Mayday, Mayday!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

[UPDATE: I see that Russia has revived its Mayday parade, first time since 1991. Why am I unsurprised?]

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féªte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. Who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Manhattan Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I visited the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

That’s how I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

woolworth_wfc_s.jpg

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.

This is what it’s come to in Britain—and the bell tolls for us, too

The New Neo Posted on by

Quoting Winston Churchill can get you into hot water. Mark Steyn writes :

On Saturday, Paul Weston of Liberty GB, a candidate in next month’s European elections, was speaking on the steps of Winchester Guildhall and quoting Winston Churchill on the matter of Muslims (from The River War, young Winston’s book on the Sudanese campaign). He was, in short order, arrested by half-a-dozen police officers, shoved in the back of a van and taken away to be charged under a “Section 27 Dispersal Notice”. I had charitably assumed this was a more severe equivalent of the parade licensing that American municipalities use to discourage public participation by disfavored groups – ie, Mr Weston was arrested because he did not have his paperwork in order. I dislike such laws, but in America their use testifies at least to a certain squeamishness about directly punishing someone for the content of his speech.

Not so in Britain. The coppers dropped the Section 27 Dispersal business, and instead charged Mr Weston with a “Racially Aggravated Crime” – in other words, he’s being charged explicitly for the content of that Churchill passage, and the penalty could be two years in jail. This is remarkable, and not just because Islam is not a race, as its ever more numerous pasty Anglo-Saxon “reverts” will gladly tell you. For one thing, the police have effectively just criminalized Liberty GB’s political platform.

Where to begin? First, with the offending passage from Churchill’s The River War that Weston had read:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities ”“ but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

Churchill posits “science” as saving western civilization against the militancy of Islam—meaning, if my interpretation is correct, the science that allowed the West to make superior weapons and to fight effectively with them against Muslim invasions of Europe and later Muslim rebellions around the world (the latter included the war his book was describing). But did Churchill foresee that Islam would take root in Britain itself, and—along with the left—wage a campaign to insidiously undermine the freedom of speech that is one of the bulwarks of western civilization? Not to mention the left’s also working to dumb down the teaching of the science, too?

I don’t think so. Although I’ve hardly read everything Churchill ever wrote, I doubt that even he had the vision to see those possibilities.

And yet here we are—and I use the word “we” because, although the US isn’t quite as far gone as Britain, it’s not far behind. That’s one of the reasons why many people (I include myself among them) are against a special criminal designation known as “hate crimes.” I think that old-fashioned “crimes” would suffice to cover all bases, and that the dangers of adding “hate” as a special intensifier to the mix is potentially too high a price to pay.

Steyn correctly describes the source of the point of view that ended up stifling Weston’s speech and which has weakened the defense of freedom of speech in the US as well:

Two generations of Americans have been raised in an educational milieu that thinks, to pluck a current example at random, that using the phrase “Man up!” ought to be banned. If you’ve been marinated in this world from kindergarten, why would you emerge into the adult world with any attachment to the value of freedom of speech?

As I say, in Britain, Australia and America, free peoples are losing the habits of free speech, and thereby will lose their freedom.

Exactly and precisely. These attitudes became entrenched in academia decades ago, as I discovered on my own when I returned to get my Master’s degree in the early 90s. Although I was still a liberal Democrat at the time, the academic world had passed me by while I’d been out in the other world minding my business and tending my family. In the meantime, someone had taught a whole new generation or two that they had the right to stop speech (and discipline the speaker) if said speech hurt their feelings.

I was shocked; how could this be? Back then I hadn’t the political framework to place it all in a left/right or statist/libertarian context, but I knew I was greatly disturbed by what I saw. When I spoke up to protest it in a class composed mostly of younger undergraduates, I was looked on by both class and professor (a woman of roughly my generation, I might add) as a kind of doddering old fossil with ideas too antiquated to bother much about.

I duly noted back then—although again, I hadn’t much political context to understand it at the time—that at the university I attended a great many of the students working to ban and punish speech they didn’t like called themselves feminists. Note that in the Churchill quote that got Weston into hot water, part of Churchill’s criticism of Islam was that it oppresses women. And so it does, to this day. But it’s the rare “feminist” who cares about that issue and its continuing truth, because somehow the need to soothe the ruffled feathers of Muslims takes precedence. Note what happened to Hirsi Ali at Brandeis, where the protection of Muslim feelings trumped championing women’s rights as well as the airing of ideas in the academic marketplace.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for us all.

New math

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace writes about Common Core math pedagogy:

Common Core needlessly complicates the simple. They complicate the simple, supposedly, to impart “number sense” to kids, to get them to understand not just that 9 +3 = 12, but why 9 + 3 =12.

That’s a very ambitious goal.

