The pseudoscience of Whole Foods

The New Neo Posted on by

Whole Foods peddles a lot of stuff that makes upscale liberals feel good about themselves but has little evidence to back it up as especially healthful.

But Whole Foods continues to rake it in. That’s because, IMHO, Whole Foods is actually a place where the health-conscious can go to get really decadent food and not feel so bad about it. Much of what is sold there is dessert that’s every bit as fat-filled and sugar-laden as anywhere, but it looks beautiful and most of it tastes pretty darn good and after all, we bought it at Whole Foods, so the calorie count doesn’t matter.

I am as guilty as the next person, although my relative but not absolute distance from a Whole Foods protects me somewhat:

Yesterday I went to Whole Foods.

I don’t live very close to one. But not too very far away, either. Perhaps just right (in the Goldilocks sense), because any closer and I’d be a lot poorer and a lot fatter, and any further away and I’d be sadder.

Yesterday I succumbed, as I sometimes do, to the seductive call of a piece of Whole Foods almond cream cake. After I’d partaken of its delicately perfumed, almond scented, moist and tender””well, you get the idea””it occurred to me that, unlike its policy with much of the rest of its food, Whole Foods is mum on the calorie content.

That stuff is ambrosia. I’d better stop writing right now before I get a yen for it that I’ll need to satisfy.

Will Russia let Ukraine go?

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s going on in Ukraine, and what’s likely to happen next? Here’s one analysis:

A real democracy in Ukraine is an existential threat to the entire system that Vladimir Putin has built since 2000. Ironically because Putin is right ”“ most Russians regard Ukraine as a kin state, or not really a different state at all. They are used to stepping in tandem; so if something changes in Ukraine, why not in Russia too? And now the dominoes might fall in the other direction…

…[T]he new government in Ukraine, however it’s made up, will be given the briefest of ritualistic honeymoons before Russia uses every instrument at its disposal to try to make it fail. Unfortunately, Russia holds most of the economic cards. Ukraine’s coffers are almost empty, and the old guard is busy looting what is left. It has less than $18bn (£10.9bn) in hard currency reserves, its currency is dropping and immediate debt-repayment needs are more than $10bn.

Russia tied Ukraine to a $15bn bailout deal in December, which is parcelled out by the month to maximise leverage, and periodically suspended whenever the opposition looked like getting the upper hand. But Russia’s real aim was to provide just enough money to support the old semi-authoritarian system (helping Viktor Yanukovych pay the police) and keep Ukrainian society post-Soviet, that is, still dependent on government. So Ukraine’s new leaders will have to be honest and say their aim is to dismantle both. They cannot declare victory now, but will have to plead for popular support during what will be two or three difficult years.

The new Ukraine will pay more for gas, which will be regularly cut off for “technical reasons”. Russia’s crazy “food safety” agency will declare that everything that comes out of Ukraine is radioactive. Ukrainian migrant workers will be sent home now they have finished helping to rebuild Sochi.

Worst of all, Russia will work hard to try to re-corrupt the political system.

I freely admit that I know very little about Ukraine—including the fact that until recently I kept calling it the Ukraine. But the above seems credible to me.

Hagel starts doing what he was hired for

The New Neo Posted on by

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is set to announce the administration’s intent to make the biggest cuts in decades to the US military, returning it to its smallest size since 1940.

I get tired of writing “this is no surprise.” But this is definitely no surprise.

Notice that I’m not saying nothing in the military budget should be cut. No doubt there are plenty of things that could go in a cost-saving move. But the military should not be asked to bear almost all the sacrifices. And we cannot trust this administration to do what’s in our best interests in terms of the military. In fact, we can trust it to want to weaken our ability to wage war, and strengthen our resemblance to western Europe in every way.

Our enemies are well aware of this, of course.

The next question is what Congress will do—that’s assuming that Congress is still involved, and that Obama’s pen and phone won’t end up finessing Congress if he doesn’t get the cuts he wants. After all, what’s to keep him from switching some monies around? Who’s going to stop him?

Circle dancing: the media is the message

The New Neo Posted on by

The Anchoress has a lot to say about the Obama’s administration’s proposal to use the FCC to “study” the newsrooms:

…[The administration is] thinking no one in the mainstream press has asked them a difficult or challenging question in 7 years, so why would they start now…

The biggest problem in our nation is not the Democrats, or the Republicans; it is not the Obama Administration, just as it wasn’t the Bush Administration, and it won’t be future Clinton or Warren Administrations. Our biggest problem is that the press has voluntarily surrendered its freedoms for the sake of idols and ideologies..

