Skirt, wind, underwear, solution?

The New Neo Posted on by

“Oldflyer” has a question:

I presume everyone saw the picture of the lovely Duchess of Cambridge’s dress blowing up and revealing her perfectly formed posterior. Now, I am quite old and not up to date, but someone please elighten me. Is it fashionable for fashionable women not to wear underwear these days? Have I missed something, I should not have? Is there a thong which is not visible?

I am probably not all that much younger than Oldflyer, but I can offer an answer to his final burning question in that paragraph:

Yes, there is almost certainly a thong which is not visible.

And for Oldflyer’s earlier questions: yes, you are missing something. And yes, lack of underwear is more common than it used to be. Of course, many many years ago (we’re talking several centuries here), lack of underwear used to be common as well, at least in the sense of underpants. Women wore corsets and petticoats and all sorts of undergarments, but not what you would call panties with a crotch (for those historically inclined, see this) until relatively recently:

Crotchless panties are not a new thing. They are only a salacious version of what had been the style of women’s underwear for centuries. Whatever form of pantalets, pantalettes, drawers, or pantaloons a woman wore, they were usually open from the thigh up. This was for a variety of reasons. Bunching up all the yardage in even the humblest dress of centuries past to try and get a comfortable position over the chamber pot left no hands to pull (or “draw,” thus the term “drawers”) down underwear. Plus it was considered healthy and hygienic; a lady’s bits needed proper ventilation. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century buttons began to appear on the crotch of drawers, giving ladies the option to close up shop if they wished.

There’s a host of information at that website, including the fact that what you might call briefs for women were invented some time around the 1930s. And if you’ve always wondered what a dimity pocket is (and who among us hasn’t?), that’s the site for you as well.

The thong is of fairly recent origin in terms of being popularly used as women’s underwear (1990s?), but of ancient origin as a piece of clothing, usually for men. Women seem to wear it in order to reduce panty lines and to feel sexy and trendy, although some claim it is more comfortable than regular underpants, be they bikini or briefs. I am here to say that they are sadly mistaken, IMHO.

Which brings us to the Duchess and her recent wardrobe malfunction at the hands of the capricious Australian breeze (that link rather discreetly covers what was indiscreetly revealed, but you can find the full picture quite easily if you use Google; I’m going to make you work for it).

The following would seem to be a solution for her problem; I wonder why she hasn’t done it. Maybe the clothes don’t hang quite right when you do this?

But despite a string of such incidents, Kate has yet to take a leaf out of the Queen’s book.

Her Majesty’s skirts are always fitted at the hem with small lead curtain weights, which cost just £1.50 for a pack of four, to prevent the royal hemline from flying away in a gust of wind.

Seems the queen has thought of everything.

There’s also another old-fashioned solution: slips that are not full, and cling to the body under the dress. Or my own favorite from the 60s and miniskirt era, petti-pants, which were slips in the form of pants rather than skirts. Women of a certain age might remember them; I had ultra-short ones that didn’t show under the mini, but protected me on the subway.

Or, if all else fails, wear non-thong underwear. Could that be so difficult?

Apparently.

For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism

The New Neo Posted on by

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I ever was assigned to read in school. As such it was exciting, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades. I think part of this feeling began (at least in this country), like so many things, with the Vietnam era. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were seen to have wrought during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, but it seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country, who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response, one that helped lead to the formation of the EU. The nationalism of the US is seen by those who agree with him as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the pendulum is swinging back. The US is not Nazi Germany, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. And, in fact, that is one of the reasons they try so hard to make that particular analogy—because Nazi Germany was one of the very best examples of the dangers of unbridled and amoral nationalism.

But, on this Memorial Day, I want to say there’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores morality, but one that embraces it and strives for it, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but it is a very good country nevertheless, striving to be better.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

flag

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of an older post. Note how it dovetails with today’s post on the recent European elections, even though this one was first written many years ago.]

This is a first for neo-neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought it was high time for this blog to host its first picture ever of Kim Kardashian.

Apparently Kim and the father of her child got married over the weekend. This was what Kim and one of her sisters wore to a pre-wedding dinner. Kim looks like she was interrupted while getting ready for a Tae Kwon Do class and misplaced her belt, whereas sister Kourtney is very covered up, with an extra large ruffle on the posterior.

And is that Captain Hook in front and to the right, head hidden by shrubbery? He will not find the crocodile here:

kardgetup

For comparison:

taikwan

Making sense of the European elections

The New Neo Posted on by

Sunday was voting day across Europe, and the results have been commonly described as an “earthquake.”

