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?

The thin blue line: another white Missouri policeman kills a young black man in self-defense

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s my headline, and I’m sticking to it until there’s any credible evidence to the contrary.

So far, the facts seem to go like this:

In Berkeley, Missouri (not too far from Ferguson), a call comes in at 11:15 PM from a Mobil station reporting a theft.

A single white policeman comes to the scene and questions two young black men who are in the station parking lot. One of the men fails to cooperate and starts wandering away from the vehicle, despite requests not to do so.

“One of the individuals ‘produced a pistol with his arm straight out, pointing it straight at the officer kind of from across the hood,’ [Police Chief] Belmar said.”

The police officer fires up to three shots at the man holding the gun, killing him.

According to Belmar, the young man’s 9 mm gun, which was found on his person, had the serial number filed off and there were five rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.

The young man, who has been identified as 18-year-old Antonio Martin, had quite a rap sheet, “including three assaults, armed robbery, armed criminal action and multiple uses of weapons since he was 17.”

The family doesn’t any of mention that (of course, it’s understandable that the shocked and grieving family would try to defend him). According to them:

He was not a violent person, to our knowledge,” he added. “Around us there weren’t any pistols. It’s hard to believe that.”

His grandmother, Margret Chandler, was also in disbelief.

“When he was around me, he knew to do right,” she said. “Why would he pull out a gun against the police? That’s the thing I don’t get. It just doesn’t add up.”

His mother says he was just on his way “to visit his girlfriend and that he was not carrying a gun.” I wonder; does she frisk him every time he leaves the house? How would she have a clue what he was carrying?

“Clashes” and demonstrations have already ensued as a result of the death. Some injurieshave occurred, as well as some arrests:

The protest thinned by daybreak, and Belmar told an early morning news conference that four people had been arrested. He said that bricks and what were believed to be fireworks were thrown at officers, but he said police did not use tear gas.

One officer was being treated in a hospital emergency room for injuries to his lower leg sustained while he ran away, Belmar said, and another was treated at the hospital after sustaining injuries to his face from a brick.

The mayor of Berkeley takes pains to distinguish the case from Ferguson:

“This was not the same as Ferguson,” Mayor Theodore Hoskins said.

He took pains to say that the shooting could not be compared to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson or to the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York. The mayor, who is black, pointed out that the Berkeley police department is majority-black.

He promised a thorough investigation but said that the video showed it was not a police officer going off “half-cocked.”

“Everybody don’t die the same,” he told reporters. “Some people die because the policeman initiated. Some people die because they initiated it. And at this point, our review indicates that the police did not initiate this, like Ferguson.”

On the contrary, it is very much like Ferguson, except in Ferguson the “unarmed” Michael Brown assaulted the cop and tried to take his weapon, rather than carrying his own. I can understand why the mayor would want to make a different distinction, though. He doesn’t want the destruction that happened afterwards in Ferguson to happen in his town.

Another difference between this and Ferguson is that this incident was captured on a surveillance video. The policeman (whose name has so far not been released, wisely, although my guess is that some enterprising reporter will publish it) was not wearing a body camera, but the gas station’s cameras caught the exchange. Unfortunately the footage was not taken from close enough to show the gun, although it shows Martin raising his arm as described.

The entire thing might even have been planned as an ambush of the cop, although it’s impossible to say.

How much will this new incident be exploited by the racemongers? Let’s just say that already it’s gotten a ton of publicity from the press, although I don’t think Al Sharpton’s on the scene yet, nor has Eric Holder announced a federal investigation. Let’s also just say that, though the video is hardly definitive, it’s a good thing it exists, and a body camera would have been even better, although no amount of evidence exonerating the police officer would be enough for those determined to make this incident out to be another example of a young black man victimized at the hands of the white police.

Oh, and one more thing: if the police officer had been black this would rate maybe a paragraph in the back of the paper, whatever the race of the dead man. If both participants had been white, likewise.

Violence against police: the widows speak

The New Neo Posted on by

Adelaide Laurie is the widow of police officer Rocco Laurie, assassinated in a 1972 ambush along with partner Gregory Foster (I wrote about the incident here). As far as I can tell she has never remarried, although she and her husband had only been wed a short while when he was killed, and she was achingly young at the time (as was he).

Ms. Laurie has some thoughts on the murder of officers Ramos and Liu:

“It’s kind of the same thing back in the day when Mayor (John V.) Lindsay was the mayor. The cops back then, they didn’t care for Lindsay and they thought that he was not supporting them,” Mrs. Laurie said. “Back when my husband was killed, I specifically said I did not want Mayor Lindsay to attend.”

