledge (I’m assuming the Giffords were unaware, although the article doesn’t address that issue).]

Ebola treatment: this is so inside the box it’s outside the box

Posted on November 10, 2014 by neoNovember 10, 2014

Could an older technique yield an effective ebola treatment?

And will researchers take the suggestion and try to develop it, instead of a more conventional vaccine?:

The proposal builds on the use of “convalescent serum,” or survivors’ blood, which has been given to at least four U.S. Ebola patients who then recovered from the virus. It is based on an approach called passive immunization, which has been used since the 19th century to treat diseases such as diphtheria but has been largely surpassed by vaccination.

The scientists propose using new genetic and other technologies to find hundreds or thousands of different Ebola antibodies, determine their genetic recipe, grow them in commercial quantities and combine them into a single treatment analogous to the multi-drug cocktails that treat HIV-AIDS.

That contrasts with current drug development, which focuses on finding one molecule, or a small number, to defeat the Ebola virus that has killed nearly 5,000 people in West Africa and infected thousands more since March.

[NOTE: Among the three Nobel laureates joining in the call for passive immunization to treat ebola is James Watson, he of double-helix fame. I was stunned to learn that he is still around, and to discover that he’s only eighty-six, at that. I knew he’d been young when he and Crick had won the Prize for their discovery of the structure of DNA, but actually he was thirty-four, which isn’t so terribly young in science. Seems like so much time has passed that he should be about a hundred, though.

By the way, Watson and Crick had actually presented the structure in a paper published in 1953, when Watson would have been twenty-five. Young, but still not so terribly young in science, and his associates Crick and Wilkins were older, twelve years and twelve years respectively (associate Rosalind Franklin was eight years older, but she died before the Prize was awarded, so she was never considered for the honor).]

Sharyl Attkisson reveals CBS complicity in Obama Benghazi 2012 debate coverup—but of course, we already knew that

Posted on November 10, 2014 by neoNovember 10, 2014

Sheryl Atkisson claims that, after the second 2012 presidential debate between Obama and Romney, where moderator Candy Crowley backed up Obama’s false assertion that he had called the Benghazi attack “terrorism” early on, CBS intentionally withheld an interview clip that would have contradicted Obama’s point. (Go here to watch Atkisson describe what happened; I would embed the video on the blog but I can’t seem to turn off the autoplay, and I hate autoplay.)

Of course, anyone who has followed Obama’s career knows that this sort of thing was and still is standard operating procedure, not just for CBS but for the entire MSM covering him. In addition, regarding the second debate itself, we really don’t need Sharyl Attkisson to know that the networks covered up for Obama in the aftermath of his “terrorism” assertion. The evidence was plain.

First of all, there was Crowley’s intervention itself and press reaction to it. Crowley was the debate moderator, and she was obviously way out of line in intervening as she did to become a judge, whether she had been right or wrong in her facts. But what network strongly condemned her behavior in the way it deserved? I may be missing something, but I certainly didn’t read that sort of thing afterwards in the MSM. Take a look, for example, at CBS’s reaction at the time, which was to cast the story as that of a journalist (Crowley) under fire from partisans on the right. CBS characterized the evidence of whether Obama had called the Benghazi attack terrorism in his Rose Garden speech as “unclear,” and called Crowley’s intervention largely insignificant, a “misstep” that had little influence on the debate and was merely part of “an increasing move in the news media to challenge erroneous claims.”

As to whether Obama’s Rose Garden statement was actually “unclear,” the word “unclear” is a coverup in itself. It was quite clear, as I demonstrated by actually looking at Obama’s entire Rose Garden speech and analyzing it in the light of Obama’s assertion during that debate and Crowley’s defense of it:

You can see that in his speech Obama characterizes the Benghazi violence and/or its perpetrators ten separate times, in an address that is only about 800 words long in its entirety. Each time, he might have chosen to have said “terrorist attacks” or “terrorists” or “terrorism,” but each time he chose not to do so. Instead, he used the words “attack” or “attackers” seven times, the word “act” twice, and the word “violence” once. He’s not shy about employing adjectives to modify those words, either: he calls them “senseless,” “brutal,” “terrible,”outrageous,” and “shocking.”

Note, however, that the word “terrorist” is never used as an adjective to modify Obama’s descriptions of what happened in Benghazi, nor is it used as a noun to describe the perpetrators. There is no question that the omission was intentional on Obama’s part, because if Obama had wanted to call it a terrorist attack it would have been natural to actually, like, you know, do so.

The only mention of terrorist acts by Obama comes, as I wrote yesterday, in his generic statement of resolve after mentioning both the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (9/11 being an unequivocal act of terrorism, and both wars being part of what used to be called the “War on Terror”).

All the networks should have pointed this out. None of them did. All that was needed was the speech itself, which was in the public domain.

What’s more, even what Attkisson is now asserting—that CBS held back the clip—is actually old news. For example, I wrote a post about it on November 5, 2012, the day before the election, based on a story on Fox by Bret Baier.

From Baier at the time:

Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama’s claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?

Why on the Sunday before the election, almost six weeks after the attack, at 6 p.m. does an obscure online timeline posted on CBS.com contain the additional “60 Minutes” interview material from Sept. 12?

Why wasn’t it news after the president said what he said in the second debate, knowing what they had in that “60 Minutes” tape ”” why didn’t they use it then? And why is it taking Fox News to spur other media organizations to take the Benghazi story seriously?

Attkisson adds valuable background to the story by giving some of the behind-the-scenes-at-CBS details, and I applaud her bravery about this and other matters she describes. But the basic story she is telling on this has been known for two years, and we have heard very little about it except briefly, from Fox. I contend that that fact is actually the bigger story, but don’t expect the MSM to cover it.