But since groups referred to as “far-right” and groups called “hard left” seem to have won in different countries, it’s hard to generalize except to say that it was a rejection of the status quo (although that didn’t happen in Germany) and a rejection of European unity. I have long been puzzled by the designations of right and left in Europe, although “left” is easier, because it seems to be Communist and/or socialist. But “right”? Is that a synonym for “anti-immigrant”? Or “anti-EU?” Or for both? I doubt very much it stands for what we would call conservatism in the US.

This seems to be a good enough description of what happened this election cycle:

All across Europe, voters have lost faith in traditional parties in direct proportion to the collapse of economic growth. In countries with free-market growth policies ”” such as the Baltic states ”” ruling parties actually gained votes in Sunday’s vote. But in Spain, France, Greece, and other countries, the traditional major parties of the Left and Right won less than half the vote. Even in Germany, the large nation most clearly committed to European integration, an openly Euroskeptic party pulled in 7 percent of the vote and will enter the European Parliament for the first time.

The reason for all this ferment is clearly economic dissatisfaction…

Sadly, European Union leaders have in the past demonstrated a bullheaded refusal to listen to voters who are skeptical of European centralization.

In other words, Europe is a mess, and it doesn’t look like these elections will fix it.

Here’s another summary that seems to make sense of the trend the elections revealed despite the left/right contradictions:

To a greater or lesser extent, the story of this Euro-election has been the rise of the minor parties ”“ some of them bizarre, some of them downright potty, but all of them united by a visceral dislike of the EU bureaucracy: its arrogance, its remoteness, its expense, its endless condescension and its manic and messianic belief in its right to legislate for all 500 million people in the EU.

…From Dublin to Lublin, from Portugal to Pomerania, the pitchfork-wielding populists are converging on the Breydel building in Brussels ”“ drunk on local hooch and chanting nationalist slogans and preparing to give the federalist machinery a good old kicking with their authentically folkloric clogs…

…[T]here is a revolt going on ”“ and we know how Brussels generally reacts to such vulgar expressions of democratic feeling. When people have voted against the federalist impulse in the past ”“ like the populations of Denmark, or France ”“ they have been asked to have another go; to vote again until they get the right answer. This time, I expect the Eurocracy will try to ignore the election results; they will try to brush them aside. Men like Jean-Claude Juncker, the ex-prime minister of Luxembourg (pop. the same as Wolverhampton) will appear on global media to denounce the European electorate for being so tasteless and irrelevant as to ask for change…

They are wrong, wrong, wrong. This European election is an expression of revulsion and discontent and it is a mandate for reform.

But the hallmark of the EU is to not listen to mandates. It’s a little like Obama and the Democrats regarding the passage of Obamacare: we know better than you little people. If we keep doing what we want to, some day you’ll see our wisdom and you’ll like it too. And even if you never do, that’s tough. We really don’t care, because we have our own agenda.

Murder in Santa Barbara

The New Neo Posted on by

So far I haven’t written about the latest mass murder and the latest mass murderer, Elliot Rodger.

That’s because there is a certain repetitiveness to these horrific crimes and the reaction to them. A young and angry perpetrator. Blaming his crime on something else: the failure of the mental health care system, the parents, the police, the school, society. Propagation of his message by the internet, and then subsequently by the MSM. Speculation about whether he was on psychoactive drugs, and if so what role that might have played. The predicable cries for gun control—particularly far-fetched in this case because his first three murders were committed with knives, and some of his victims’ injuries were caused by him mowing them down with a car.

I repeat what I’ve often said before: it is easy to see, ex-post-facto, that something should have been done about this guy. There were certainly plenty of warning signs. But they only look unequivocal after the fact, not before, and everyone who presents with this kind of behavior cannot be locked up, and certainly can’t be locked up forever. Elliot Rodger looks to me (after seeing a couple of moments of the video he made, and reading about it) to have been a psychopath, and psychopaths cannot be deterred except by incarceration, and that can’t be done in the absence of a crime. It certainly can’t be done indefinitely in the absence of a heinous crime.

I only watched a couple of seconds of the Rodgers video; I stopped because it was almost unbearable to watch it. He emanated such pure evil I did not want to look on it any longer. But it’s a mistake to think Rodger seemed that way in his ordinary life prior to the killings. He probably had developed a false front, not entirely effective (many people seemed to sense he was deeply troubled) but effective enough to accomplish the goal of presenting himself as less dangerous than he actually was.

Unfortunately, I see no way to have prevented this.