I suppose we should ask this question, however: Given that teachers are currently failing in the less-ambitious goal of simply teaching that 9+3= 12, why do we believe they’ll be better at the more-ambitious goal of teaching why 9+3 =12…

Pedagogues have been doing this sort of thing for ages. In fact, Tom Lehrer got their number back in the early 60s when he lampooned what was then called “New Math.” Enjoy this; it’s timeless:

Speaking of timeless, I was lucky enough to be educated prior to such abominations, although even in my day there were tiny hints of what was to come. For example, my grandmother used to tell a favorite story about something I did as a child. I have no memory of the incident, but it sounds about right. When I was in grades one and two there was a big push to get us to see that the simple math tables we were learning had practical real-world applications. This bored me no end, but I knew that if I failed to label my math problems properly (one apple plus five apples equals six apples), I would be marked down even if I got the right mathematical answer.

I hated it, but I complied. And according to my grandmother (who’d been a teacher back at the turn of the century—that’s the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century, by the way) I applied it. When I was around six or so I was playing with some toys in her apartment while she was talking to a friend (also a former schoolteacher) about teaching children their math tables by drilling them with flash cards and the like. They didn’t think I was paying attention—why would I be?—until I suddenly cried out, “No, no, no!”, leapt up, and imperiously and impatiently said, “That’s not how you do it!”

They were sitting in front of a dish of cookies, and I took four out of the plate, lined them up in two rows of two, and pointed. “You have to say two of these and two of these!” I insisted, having learned my lesson.

I’m sure all kidney patients…

The New Neo Posted on by

…will be happy to hear that UCLA has rejected a three million dollar donation from Donald Sterling for kidney research.

People are falling all over themselves to show how righteous they are by shunning Sterling and everything he ever touched. Apparently they’re afraid his racist cooties will rub off on them.

The latest developments in the Sterling case—this action by UCLA, and of course the lifetime ban and huge fine levied by the NBA, are legal and well within the rights of both institutions. But it’s possible to feel alarmed at what’s been happening without mounting any sort of defense of Sterling himself. What alarms me is the chilling effect this has on private conversations, and the encouragement it gives to blackmailers and those out for revenge.

It’s been reported by “a source” that Sterling knew he was being recorded when the conversations were taped. If that is correct (and at this point we have no way of ascertaining whether it is or isn’t), then the man’s a fool (well, we already knew that) as well as a racist. But at least it would also take the case out of the realm of being in violation of the California wiretapping statute that requires the consent of both parties to any recording of a confidential conversation, a law whose violation would very very much concern me.

I had never heard of Sterling before this story broke. I don’t follow basketball and haven’t for decades. So I knew nothing about previous allegations of Sterling’s racist behavior, including this 2009 Department of Justice lawsuit that was settled out of court. But the NAACP no doubt knew about all of it, and somehow the organization managed to tolerate his behavior and even to reward it till now. What changed?

Kerry was only reflecting Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m in agreement with Andrew McCarthy on this:

In what he foolishly thought was a safe place to let his hair down, Kerry merely gave voice to what the Obama administration thinks. “Apartheid” trips easily off his tongue because it is part of the Islamist narrative that the administration has internalized.

Forget Kerry. This was made explicit in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech””for anyone who didn’t infer it already from Obama’s friendships with notorious Israel bashers like Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers (see P. David Hornik’s FPM report on Ayers joining his fellow tenured radicals in a 2010 petition accusing Israel of ”” all together now ”” apartheid policies). As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Obama’s speech “combined fictional accounts of Islamic history and doctrine, a woefully ignorant explanation of Israel’s claim to its sovereign territory, and an execrable moral equivalence drawn between Southern slave owners in early America and modern Israelis besieged by Palestinian terror.”

I would take small issue with a couple of things McCarthy said. The first is “That the current secretary of state is a clownish figure has been well known for decades.” It’s the word “clownish” that troubles me. Yes, Kerry’s been made fun of (why the long face, John?) for his patrician windsurfing ways and overwhelming arrogance (do you know who I am?). But those who remember him from his Vietnam testimony days find him anything but clownish. The man has done a great deal of damage.

McCarthy also says that Kerry’s use of the word “apartheid” was “not a gaffe.” I maintain, however, that it was somewhat of a slip, but only in the sense that he didn’t mean his real point of view to come out. It was therefore more of a “tell” than he’d planned. But he probably has run way too long in circles where the only thing that would happen if he were to talk about Israel as a potentially (or actually) apartheid state would be for his listeners to nod sagely in agreement. So I think that not only did he suppose that the text of his remarks wouldn’t surface, but he failed to realize how inflammatory his words would seem if they ever were publicized.

Is this finally the Benghazi smoking gun?

The New Neo Posted on by

Please forgive my cynicism, but I don’t think America cares about Benghazi.

