You may never have heard of Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the greatest male ballet dancers who ever lived

The New Neo Posted on by

In fact, he might just be the greatest male ballet dancer who ever lived. Such comparisons are subjective, after all.

When I was young (probably some time in the 1960s) I saw Vasiliev dance in person, along with many other Russian dance luminaries of the day. He never defected. He was married to another great dancer, Ekaterina Maximova, an Audrey Hepburn-ish type with great charm and lightness.

I can’t seem to discover how tall Vasiliev is (he’s still alive at 83 although Maximova died in 2009), but he seemed a giant on stage. He had a highly unusual quality for a ballet dancer because the initial impression he gave was of tremendous physical power allied with the usual grace that ballet dancers posses, and a very masculine power at that. It’s hard to describe him and, although luckily we have videos, as I’ve said many times videos can’t capture dance except as a pale echo.

But even on videos you can see the tremendous height of Vasiliev’s jumps. In this video the camera angles are sometimes odd, and I have no idea what sort of surface he’s on. It looks as though it could even be concrete, which would be awful. But no matter; Vasiliev soars to a height surprising. Keep in mind that the year was 1969 and ballet technique back then was nothing like as advanced as today. And yet most of today’s dancers can’t hold a candle to him (I’ve cued up a very short excerpt from this pas de deux):

Here you can see his tremendous upper body strength when he does some famous one-armed lifts of his wife. This is from the Soviet ballet “Spartacus,” a work I saw in person and which bored me unutterably. But that certainly wasn’t Vasiliev’s fault; for me, it was the choreography that was such a snooze:

I actually think that one of the best ways to see Vasiliev is in this later video – I believe he’s in his late forties here – that records him teaching a class to four other male dancers. The video shows the tremendous ease and unified harmony of his movements and his emphasis on head and shoulders, otherwise known in ballet as epaulement. It’s absolutely vital to ballet and much-neglected today (be sure to read the captions, which translate what Vasiliev is saying):

I said it’s hard to describe Vasiliev’s special qualities. But I found this 2023 interview with him in which he manages to do it, so I’ll just quote him. Here he is answering the question “For you, what is the most important thing in a performer?” [emphasis mine]:

V. Vasiliev: Everything is important in a performer. I never tire of repeating what my great teachers told me: there is nothing unimportant or secondary in a performing art. Therefore the rarest quality in an artist is a sense of a natural organic source from which everything melds into a single and inseparable harmonic whole which is impossible to separate out into its components or explain, and this all works well for the development of the character. This is what we observe in truly great performers. And this is a great gift, it is unlikely that it can be learned.

I couldn’t agree more.

Some details of the World Community Kitchen killings in Gaza

The New Neo Posted on by

We have more perspective now on what happened to cause the Israelis to bomb the World Community Kitchen convoy.

An excerpt:

Things begin to go pear-shaped at Implementation Point 2. That point marks what is essentially the line of contact between the IDF and Hamas. At this point, at least one armed man climbed onto the aid trucks.

Let’s stop here for a moment. There appears to be an agreement between the IDF and Hamas that Hamas fighters can ride shotgun on aid trucks to safeguard the supplies. If you recall, when Biden announced the construction of a temporary port in Gaza, I pointed out that issue.

Astounding. Apparently it’s not enough to aid the enemy population; actual terrorists are the foxes guarding the aid henhouse. What could possibly go wrong?

Israel has dismissed two senior officers as a result:

The probe found that the strike was ordered against the convoy of WCK vehicles after officers suspected they carried a Hamas gunman, despite a low level of confidence, and against army regulations. The officers did not identify the vehicles as belonging to WCK when the strike was ordered, according to the investigation.

So protocols were also violated in what was already an exceptionally volatile situation.

And now – as is petty much always the case regarding Israel – the world is outraged at something Israel did which was almost inevitable in a war. Mistakes will be made and innocent people will die as a result.

The larger issue is why so much aid is being given to a population that started this war with a massive series of aggressive atrocities in a sudden and unprovoked attack when a ceasefire was supposedly in operation. That population continues its heavy support for its own longstanding use of terrorism in general and the terrorism of October 7 in particular. That population elected a terrorist operation to be its government. And yet nearly the entire world has dedicated itself to helping them.