Because this is true, our government is either factionalized, fictionalized and bombarded with daily media outrage and indignation, or it is given an utterly free pass, with no accountability required…

I’ve been saying this for a long time. We’ve all been saying if for a long time, but the Anchoress says it especially well (please read the whole thing). I would only add that the press is only one half of the equation; the other half is a receptive audience that lacks the historic and/or critically aware background to evaluate what it reads, or perhaps even to pay much attention.

I read the liberal press’ spin on something, and then I hear it parroted back by a group of acquaintances of mine, who all nod their heads in synchrony and agreement. And yet if I ask them a few questions about something that reflects poorly on liberals or the administration, something only the right has covered, they’ve never even heard of it and don’t want to hear of it. If a tree falls in the conservative forest, does anyone other than conservatives hear it?

Even if you try to mention any particular offense (for example, the recent effort re the FCC monitoring newsrooms, with which I began this post), its significance is only really understood in context. It’s the totality of the picture that is especially alarming. But it’s the totality that is especially hidden, and even if news of one or two suspicious actions of this administration manages to seep through the information barrier, without the whole picture a conservative’s reaction can easily sound paranoid to the liberal listener. That is by design.

Some people wonder why I bother to write about the egregious bias of the press anymore. After all, there’s nothing new there, and what good does it do to belabor the fact? I do it because the press continues to be one of the most important things in our lives, and has the power to shape our future.

In closing, I’ll reprint something I’ve posted here before. It’s the words of the Czech author Milan Kundera, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 70s:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

Apparently, Carina Kolodny was placed in a time capsule in 1958…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and it was just opened.

On her release, she appears to have made the happy discovery that gay marriage is here, and that furthermore it will save us in the following manner:

As same-sex couples marry, they will be forced to re-imagine many tenets of your “traditional marriage.” In doing so, they will face a series of complicated questions:

Should one of us change our last name? And if so, who?

Should we have kids? Do we want to have kids? How do we want to have kids? Whose last name do our kids take?

How about housework, work-work, childcare? How do we assign these roles equitably? How do we cultivate a partnership that honors each of our professional and personal ambitions?

As questions continually arise, heterosexual couples will take notice — and be forced to address how much “traditional marriage” is built on gender roles and perpetuates a nauseating inequality that has no place in 2014.

Having just arrived in the year 2014, Carina can be forgiven for not realizing that these are topics about which heterosexual men and women have been duking it out ad nauseam, with great and voluble intensity, in speech and in print, for over fifty years. Despite this, there has been no unanimity or resolution on the subjects, although one can hardly say the issues are the least bit unexamined.

I know quite a few gay and lesbian couples, and I can’t say I ever noticed they don’t fight over the usual things like who will do the dishes and which name to give the kiddies and whose job should take precedence. What’s more, when I studied domestic abuse in grad school I learned that—somewhat surprisingly, since gender differences were originally thought to be part of the impetus—gays even have very similar rates of domestic violence compared to heterosexual couples. We are far more the same than we are different, it seems.

But Carina believes that gay married couples have a magically better approach to the questions she lists, because there will be no gender-based power struggles between them, and their wonderful influence will seep into the lives of heterosexuals and affect them for the better, ushering in the Brave New World of which Carina dreams.

And that’s why Carina has never before admitted that yes, gay marriage will influence straight marriage:

So yes, I told a white lie while soldiering on toward this inevitable outcome. I bit my lip in favor of dignity and equality — not just for the LGBTQ community but for heterosexual women. I have done nothing for which I am ashamed.

…I believe that marriage equality will stomp out the remaining misogyny that you call “tradition.”
And that’s a win, not just for the LGBTQ community but for heterosexual women and the heterosexual men who see them as equals.

Carina Kolodny isn’t a writer for the Onion. She a real live person and she’s very, very serious. What she doesn’t know about marriage—heterosexual and gay—could fill a book. And it probably will some day.

The uniqueness of the ACA

The New Neo Posted on by

Noemie Emery has a fine article summarizing why the ACA is different, and more unpopular, than all the other seminal and sweeping bills passed by Congress.

You may have forgotten some of the details of the story. Emery gives you a refresher course. It’s also a good article to send to others, be they for or against the ACA.

Pravda, here we come!

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t yet covered the story about this administration’s proposal that the FCC monitor newsrooms to see “whether journalists are producing articles, television reports, Internet content, and commentary that ‘meets the public’s critical information needs,'” although I plan to write more about it soon.

I’m strapped for time at the moment, but the topic is extremely important. So I’ll just do something uncharacteristic and quote Rush Limbaugh, who’s right on the money about this (please read the whole thing, although it’s long):

So this goes to the core of a free press…It’s a new world. There isn’t any news. That’s not what journalism is anymore. You don’t go into journalism because you want to report news to people. You don’t go into journalism because you want to find out first what’s happening and be the first to report to other people what’s happening.