[NOTE: What’s more—although the answer to this question really is “unclear”—there is an argument to be made that Crowley colluded with Obama in setting up the whole thing for the debate.]

Report: ISIS leader may be badly wounded or dead—or maybe not either

Posted on November 10, 2014 by neoNovember 10, 2014

This sort of report reminds me of the days when we’d get bulletins that Bin Laden had been wounded or killed.

They were never true—until one day they were.

So there is no way to tell about this:

The leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was “critically wounded” when a U.S.-led air strike targeted the western Iraqi border town of al-Qaim, tribal sources told Al Arabiya News Channel on Saturday.

U.S. Central Command confirmed in a statement that U.S.-led air strikes targeted ISIS leaders near their northern Iraqi hub of Mosul late Friday, without confirming whether Baghdadi was killed, AFP reported.

I suspect they have not confirmed it officially because they actually have not confirmed it at all. There are some US “advisors” in Iraq, and there must be some intelligence from Iraqi sources, but how good it is on a subject like this is anyone’s guess. Of course, the strike location would have been based on intelligence in the first place.

It seems a bit more certain that a key aide to al Baghdadi was killed in the strike. But rest assured that none of this will stop ISIS:

The news came as Britain’s chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nick Houghton, said on Sunday that the Isis leadership would regenerate itself even if Baghdadi had been killed. In a sign that the UK believed there was a strong chance Baghdadi died in the air strikes, Houghton spoke of “potential death” as he said it would take some days for the US to confirm whether the Isis leader was alive or not…

But Houghton said Isis would fight back if its leader had been killed: “What I wouldn’t want to do is rush to the sense that the potential death of one of their totemic leaders is going to create some strategic reverse within Isis. They will regenerate leadership ”¦ because of the current potential attractiveness of this warped ideology.

What a way to go

Posted on November 8, 2014 by neoNovember 8, 2014

This is certainly different:

Now, the ashes of a loved one can be made into a beautiful diamond, thanks to a Swiss company called Algordanza…Using a combination of machines and complex scientific process, the staff at Algordanza separate the carbon from the deceased’s ashes, then convert the carbon into graphite, and use specific temperatures and pressure to create a diamond “seed.”

The color of the diamond varies depending on how much boron is present in the deceased’s ashes. The more boron, the bluer the diamond.

The finished product:

It gives new meaning to the song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”

But what it really reminds me of is one of my favorite verses from Shakespeare (it’s actually part of Ariel’s song in “The Tempest”), the mysteriously evocative “Full Fathom Five“:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them ”” Ding-dong, bell.

The lovefest negotiation: Obama and Congressional leaders

Posted on November 8, 2014 by neoNovember 8, 2014

Here’s an article that attempts to give the inside scoop on yesterday’s meeting between Obama and leaders of Congress. It as not a happy time:

The Republicans’ approach, three days after they resoundingly won control of the Senate in midterm elections, “seemed to fall on deaf ears,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said in a telephone interview. “The president instead of being contrite or saying in effect to America, ‘I hear you,’ as a result of the referendum on his policies that drove this last election, he seems unmoved and even defiant.”

“I don’t know why he would want to sabotage his last two years as president by doing something this provocative,” said Cornyn. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell earlier this week said the president’s stance was “like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

Note the grim faces in the photo. Including Harry Reid’s.

Megan McArdle asks an interesting and related question: does Obama even know how to negotiate?

Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill. It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway. This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

Actually, it’s how you negotiate as a seven-year-old, as well.

That is, if you’re even trying to negotiate. What if you’re trying to coerce, threaten, bully, while maintaining a facade of give-and-take negotiations—a facade that is so gossamer that it ends up fooling no one except those who want to be fooled?

As I wrote in my Noonan post, it’s as though the idea of Obama as a reasonable man, interested in the welfare of the country, willing to sit down and iron things out, dies very very hard, despite years and years of evidence to the contrary.

But although I think McArdle misses the fact that Obama has no intention of actually negotiating or compromising, at least not until his back is pushed right to the wall and perhaps not even then, she does go on to give a very interesting answer to her question about Obama and negotiations with the Republicans. Let’s assume for a moment he really would like to engage them in that way; does he know how? Her answer is “probably not,” and I think this may indeed be true, although it would be really informative if someone could tell us whether during his brief stint as a practicing attorney he ever negotiated a settlement, for example. I actually suspect that in situations where Obama didn’t think he had the power, and where it wasn’t really his agenda he was trying to implement but rather his clients’ interests, he could actually negotiate quite well.

McArdle:

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans. It’s not as if he has a long, distinguished record of passing legislation in a mixed environment. His later years in the Illinois State Senate enjoyed a solid Democratic majority, and he jumped into the U.S. Senate at a propitious time. Soon after he arrived came the wave of 2006, when Democrats controlled both houses of congress by comfortable margins, and Senator Obama was far too junior to be negotiating with the White House. Then came the financial crisis, and another wave, and Obama spent the first two years of his presidency in a happy situation where he could get things done without needing the support of the opposition. He didn’t even negotiate with his own party; the Senate negotiated his health care bill, and Nancy Pelosi whipped it through the House.

Post 2010, of course, he also hasn’t had much practice negotiating…

But at this point he doesn’t hold all the cards, does he? The legislative branch is about to be controlled by Republicans; after all, that’s the only reason he had that meeting with them yesterday in the first place. The thing is, I think that Obama thinks he’s got all the wild cards in the deck, and he’s willing to play them. If he’s willing to go outside the rules, he may think he’s the one holding the winning hand.