Another terribly dangerous J6 insurrectionist faces the possibility of prison: meet Rebecca Lavrenz

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, the title of this post contains sarcasm.

This 72-year-old woman’s crime appears to have been praying near the Capitol on J6, then entering the building through an open door, walking around for 10 minutes quite peacefully, and exiting. Horrors!

Here’s the story:

Rebecca Lavrenz, dubbed the “praying grandmother,” attended the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, 2021, prayed with a group of people outside the Capitol Building, and went into the Capitol Building, where she stayed for just 10 minutes. She has been on trial this week in Washington, DC, facing prosecution at the hands of Biden’s Department of Justice.

By her own admission, she spent about 10 minutes inside the Capitol Building on J6, over an hour praying outside, and for that, she has been charged with four misdemeanor counts. Surveillance footage shows her peacefully walking around inside the Capitol Building and even speaking to a Capitol Police Officer, who leaned forward slightly to hear her.

That’s it.

The charges against her are “entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building, and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol Building.” So, what was her “disorderly conduct”? They don’t quite say, but the FBI claims this:

… there is also probable cause to believe that Lavrenz violated additional laws “which make it a crime to willfully and knowingly utter loud, threatening or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the Grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either House of Congress, or the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either House of Congress, or the orderly conduct in that building of a hearing before, or any deliberations of, a committee of Congress or either House of Congress; and parade, demonstrate, or picket in any of the U.S. Capitol Buildings.”

Was it the praying?

She was convicted on all four counts, and the penalty might be up to a year in prison and/or a fine of $200K. The jury took an uncharacteristically long time to convict her – for a DC jury in a J6 kangaroo court, that is:

Defense attorneys from John Pierce Law presented seven witnesses, while four people testified on behalf of prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, who argued that Lavrenz entered the Capitol without having the authority to do so.

She testified for five hours Monday, and the jury started deliberations at 4:45 p.m., released at 5:30 p.m. Monday and resumed deliberations Tuesday, Wednesday and nearly all day Thursday. Lavrenz said she was called in to answer clarification questions several times. The verdict was announced late Thursday afternoon.

She also says that, “I’m going to make my voice so loud that if they try to put me in prison to shut it up, it won’t work.” Lavrenz is already getting a fair amount of attention because the charges are so ludicrous and she’s such a sympathetic defendant. But it doesn’t and won’t stop the over-the-top political prosecution/persecution. The Democrats have invested way too much in this and way too much is riding on it.

Meanwhile, actual criminals, and actual destructive rioters on the left …. Well, you know the drill.

You really have to hand it to the Babylon Bee

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes they are just spot on.

Injecting humor into the often-horrible news we read every day requires a good ear, a delicate touch, a sense of the absurd, and a strong stomach. The folks at the Bee seem to have all four.

Case in point:

There’s a new study telling us what we already knew: that most adolescents unhappy with their sex grow out of that feeling if you just let them grow up without medical intervention

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a description of the study:

The majority of gender-confused children grow out of that feeling by the time they are fully grown adults, according to a long-term study.

Researchers in the Netherlands tracked more than 2,700 children from age 11 to their mid-twenties, asking them every three years of feelings about their gender.

Results showed at the start of the research, around one-in-10 children (11 percent) expressed ‘gender non-contentedness’ to varying degrees.

But by age 25, just one-in-25 (4 percent) said they ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ were discontent with their gender.

The researchers concluded: ‘The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common.’

Relatively common as well as transient:

The authors said: ‘Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.’

Back in the olden days – and by that I mean before about 2014, when gender nonconformity and medical intervention weren’t being pushed so hard and hadn’t become trendy – adolescents who had those feelings weren’t told the solution was to take drugs like puberty blockers and hormones, or to remove their genitalia (and try to construct new ones out of parts of the old) and secondary sexual characteristics like breasts. Lo and behold, most of them emerged from adolescence none the worse for wear, sexually mature and with fully functioning body parts. Some of them would be homosexual in orientation and some would be heterosexual, but the vast majority would adjust to whatever sex they had at birth.