…You go into journalism to advance an agenda. World peace, ending world poverty, destroying the powerful, whatever it is. But it is not related to the news anymore. By the way, Katy Bachman, who I mentioned yesterday that I’ve encountered in my professional broadcast career, writes at Adweek. She reported yesterday that the program has been dialed back.

It hasn’t. It has not been dialed back. They want us to think it has. Lanny Davis has stood up in outrage. Well-known Clinton defender, Lanny Davis, stood up in outrage. It’s typical. He says, “Obama needs to find out who did this and fire him!” Lanny, Obama would have to fire himself, and that isn’t going to happen. Can I tell you what else I found? I found a tweet. I have a got a screen shot here. It’s very small, and it could have been Facebook.

But it’s a tweet, and it is from a Democrat running for Congress in Virginia against Eric Cantor. The Democrat’s name is Mike Dickinson, and it looks like the tweet is from February 17th. So four days ago. I’m going to read you the tweet. “Fox News does nothing but tell lies and mistruths. They have unqualified political analysts. We need FCC to monitor and regulate them.”

That’s a Democrat candidate for Congress.

There’s more, much more. But the bottom line is this: if the MSM isn’t outraged, most people won’t be. Most people still are informed and stirred by the MSM. And the MSM is not outraged because it is fully on board with this administration.

That’s the brilliance of getting the left in control of the newsrooms. It means that a leftist administration will experience no significant pushback from an ostensibly free press, because the leftist media will compromise its supposed principles in order to reach the desired goal. They think the crocodile will never eat them.

The human cost: Korea

The New Neo Posted on by

These heartbreaking photos say it all.

Actually, I’m sure they don’t say it all, but they say an awful lot. What abysmal cruelty, for North Korea to reduce families to this situation:

Their backs stooped, dozens of elderly North and South Koreans separated for six decades reunited Thursday, weeping and embracing in a rush of words and emotion. The reunions come during a rare period of detente between the rival Koreas and are all the more poignant because the participants will part again in a few days, likely forever.

Six decades of separation.

Never again to see each other, but given this one last opportunity, with every moment a precious brew of joy and bitter sorrow:

Koreanbrothersister

Koreanmotherdaughter

Koreansisters

Koreanunclenieces

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Hillary Clinton’s favorability: a poll result that makes me want to take up drinking

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

A clear majority of Americans, 59%, still view Hillary Clinton favorably a year after she left her post as secretary of state. Clinton’s current rating is noticeably lower than the 64% she averaged while serving in President Barack Obama’s cabinet.

The last time she had a higher unfavorable than favorable rating in the U.S. was in February 2008, when she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination against Obama. The latest findings come from a Gallup poll conducted Feb. 6-9.

At the time Clinton signed on as Secretary of State under Obama, I couldn’t understand it. I thought it was a bad decision on her part, but I was wrong. She is a very smart political animal, and she seems to have rightly ascertained that it was only her temporary opposition to the Great Obama that had made her look bad, and that if she joined him it would burnish her image.

And so it has, no matter what she actually did while in his Cabinet, because what she did was every bit as awful as what Obama did, and she did it as his underling. Somehow, though, that seems to have helped her in the minds of the American public. Her favorability rating is a great deal higher than his right now.

Let’s take a closer look at her chart over time:

hillaryfavorable

You can see that her favorability ratings have demonstrated some variability over time, but have never gotten that bad ever since the public came to know her. The lowest low was 47, recorded in 1996. I was trying to think what might have been happening re Clinton back then, and I came up with this, which may have been responsible. At any rate, Clinton has remained remarkably popular for so controversial a figure, and soared into the mid-60s and remained there during her entire tenure as Secretary of State.

No one ever said Clinton wasn’t smart. She knew exactly what she was doing. As for Benghazi ”“ at this point, what difference does it make?

McCain comes down firmly in the “Obama is a fool, not knave” camp

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not as though what John McCain says matters at this point. However, he is still a US senator, and—although it may seem several lifetimes away—he was Barack Obama’s Republican opponent in his first presidential race, way back in 2008.

Here’s what McCain had to say yesterday about Obama:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Thursday called President Obama “the most naé¯ve president in history” because of his foreign policy tactics.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “played us so incredibly,” McCain said on a Phoenix radio station.

“This is the most naé¯ve president in history,” he said.

“The naé¯veté of Barack Obama and [Secretary of State] John Kerry is stunning,” he added, citing the administration’s plans for Iran and Syria.

