A meandering reflection on fashion and decadence

The New Neo Posted on by

This is what the well-dressed starlet/model/whatever is wearing lately:

abbeyClancy

jaimieAlexander

Dresses that leave so little to the imagination seem to me to have almost nothing going for them except their power to shock (then again, perhaps the men in the crowd would disagree). And we’ve grown so accustomed to the display of more and more skin that such things have lost some of that power, so it’s necessary to escalate to get the requisite effect.

As in long ago Rome:

In lifestyle Roman actors did not enjoy a good reputation and their morals challenged even the decadence of Roman society. Their performances could be lewd, highly sexual and offensive, even going as far as to appearing naked on stage and engaging in sexual acts. They could also be highly critical of the political status quo and so ran the gauntlet of emperor and senator…Far from being great dramas most Roman plays were whimsical, more mimes and pantomimes; the classics we know and respect were in the minority…in the Imperial period a number of women emerged as famous actresses, earning reputations as infamous as their male counterparts…Over the years a number of actors became quite influential, counting among their friends men of high standing within Roman society.

And musn’t forget the ill-fated Weimar Republic:

Apart from the new tolerance for behaviour that was technically still illegal, and viewed by a large part of society as immoral, there were other developments in Berlin culture that shocked many visitors to the city. Thrill-seekers came to the city in search of adventure, and booksellers sold many editions of guide books to Berlin’s erotic night entertainment venues. There were an estimated 500 such establishments.

If you’re not familiar with Anita Berber (and I certainly wasn’t until I did the research for this post), her performances and life may retain their ability to shock, even now.

The Weimar Republic and decadence—makes me think of the Sally Bowles character in the musical “Cabaret,” which itself was a somewhat-cleaned-up version of the real Weimar goings-on. Sally was based on a British actress and writer by the name of Jean Ross, who lived with writer and playwright Christopher Isherwood in Berlin in the 30s (just as Bowles did with the highly fictionalized Isherwood character in “Cabaret”).

Unlike the apolitical Sally, Ross was a lifelong Communist, and possibly even an undercover agent for the Comintern. She latter married the British Communist journalist Claud Cockburn, one of whose three journalist children from his third marriage was Counterpunch’s leftist editor Alexander Cockburn.

As I was writing the above paragraph, I thought, “Why am I following this strange trail?” And then I found that someone else had done much the same, although his journey led in still another direction to a completely unexpected connection: Claud Cockburn’s daughter from his first wife (Ross/Bowles was his second) was married to Flanders of the British comedy team Flanders and Swann, favorite performers of my youth, and not especially decadent at all:

Make of it what you will.

Allergic to my sunglasses

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, you read that right: I discovered I was allergic to my sunglasses.

I often wear sunglasses on sunny days, in part because I’ve found that strong sunlight can trigger migraines for me. Also, as I’ve gotten older I’ve become quite the wimp, and really strong sunlight seems more glare-y than it used to be.

But my lovely new sunglasses, bought because they’re not only relatively flattering (can’t ask for miracles) but also because they rested ever-so-lightly on the nose rather than heavily, seemed to be creating pressure marks on said nose that didn’t go away.

One day I studied the marks and it struck me that they looked almost rash-like. So I experimented by not wearing my sunglasses for a couple of days. Voila! Marks all gone, and new sunglasses of a different material haven’t caused the problem to recur.

Weird, eh?

I offer this as a public service announcement. And in order to stop talking about Obamacare, if only for a moment.

Obamacare lie #…well, I’ve lost count of the number

The New Neo Posted on by

Democrats continue to spin all the plan cancellations as being much ado about nothing: hardly anyone was affected, and those that were affected were silly stupidheads with plans only a dodo-brain would have bought, and from which the ever-helpful Democrats tried to save them.

Kristen Powers is a Democrat, too. But she’s not buying the party line, because she happens to be one of those people whose plan was cancelled, and she’s no stupidhead:

My blood pressure goes up every time they say that they’re protecting us from substandard health insurance plans,” Powers told Bret Baier. “There is nothing to support what they’re saying.”

“I have talked to about how I’m losing my health insurance,” she continued. “If I want to keep the same health insurance, it’s going to cost twice as much. There’s nothing substandard about my plan.”

“All of the things they say that are not in my plan are in my plan,” Powers lamented. “All of the things they have listed ”” there’s no explanation for doubling my premiums other than the fact that it’s subsidizing other people. They need to be honest about that.”

The “they,” of course, is the White House and every pundit and Democratic spokesperson on the planet except for Powers. Is she just learning that “their” lies are egregious and ubiquitous?