There’s a lot more at the link, including charts and maps showing the trends in transgender diagnoses and care in recent years. There’s also this quote, which underlines what I wrote in the title of this post – the fact that we already knew that most adolescents will grow out of their dissatisfaction with their sex and that we have known it for quite some time:

Dr. Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, told DailyMail.com: ‘We’ve known for over a decade that most kids who experience distress with their sexed bodies resolve those feelings after they pass through natural puberty.

‘Indeed, we can infer from the DSM 5 [2013] and other sources that as many as 88 percent of gender-dysphoric girls and as many as 98 percent of gender-dysphoric boys in previous generations desisted if allowed to go through natural puberty.

‘These two facts make it clear why “gender-affirming care” on minors is such an outrage. It leads, in the end, to sterilization and in many cases to a complete loss of natural sexual function.

‘There is no good evidence that this helps minors long term. Moreover, it medicalizes what could very well be temporary psychological symptoms.

‘History will judge this medicalized “gender-affirming care” on minors as we now judge eugenics and lobotomies.’

Puberty blockers make sure that such children don’t go through “natural puberty,” and then the blockers are followed by opposite-sex hormones which have the additional effect of halting the process of sexual maturity that would be normal for the actual sex of the child and substituting some elements of the sexual characteristics of the opposite sex. The result for many people is that their ability to experience sexual satisfaction is blunted, and they often find it hard to attract partners who are mainstream. Transgender surgery can be a real nightmare as well.

You can find the study at this link.

NOTE: By the way, although I haven’t written much about it, J. K. Rowling has been heroic on this issue and especially on freedom of speech related to the subject.

Biden and his foreign policy aides: weak, accusative, inconsistent, cowardly, corrupt

The New Neo Posted on by

When the US is led by corrupt weaklings, its enemies rejoice and see tremendous opporunity.

That’s what’s been going on during the Biden administration. And now, Iran thinks it had better hurry up and attack, because it’s possible that the golden opportunity afforded by Biden and Company won’t last past January of 2025.

Here’s Caroline Glick discussing the situation:

More here, from Ace.

My reaction to all of this is similar to what I remember when Obama was president and in particular when he was pushing the Iran Deal. It was both infuriating and frustrating to watch helplessly while he sold the country and the West out and catered to some of the worst government leaders with some of the most pernicious goals on earth. All the while, Obama and his aides pretended that they had our country’s best interests in mind and that somehow all of this would stop Iran rather than enabling it. Meanwhile, Israel and particularly Netanyahu were treated as some sort of errant-child nation, misbehaving and needing putting in its place.

I began calling that sort of thing “The Obama Doctrine” back in 2009. From that post:

Obama is counting on Iran taking a long time to develop a nuclear capacity. Whether Obama actually believes this or not (or whether we even have the capability to correctly predict such a timetable), it suits him to underestimate Iran’s nuclear program in his continuing efforts to appease enemies (Iran) and hostile potential enemies (Russia) while simultaneously doublecrossing friends.

How did the Russians return Obama’s favor? The answer is: why should they return the favor? Maybe I don’t get the intricacies of the famous three-dimensional chess Obama is supposed to be playing these days, but it seems to me that he’s given a freebie to Iran and the Russians in exchange for nothing except the opportunity for them to view him as a weakling and a pushover.

A few weeks earlier I had stated the basic principle of Obama’s foreign policy: “offend our allies and friends, and cozy up to our enemies.” It really wasn’t hard to see that was the case, and it was the first time I can ever remember thinking a president was purposely making foreign policy decisions that could be described that way.

And now, for whatever reason, the policy is the same only intensified. Biden was Obama’s vice president and went along with what he did. Biden himself had a history of having been wrong about foreign policy for most of his political life, but I had never gotten the impression he had a malign intent towards the US and its allies, until he became Obama’s VP.

Now that Biden is president, it’s difficult to ascertain how much Biden himself is in charge and how much others are in charge, and whether those “others” include Obama (I think the answer is a strong “yes”) or whether they merely consist of many of the same people who advised and helped Obama.