Now, in a way, that’s a hard-hitting comment. It certainly deals in extremity: McCain says “most naé¯ve…in history” and “stunning.”

These are not mild words on McCain’s part. But they betray a profound misunderstanding of what might be going on here. We’ve had the “Obama, fool vs. knave” discussion on this blog many times, and the answer is not something we even have to be certain of (although by now I’m pretty sure it’s “both”) in order to see that McCain isn’t even considering the “knave” possibility.

How hard is it to see that Obama has a philosophy of foreign policy intervention that, even giving him the benefit of the doubt, seems at best to be focused on reducing our power and influence, and making us into a clone of various western European countries? That’s not naé¯veté, that’s intent, and the intent is crystal clear.

And that’s at best. At worst—well, you fill in the blanks. I have filled them in several times, but if you’d like a refresher, it’s here:

[Obama’s] not just interested in smallness and irrelevance for their own sakes. He’s interested in weakening America’s influence, and in doing so he allows other forces to rise, forces that previous administrations had opposed. Those forces could be summarized as being either leftist or Islamicist, depending on the country and the situation. In studying Obama’s decisions in the foreign arena, it is difficult to escape the idea that Obama prefers that these groups gain more power around the world. And since he can’t come out directly for them, sometimes he must support them by apparent indirection and inaction.

The Obama Doctrine.

I was going to end this post with a statement to the effect of, “Maybe it’s McCain and many other Republicans who are the naé¯ve ones.” That may be very, very true. But then I reconsidered and thought, “Perhaps not all of them are as naé¯ve as they appear.” Perhaps at least some of them actually know more than they let on and are just being quiet about it, because they realize that saying it would put them in the “crazy, racist, extremist, hateful” camp.

That’s the beauty of the Obama presidency.

Raising a gender-neutral child

The New Neo Posted on by

Another article in the “unfortunately, not the Onion” category.

This is where PC thought takes us, ultimately:

Once my partner and I finally stopped orchestrating schemes, we actually did something that stuck. We never planned on not teaching our son gender pronouns, it just happened. Once he started trying to talk and would point to a random person on the street with a question mark on his face, we’d say, “Oh, that’s a person”, as opposed to, “that’s a man/woman or girl/boy”. When he actually started being able to verbally ask about people, we’d either tell him the person’s name or we’d say it’s a person and groups of persons were people.

At two and a half the terms: his, her, he, she, woman, man, girl, boy are not part of his vocabulary.

These parents (we know the writer is a woman, because in the article she refers to her pregnancy, but we don’t know the sex of the other parent whom she refers to as her partner, relentlessly avoiding any gender-revealing pronouns) obviously subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language: “holding that the structure of a language affects the perceptions of reality of its speakers and thus influences their thought patterns and worldviews.” If we don’t mention girls and boys, men and women, they don’t exist, or they don’t exist in quite the same way they would if we named them as such.

Parents have a lot of freedom to raise their children as they see fit, provided they don’t molest, beat, or starve them. There are more subtle forms of mistreatment, though—including being so far out in la-la land that you don’t recognize some of the basics of our society and every other society that has ever been (as far as I know), which is the recognition of gender differences.

The author writes, “the long term implications of this are yet to be seen,” and it’s possible her son will be just fine with it. It’s possible he’ll consider it one of mom’s (or mom and dad’s, or mom and mom’s) amusing peccadilloes, a harmless eccentricity on the order of setting the table with the fork and spoon reversed, or banning candy from the house, something that can be made up for later as parental influence wanes and the wider world becomes dominant. It’s possible he’ll end up in a therapist’s office screaming what crazy parents he had and how they harmed him. It’s possible he’ll become a proud professor of gender studies and spread the word about what a wonderful way this is to raise kids.

It’s possible this is the wave of the future. Somehow, I don’t think so. Is it child abuse? In my opinion, yes, but not in any actionable, legal sense. One consoling thought is that most (although not all) parents who hold similarly rigid ideas that lead to strange social experiments with their children slowly learn, as those children grow older, that life and culture have a way of intervening, and that it might be time to lighten up. Another is that many (not all) children are more resilient than we think.

As for this particular child, I wish him luck. He‘ll need it.

[Hat tip: Bryan Preston.]

Sean Trende…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is bullish on the GOP’s chances of gaining control of the Senate in 2014:

Barring some sort of change in the national environment or meltdown in the Republican nominations process — neither of which is impossible — Democrats are likely in for a very long night on Nov. 4.

Trende left two other strong possibilities: relentless attacks on Republican nominees by the MSM, and Republican nominees placing feet firmly in mouths.