Lindsay, who pushed to place members of the general public on the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, and formed the Knapp Commission to investigate police corruption, also drew the ire of the NYPD rank and file.

Although it’s been over forty years since her husband’s murder, it is still very fresh in Adelaide Laurie’s mind:

I’m still in shock. I’m just devastated. With everything going on in the city, it’s taking me back to the 70s when things were so bad,” she recounted. “It was really a rough time in the city, when cops were being targeted. They were being maligned and mistreated, really like what’s going on today. The memories just, they never go away, and the pain is always there, but when something like this happens, you just relive it.”…

“I’m just broken-hearted for the families. I know what they’re going to go through,” Mrs. Laurie said. “Your life is altered, and it’s never gonna be the same…. I know that police Officer Liu was only married a short time, just a couple of months. Rocco and I were only married about two years when this happened, so we were kind of like newlyweds also, so it’s really a bad time for his widow.”

There are some wounds that never heal.

Foster, who was black, and Laurie, who was white, were apparently targeted because of the interracial aspects of their partnership:

Two days [after their murder], police received a hand-printed letter signed by the BLA, a violent militant group which targeted and assassinated police officers across the country, claiming responsibility for killing Laurie and Foster.

“They were targeting what they called the ‘salt-and-pepper,’ the black and white teams, and they didn’t like that, that the blacks and whites were working together,” Mrs. Laurie said.

There had been an ambush of a similarly interracial team the previous year, apparently committed by the same group.

The interracial aspect of the Ramos/Liu team hasn’t been much remarked on, and I have no idea whether it played into the motives of their killer. But it’s something to think about as a possibility.

Here’s a heartrending account of the families of Liu and Ramos, as well as the sympathy shown them by the daughter of Eric Garner. At the link is a video of Liu’s widow speaking.

One interesting sideline to the tragedy is the prominence of Staten Island in all these stories. It’s by far the smallest New York City borough in population, but is home to many police officers and firefighters, and suffered the highest per capita number of casualties in 9/11. Rocco Laurie was a native Staten Islander, and Liu had attended college there, whereas Ramos’ elder son had graduated from Staten Island Academy despite living in Brooklyn. And in a particularly strange irony, Ramos— prior to becoming a police officer three years ago—had worked as part of the security detail at Police Officer Rocco Laurie Intermediate School on Staten Island, named for Adelaide Laurie’s husband.

[ADDENDUM: It’s not just the widows and children and parents of the victims who are distraught. Brinsley’s motheris grieving too, and expresses condolences for the men he shot. The other day I discussed whether Brinsley had any sort of mental illness, and his mother’s report, if accurate, indicates he may have, because she says he had been institutionalized for a while in the past, and tried to kill himself at the age of 13. I repeat what I’ve said before, which is that mentally ill people are hardly immune to inflammatory rhetoric that can help spark them into action.

And this seems a tragic case of a good intention on the part of Brinsley’s ex-girlfriend that had very bad consequences:

Hours before an increasingly disturbed drifter executed two city cops in cold blood, he confronted his ex-girlfriend and threatened to kill himself ”” before she talked him out of it and took a bullet herself.

One can certainly wish she hadn’t succeeded in talking him out of it. It is not at all unusual, by the way, for homicidal people to also be suicidal at the same time.]

Entertain this hypothetical

The New Neo Posted on by

I though I’d highlight the following comment, which I found at this article:

I have no doubt that if, by some miracle, these two slain officers [Ramos and Liu] had been able to escape their fate by killing this monster [Brinsley] before he killed them, we would now hear Sharpton, Obama, De Blasio and Holder calling for prosecutions against the officers. We would hear how they used their guns before trying other methods. We would hear that the gunman was mentally ill and no one was helping him and if they had just waited for back up, and how this miscreant was just turning his life around, perhaps we’d have heard he was on his way to college. You know, just really a misunderstood soul who was a gentle person.

An excellent point.

For Christmas: lebkuchen

The New Neo Posted on by

Enough of this sorrow and pain—now for something completely different, something for the holidays. It’ll help you gain your requisite .81 pounds and then some.

Those of you who’ve read this blog for a long time are probably familiar with the following family recipe, which I’ve posted here before. But here it is again for anyone who may have missed it. The recipe was brought over from Germany by my ancestors sometime in the mid-1800s, and when I was growing up it was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt Flora, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.

The name of the treat is lebkuchen. But it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins. That is, if you can resist the urge to devour it immediately, and good luck with that.

Flora’s Lebkuchen:

(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)

1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice

Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).

Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.

Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.

Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.

Grease and flour two 9X9 cake pans. Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester to see if it’s done). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.

Meanwhile, make the frosting.

Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not usually correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.

Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).

I have absolutely no powers of resistance for this particular treat.