No matter. The effect is the same. And the effect has been pernicious.

When Trump brags that the Ukraine War and October 7 wouldn’t have happened on his watch, even though it’s his usual braggadocio I believe that he is correct. Other leaders were afraid of what he’d do in retaliation to their aggression, and that was a good thing. In contrast, they are completely unafraid of Biden and his foreign policy aides and in fact have contempt for them – and rightly so.

Update on Gerard’s book

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m getting closer and closer to the time when I’ll be able to announce that the book is for sale. Yeah, I know, you’ve heard it all before. But it’s really true. All the editing is done. I’ve gotten the blurbs from a few other writers. I have a book cover design.

Lately, though, it’s been taking more time than I thought it would to create a website for selling the book. It’s a different skill from creating a blog, something I’ve done several times before. I thought “piece of cake,” but instead it’s been a rather tough bit of beef jerky. But I’m getting close to finished even with that. The stumbling block at the moment is setting up Woo Commerce for the sales, which is far more complex than I ever imagined.

Then it will be time or me to order a sample copy printed, and if that works out well I’ll have them do a print run. And then – voila! – I’ll announce on this blog and Gerard’s that the book is ready for sale.

In addition, I plan to ask some other websites to mention that the book’s for sale. I also have a list of email addresses of people who donated to Gerard after the fire, and I plan to email them with the announcement and instructions for ordering the book.

I don’t know the exact amount of time all this will take, and I’ve been wrong when estimating the time frame before. But my hope and expectation is that the book will be out by May.

Birx as the COVID villain

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an interesting documentary that makes the point that it was Dr. Deborah Birx rather than Fauci who set a great many of the COVID policies that hurt the nation. It also portrays Trump as a victim of Birx, helpless to effectively send a counter-message.

I see it as somewhat different: Birx was instrumental in the lockdown chain reaction, but so were many other players including Fauci and in particular many state governors (especially in blue states). Social media and the press were a big part of it, too, censoring and often ridiculing those who saw it differently. And although Trump tried to counter that, it was a relatively weak effort and not very successful – although granted, he wasn’t a health expert and was relying on those who supposedly were.

Dr. Scott Atlas was a dissenting voice of reason; I wrote about him in this post from December of 2021. Almost from the start, I was able to see that COVID fatalities were being over-hyped and were very much skewed to the elderly and already-ill, and that lockdowns longer than the first couple of weeks were dangerously counterproductive (I wrote about that, too, for example in this post from October of 2020). And even as early as February of 2020, when the best data we had were from the cruise ship Diamond Princess, I was able to write this post that made it clear the danger from COVID was not that severe.

I’m not saying I wrote these things because I’m so brilliant. I wrote them because they were obvious to anyone with a simple understanding of math. And yet, so many people acted on very different premises and under very different instructions. I’m putting this video up because I believe that Birx had an important role in all of that destructiveness, and I think it’s worth remembering:

The World Central Kitchen deaths in Gaza: the standard set for Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

This was tragic news:

Seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli airstrike …

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that the Israeli military was responsible for the unintended “tragic” strike and vowed to investigate. …

“It was a mistake that followed a misidentification – at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” he said, adding that a “thorough investigation” would be completed in the “coming days” by an independent body. …

The WCK said the convoy included armored cars clearly marked with the WCK logo and was in a de-conflicted zone. The organization said it also coordinated its route with the Israel Defense Forces.

It’s also a tragedy on which Israel’s numerous enemies will attempt to capitalize, although it is exactly the sort of tragic mistake that inevitably happens in wartime. But, unlike other countries, Israel is not allowed mistakes (it’s not even allowed to defend itself without mistakes, either).

And Isael’s enemies have also portrayed this strike as purposeful targeting. This tragic mistake and these very sad deaths have been a golden opportunity for Israel’s enemies to continue to spread the pernicious lie that Israel is evil and genocidal.