It’s a yawn because it’s been officially declared a yawn by the administration and far more importantly the MSM. And so I’m not at all confident that this new revelation will matter (see also this):

Emails sent by senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes to other top administration officials reveal an effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the attacks that killed four Americans.

Rhodes sent this email to top White House officials such as David Plouffe and Jay Carney just a day before National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her infamous Sunday news show appearances to discuss the attack.

The “goal,” according to these emails, was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”

Did I write “revelations”? The emails may be proof of the orchestration of the lies, but that’s probably no revelation since they merely underline what almost everyone paying attention already knew, which is that the administration’s blaming the video was a purely and utterly political act with purely and utterly political motivations.

In fact, a great deal of what this administration does is purely and utterly political, to a degree that is unusual even compared to previous presidencies. This is no accident, either, since Obama has more political and PR advisors in policy positions than previous presidents have had.

I’ve written about the situation before, in a post about Ben Rhodes’ background and his then-merely-suspected involvement in the Benghazi mess, and a more general one about the huge policy footprint of Obama’s political advisors. That phenomenon has been one of the hallmarks of Obama’s administration, which is one of the reasons it was so easy to see and to believe that the Benghazi-was-about-a-video meme was promulgated by the administration for political reasons and political ends.

Rhodes is probably merely the tip of the iceberg. We still haven’t had the most basic questions about Benghazi answered, such as where was Obama that night? But if Obama responds to the news about Rhodes’ emails at all, it will probably be to do one or all of these things: deny he knew a thing about it, say Rhodes was merely instructing people to say what the administration actually thought was the truth, and/or ask what difference does it make now, anyway?

Roger Simon (and others) call for a full investigation and possible impeachment, and in a just country the administration would be forced to answer for what it did and didn’t do regarding Benghazi. However, I regretfully have to say I believe that those who think this call of Roger’s will be answered: “American ‘liberals’ and their media consorts should search their souls” are living in a dreamworld.

Simon adds, “We will now see if there is even a figment of honesty in our mainstream media and if our elected representatives are to be trusted in any way.” Again, I think we know the answer. But I hope I’m wrong.

Another May-December fun couple who ran into difficult times

The New Neo Posted on by

The foibles of Donald Sterling and his mistress have somehow managed to remind me of these guys, another pair with a rather large age gap, and who represented what in those days (1974) passed for an ethnically diverse couple:

millsfoxe

For Wilbur Mills, Democratic congressman from Arkansas who held the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee for 17 years, longer than anyone in history, being caught drunk and in a dalliance with Argentine stripper Fanne Foxe precipitated the end of his political career, although it actually was a second similar incident that administered the coup de grace.

Compared to Sterling and his lady friend, Mills was positively youthful when all this happened (65), and Foxe comparatively geriatric at 38.

In an aside, I noticed on Foxe’s Wiki page that she earned a spot on Time magazine’s 2009 list of history’s top 10 mistresses (although, strangely enough, she appears to be number eleven). My, my my! Who even knew Time had compiled such a list?

Here’s the roster, in case you’re wondering. Quite a few of the women have names that no longer ring a bell, having passed to obscurity in the five years since the list was compiled, showing how fleeting fame can be. And one of them wasn’t even a mistress: Anne Boleyn, who got a bum rap not only from Henry but from history, it seems.

Do most people even know that one of the reasons Henry VIII was so keen to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Boleyn was that Anne held out on him sexually and insisted on marriage as the prerequisite? She had watched what had happened to her sister Mary, who’d been Henry’s previous mistress, had gotten pregnant by him, and been effectively abandoned by him, and Anne had no intention of going the same route.

So it’s ironic that Anne’s on a list of mistresses when she was bound and determined not to be one. Also ironic that, in order to behead her, Henry falsely accused her of infidelity. Anne was ambitious, but she was sexually faithful to both Henry and her marriage vows. She was also very smart, although that didn’t help her much when arrayed against the formidable forces of a king who wanted to be rid of her. But her daughter, Elizabeth I, probably inherited her brilliance from both her parents.

[NOTE: It would be nicely symmetrical if I could list Henry and Anne as still another May/December romance gone wrong. But it wouldn’t really be true because, at the time of their marriage, Henry was 42 and Anne (whose birthdate has been disputed) was somewhere between 26 and 32. That’s an age gap, all right, but not such a big one, and Henry was still a relatively young man.]

[NOTE II: Here’s an interesting tidbit on Mills:

His accomplishments in Congress included playing a large role in the creation of the Medicare program. Mills initially had reservations about the program because he was worried about the eventual cost, but eventually shepherded it through Congress and had a large hand in shaping its program.]

Wall Street Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know much about the agenda of the authors of this Politico piece entitled “Wall Street Republicans’ dark secret: Hillary Clinton 2016.” I’m going to assume they have one, though, and that it’s not to help the 2016 Republican candidate, whoever he/she may be.