[ADDENDUM: More here about the actions of the police in their prior interview with Rodger, and his parents frantic efforts to stop him in time. This is also of interest; it seems that one problem was that the parents’ intense concerns about earlier videos were not conveyed properly to the police who went to interview Rodger, and he was able to fool them. It also seems as though the suspicion at that time was that he was mostly suicidal rather than homicidal, and Rodger was very canny in dealing with them.]

Clogging: then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

Clogging fifty years ago (hat tip: “cornei”), from some baby boomers:

And here’s a much more recent manifestation. There are some interesting stylistic changes—and of course, this is more formal and regimented, perhaps because it’s a competition:

What do the two videos express about the changes in America? I bet you can still see scenes like the first one today, somewhere. But you didn’t see scenes like the second one fifty years ago.

Or maybe you did, and I just missed it. I can’t say my finger was on the pulse of clog dancing at the time.

The president and the enablers

The New Neo Posted on by

Chuck Schumer warns Republicans in Congress that if they don’t give the Democrats what they want regarding immigration reform, President Obama will take it anyway.

Excuse me, did I say “will take it anyway”? What Schumer actually said was [emphasis mine]:

If [House Republicans] don’t pass immigration reform [by the August recess], the president will have no choice but to act on his own.

Obama doesn’t want to do it, you see. But he may have to do it, because those darned Republicans will have forced his hand by not cooperating to present him with what he wants. Hey, isn’t that how presidents always operate?

Maybe Schumer thinks Congress should pass an Enabling Act next, although it seems that Obama doesn’t even need one de jure, he has one de facto.

I’m assuming everyone knows what the Enabling Act was, or at least will follow the link if they don’t. But just in case, I thought I’d add this explanation [emphasis mine]:

After being appointed chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Hitler asked President von Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. A general election was scheduled for 5 March 1933.

The burning of the Reichstag six days before the election, depicted by the Nazis as the beginning of a communist revolution, resulted in the Reichstag Fire Decree, which (among other things) suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights. Hitler used the decree to have the Communist Party’s offices raided and its representatives arrested, effectively eliminating them as a political force.

Although receiving five million more votes than in the previous election, the Nazis had failed to gain an absolute majority in parliament, depending on the 52 seats won by their coalition partner, the German National People’s Party, for a slim majority.

To free himself from this dependency, Hitler had the cabinet, in its first post-election meeting on 15 March, draw up plans for an Enabling Act which would give the cabinet legislative power for four years. The Nazis devised the Enabling Act to gain complete political power without the need of the support of a majority in the Reichstag and without the need to bargain with their coalition partners.

Note the fact that Hitler never had a majority during his rise to power and his consolidation of power. Note also how he systematically eliminated his opposition through canny use of the law and certain crises (and possibly manufactured crises, at that) to justify his usurpation of power. Note also when you read the next passage how Hitler managed to use a combination of intimidation of and false promises to his opponents, and parliamentary jockeying and procedural rule-changing, in order to get his way. Hitler was both utterly ruthless and politically brilliant at this point in his life:

…[T]he Social Democrats initially planned to hinder the passage of the Act by boycotting the Reichstag session, rendering that body short of the quorum (two thirds) needed to vote on a constitutional amendment. The Reichstag, however, led by its President, Hermann Gé¶ring, changed its rules of procedure, allowing the President to declare that any deputy who was “absent without excuse” was to be considered as present, in order to overcome obstructions. Because of this procedural change, the Social Democrats were obliged to attend the session, and committed to voting against the Act. Leaving nothing to chance, the Nazis used the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree to detain several SPD deputies. A few others saw the writing on the wall and fled into exile.

Later that day, the Reichstag assembled under intimidating circumstances, with SA men swarming inside and outside the chamber. Hitler’s speech, which emphasised the importance of Christianity in German culture, was aimed particularly at appeasing the Centre Party’s sensibilities…

In the end…the non-socialist parties all voted for the bill, except for two deputies who weren’t present. With the KPD banned and 26 SPD deputies arrested or in hiding, the final tally was 444 in favour of Enabling Act against 84 (all Social Democrats) opposed. The Reichstag had adopted the Enabling Act with the support of 83% of the deputies. However, the atmosphere of that session was so intimidating that even if all SPD deputies had been present, it would have still passed with 78.7% support…

Under the Act, the government had acquired the authority to pass laws without either parliamentary consent or control. These laws could (with certain exceptions) even deviate from the Constitution. The Act effectively eliminated the Reichstag as active players in German politics. While its existence was protected by the Enabling Act, for all intents and purposes it reduced the Reichstag to a mere stage for Hitler’s speeches. It only met sporadically until the end of World War II, held no debates and enacted only a few laws. Within three months after the passage of the Enabling Act, all parties except the Nazi Party were banned or pressured into dissolving themselves, followed on 14 July by a law that made the Nazi Party the only legally permitted party in the country…

Due to the great care that Hitler took to give his dictatorship an appearance of legality, the Enabling Act was renewed twice, in 1937 and 1941. However, its renewal was practically assured since all other parties were banned. Voters were presented with a single list of Nazis and Nazi-approved “guest” candidates under far-from secret conditions.