That lie is not just pernicious; it is Orwellian in its reversal of the truth. No country on earth has ever waged war as carefully as Israel in its ongoing attempts to spare civilians and certainly to spare aid workers. Israel’s civilian-to-combatant kill ratio is among the best in the world for urban warfare, and the IDF sustains extra casualties in its own ranks in order to keep it that way:

It is no accident that this reduced civilian death toll has been “somewhat overlooked” by the media and by Israel’s critics, including previously by The New York Times itself. Israel is subject to a discernible double standard when it comes to covering its military actions.

… Israel’s military actions produced far fewer deaths and a far lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than in any comparable urban warfare. This is especially significant considering the reality that Hamas deliberately increases civilian deaths by using women and children as human shields and by hiding its military personnel and equipment among civilians. The current ratio of civilian-to-combatant is well below two-to-one, which compares extremely favorably with ratios achieved by other Western democracies in urban warfare.

None of this matters to most of the world or to most of the press, and I submit that even if the ratio were to be markedly reduced by Israel it still would not matter to most of the world or to most of the press.

I did some research on the World Central Kitchen, a group I’d never heard of before this. The organization sounds as though it does very good work around the world. Its main focus is on helping people visited by natural disasters – earthquakes, floods, fires, and hurricanes, for the most part. If you look at the list of the group’s previous operations at that link, you’ll see that the WCK served in Haiti after the earthquake, in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, in California after the Thomas Fire, in Hawaii after the Puna eruption, and in many other similar situations after natural disasters. It also has provided food in the US to the poor in several places.

But what of war? I expected to find a long list of places where the group has provided food during armed conflicts, as well. But I only found two, and Gaza was one of them. The other – no surprise – was during the Ukraine War. Much of the aid provided there by WCK was not within Ukraine itself but in the refugee camps along the Polish border where Poland had taken in Ukrainian refugees, although some was also in Ukraine.

You probably are aware that, unlike the situation with the Ukrainian refugees, no one is willing to take in refugees from Gaza, although Egypt has a border with it. So any group seeking to aid the Gazans would have to be in Gaza itself, and although the vehicles were supposedly in a “de-conflicted zone” (however that is defined; I’m not sure what it means exactly), they were nevertheless in Gaza itself. Gaza as a whole is a war zone involved in urban warfare, and that of course increases the danger.

The WCK must know that. In fact, they had some bad experiences in Ukraine. A World Central Kitchen employee was killed in the Ukraine conflict earlier; it sounds as though he was a local man who had volunteered with the group:

In early June 2023, Igor—a WCK volunteer—was killed when a Russian missile hit his apartment building in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region. Igor volunteered for months to feed neighbors in his community, and we are forever inspired by his bravery and compassion.

There also had been another Russian missile strike, this one on the Kharkiv kitchen in 2022, in which four WKK workers were injured. Fortunately no one was killed. But I can almost guarantee that even had they died as a result of the strike, the press and the world wouldn’t much care.

Here’s another page describing the WCK’s Ukraine efforts. In addition to the refugee camps in Poland, the organization delivered supplies to many Ukrainian restaurants that made meals for their fellow Ukrainians. There was definitely some risk involved, and in fact two volunteer workers (whom I believe were Ukrainian, and who were involved in serving meals) were killed in a Russian strike on a community center in Chuhuiv (near Kharkiv). We certainly didn’t hear much if anything about that, either – after all, it wasn’t Jews doing the bombing.

But back to the WCK’s efforts in Gaza. There are many armed conflicts in the world where people almost certainly need aid. The WCK can’t be everywhere, of course. But why, of all the other suffering people (besides Ukrainians) living in earth’s many war zones during the last few years, would the Gazans be the most deserving of aid and the most sympathetic? I’m not just talking about the World Central Kitchen, either; that group is just following the lead of so many NGOs, the press, the UN, and most of the nations on earth.

So, why the Gazans? After all, they elected a terrorist group to be their leaders, supported those leaders and even aided them in one of the most ferocious and barbaric terrorist attacks ever perpetrated in the modern age, cheered them on and taunted the hostages that were taken, and have continued to support terrorists as measured by opinion polls in the region.

Why the Gazans? It’s a rhetorical question, actually. I believe it is because they are fortunate enough to have declared war on Israel and the Jews.