It’s a fascinating article, with its innuendos that Wall Street Republicans secretly support Hillary Clinton, and its lack of actual evidence that they do. The goal (I would guess) is to further the discord and split in the Republican Party between the conservatives and the RINOs, a canyon that is already Grand-sized as it is.

The idea of the piece is that the big money donors are unhappy with Tea Party candidates, and that if they can’t get their guy—Jeb Bush—in, they’ll lie back and let Hillary cruise to victory because they don’t mind her all that much.

Perhaps that’s even true, and if so not really much of a surprise.

To me the most interesting thing about the article is its downplaying—amounting to almost no mention at all—of Scott Walker as a possible GOP candidate. He’s given less time in the piece than Christie, Bush, Cruz, Rubin, and even Kasich, although I see Walker as very much in the 2016 game.

This isn’t true just of this particular article, either. I’ve noticed it time and again in almost everything I read about the 2016 possibilities. Unless the piece is explicitly about Walker (such as, for example, this recent NY Times article that focused on some old and supposedly racially controversial emails exchanged by a couple of Walker’s staffers, or this one from February that stirred the email pot as well), he is ignored, pooh-poohed, played down, and considered basically irrelevant.

Except, of course, for the fact that he is sometimes attacked. After all, the email bit worked against Christie, so why couldn’t the same work to discredit Walker, just in case?

But my guess is that Democrats fear Walker more than they let on. That’s why their m.o. is to give the basic message of “run along now; nothing here to see,” combined with “and furthermore, he’s a corrupt racist who, by the way, never graduated from college because he either dropped out or was forced out.”

As for those (unnamed) Wall Street Republicans featured in the Politico piece, my guess is that for most people on Wall Street, politics is about what you’ve done for me lately or might do for me in the future rather than any other principle.

John Kerry, our illustrious Secretary of State…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has made the following statements:

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday…

Kerry also said that at some point, he might unveil his own peace deal and tell both sides to “take it or leave it.”

“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens””or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state,” Kerry told the group of senior officials and experts from the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. “Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.”

That’s what happens when you add a man like Kerry to an administration like Obama’s.

I’ve written about Kerry many times before. I’ve had contempt for him for a long, long time, decades before I had my political change experience. His 1970 and 1971 meetings with the North Vietnamese and his Congressional testimony in 1971 concerning the Vietnam War (comparing our troops to Genghis Khan’s forces, downplaying the tyranny of Communism) were deeply offensive as well as indicative of his overwhelming personal ambition and arrogance. Finally becoming Secretary of State under Obama after all those years of aspiration to something greater than the Senate was probably a consolation prize that helped console him for the bitterness of his presidential defeat in 2004.

So what are Kerry’s latest remarks about? Some of it is merely a reflection of the relatively anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian attitude of the Obama administration. But some of it is probably Kerry’s own anger at how impotent he’s been in achieving anything in the Middle East negotiations so far. Narcissists tend to get especially frustrated when their expectations of their own power aren’t realized, and Kerry’s lack of success in the Middle East “peace process” would almost inevitably cause him to strike out in retaliation of the verbal sort. His remarks are a version of why can’t these stupid people see things clearly, like I do? Why don’t they just bow to my superior wisdom and “take” the peace plan I’ve worked so hard on?

[NOTE: There’s a reason why the Arab states in the Middle East aren’t actual “apartheid” states (rather than imagined ones, like Israel), and that’s because they became Judenfrei some time ago.]

This evening is the start of…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Bookworm writes:

Back in the 1930s, no one could believe that the Germans, considered the most civilized and advanced of all Europeans, could become so bestial.

The tragedy today is that, when we look at the Islamists, we’ve already seen how bestial they are, and still nobody believes their oft repeated goal of reinstating the Holocaust.

I would add that it’s a further tragedy that many people would probably applaud if they achieved that goal.

Here’s some post-Holocaust history:

Charlotte van den Berg was a 20-year-old college student working part-time in Amsterdam’s city archives when she and other interns came across a shocking find: letters from Jewish Holocaust survivors complaining that the city was forcing them to pay back taxes and late payment fines on property seized after they were deported to Nazi death camps.

How, the survivors asked, could they be on the hook for taxes due while Hitler’s regime was trying to exterminate them? A typical response was: “The base fees and the fines for late payment must be satisfied, regardless of whether a third party, legally empowered or not, has for some time held the title to the building.”

Remembering a Polish hero, Jan Karski:

Karski risked his life many times over to bring eyewitness testimony of the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto and of the transport of Jews to death camps to Western leaders. But the point about Karski’s amazing tale is that the people he told about the Holocaust at a time when it was still going on either refused to believe him or ignored his testimony.

[Hat tip: Maetenloch at Ace’s.]

[NOTE: For some relevant posts I’ve written on the subject, see this, this, this, and this.]