I challenge anyone to read that without getting a chill up the spine. It unfolds like a Greek tragedy, no less horrible for knowing the plot.

Coming back to the present day, it’s long been clear that President Obama considers that the Constitution, with its checks and balances, offers no real constraint to his usurpation of power. Actually, it never really was the Constitution that prevented previous presidents from doing the same thing—it was their own respect for it, plus the checks and balances offered by integrity-driven members of those presidents’ own parties who would pressure them to do the right thing, and/or a press that would call them on their excesses, and/or voters who would reject them if they violated constitutional constraints. Obama doesn’t have to deal with such things, and that emboldens him.

[ADDENDUM: To the very valid criticism of posts such as this which draw some sort of comparison with Hitler, I offered this response in the comments section, but I thought I’d highlight it here as well.

I know what people mean when they say it is counterproductive to ever use historical analogies to Hitler or Stalin or other tyrants of history when we speak about Obama et.al. My response is that I considered that when I wrote this post, and I consider it whenever I make such analogies, which I have done in the past.

But sometimes there is no other way to make a point about tyranny other than to compare it to other tyrannies. They are not the same, but there are similarities (especially in terms of process), and those similarities heighten the point. If we don’t make such comparisons we trivialize what’s happening. If we do make them we run the risk of sounding crazy.

That’s the dilemma—there seem to be no other choices. Tyranny usually looks fairly innocuous at its beginning. It’s only later on that people realize what they’ve lost. Cassandras are bound to be disbelieved by most people at the outset. That’s just the nature of the thing.]

There’s a whole lot going on, isn’t there?

The New Neo Posted on by

A roundup of news:

The 9/11 museum has finally opened, and Peggy Noonan most definitely approves. I’m planning to see it next time I’m in New York.

Now, that’s a commencement speech.

Europeans’ growing disillusionment with the EU and the euro.

Los Angeles has become “the staged auto accident capital of the U.S.” I don’t doubt it; I even know someone who’s been a victim. Just another step on our road towards becoming a third-world nation.

I wouldn’t have thought I’d agree with an article in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, but I can’t find much fault with this one by Michael Kinsley on the subject of Glenn Greenwald. My only quarrel is that I think Kingsley is much too easy on Edward Snowden, who’s no naif.

More details on just what Piketty might have gotten wrong in his data and computations.

China and Russia, happy at last.

The irony of the Weather Underground

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading David Horowitz’s 1989 book Destructive Generation—and particularly the chapter entitled “Doing It,” about the Weathermen who morphed into the Weather Underground (notably Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, as well as several fellow travelers)—I am struck by the irony of their life trajectories.

What a group of nihilistic, self-aggrandizing, angry, reckless, power-mad, ignorant, arrogant people they were. But say what you will about them, they showed they could learn from experience. When all these destructive characteristics of theirs came together to cause three of their number to blow themselves and a Greenwich Village townhouse up instead of their planned target, soldiers at Fort Dix, it scared the survivors among them into another mode of action.

What they learned from the incident was this, according to Horowitz, who quotes their 1970 position paper “New Morning – Changing Weather”:

Claiming that they were communicating “not as military leaders, but as tribes at council,” they dealt publicly with the townhouse for the first time, admitting that the explosion had “destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle…It was clear that more had been wrong with our direction than technical inexperience…This tendency to consider only bombing or picking up a gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better, we’ve called the military error.” After noting that “a group of outlaws who are isolated from the youth communities…cannot develop strategies that grow to include large numbers of people,” they said they planned to build a mass movement of youth into a Weather Nation.

Dohrn and Ayers went through several other incarnations before Horowitz’s 1989 chapter ends, leaving them wandering in an aimless wilderness, unfocused and unfulfilled. But in the years that followed they certainly got the last laugh, didn’t they? Most of America may have rejected their ravings, their violence, and their romantic narcissistic views of themselves as great revolutionaries. But academia and especially the universities bought (in the form of professorships and honors) what they ultimately decided to sell, which was nothing less than the slow Gramscian march through the educational institutions, which ended up transforming younger generations and moving this nation in the direction they had planned all along.