Speaking of lies, Ross Douthat takes aim at a common one that was offered by Matt Yglesias in its most recent incarnation, the idea that, in the individual market, insurers were free to cancel a person’s insurance if the person became ill, and did so routinely and often:

During the original Obamacare debate, for instance, the conservative economist John Goodman cited data suggesting that rescission is actually vanishingly rare, and noted that the White House accused insurers of “systematically” rescinding coverage for women with breast cancer based on just four cases out of thousands. Likewise, the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Pauly has done a fair amount of research on individual insurance market outcomes, concluding that “although there have been some anecdotes about insurers slipping out of their policy provision to renew coverage at group average premiums for high risks by canceling the coverage entirely, we conclude that on average guaranteed renewability works in practice as it should in theory and provides a substantial amount of protection against high premiums to those high risk individuals who bought insurance before their risk levels changed.” (In this paper from 2008, he and a co-author found that while the employer coverage was more stable than individual-market coverage for Americans with average health, “for people in fair or poor health” the chances of losing coverage are actually lower in the individual market than in the employer-based market.)

So it’s simply not true that this was a common practice before Obamacare. There were laws against it, and the cases that did occur were the huge exceptions rather than the rule, and actionable—although some have gotten a lot of publicity (and some, such as one prominent one presented by our president, were lies). But hey, why not repeat a lie if people will believe it?

Why should Republicans try to rescue Obamacare?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why should the Republicans try to pull Obamacare’s fat out of the fire?

Good question:

The GOP has to be seen doing something. That’s just reality. Millions of people who played by the rules are losing their insurance and quite possibly their doctors as well. It’s simply not an option for a political party to say, “Wow, that sucks for you. Should have voted for us, huh?”. Campaigns are about generating future support, not punishing voters for past lack of support.

The upside is that the GOP is doing this in a way that panders completely to the people who just, “want something done” but is also a poison pill to the Democrats. Obama doesn’t want to “fix” what isn’t a bug in the system but from his point of view, a necessary feature.

The risk in all of this is that the Democrats say “yes”. I have my doubts that the Senate will take up the Landrieu bill let alone pass Upton’s. And the odds of Obama signing any of them are zero (he never has to face voters and he cares more about his plan than some random Democrats).

Could this all go south and wind up with the GOP sharing blame for Obama’s failure? Theoretically, yes. But doing nothing isn’t risk free either.

I’ve thought about this question ever since I heard that Republicans had suggested a “Keep Your Health Plan” act. Why interrupt your enemy when he might already be occupied in destroying himself? Then again, people are suffering, and failing to help them will not endear Republicans to anyone except the most die-hard tough-love advocates. And most of those people didn’t support Obamacare in the first place.

[ADDENDUM: A political party is having a civil war, and for a change it’s not the Republicans.

Actually, it seems to be less a civil war than the venting of long-pent-up anger at the president on the part of Democrats who feel they’ve been burned by him. Obama has never been known for his good relationships with those on Capitol Hill, even the Democrats there. He’s been arrogant to them, too, as well as to the Republicans.

Wonder whether he’ll cave at all to his party’s demands, given he really doesn’t give a hoot about them, and no longer needs them in order to get re-elected. Of course, he can’t get more legislation passed without the support of Democratic members of Congress. But perhaps he’s content to rest on his laurels in terms of legislative accomplishments, and just continue to go around Congress by executive order in the future. Members of Congress: who needs ’em?]

Obamacaregirl speaks

The New Neo Posted on by

Not just a face in the crowd anymore, Obamacaregirl speaks (you can click on the link to see the video, but since it’s one of those awful autoplay things I didn’t put it on the blog).

She’s still careful to give only her first (and perhaps pseudonymous) name: Adriana. She’s a legal resident from Colombia, and she never even got paid for the gig.

She seems to have taken all the jokes a lot more personally than they were ever intended. But I imagine it must have been a shock, to say the least, to have become the smiling face of a monumental insult to the American people, as well as for a lie.

I can’t figure out why anyone would call it cyber-bullying, though, when the target wasn’t really Adriana, and no one even knew her identity.

NOTE: When I wrote the title for this post, I was thinking of the famous ad campaign for Greta Garbo’s first talking movie in this country, “Anna Christie.” Apparently I misremembered the phrase; it was actually “Garbo Talks,” not “Garbo Speaks”:

Of all its stars, Garbo was the one that MGM kept out of talking films the longest for fear that one of their biggest stars, like so many others, would not succeed in them. Her famous first line is: “Gimme a whisky”, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby!” In fact, Garbo’s English was so good by the time she appeared in this film, she had to add an accent in several retakes to sound more like the Swedish Anna.

The play on which the movie was based was by Eugene O’Neill:

Obamacare: let’s not call it cancelled, let’s call it “transitioned”

The New Neo Posted on by

So much kinder and gentler:

One thing that you should be aware of is that word has gone out and Democrats will no longer speak of plans being “cancelled.” They are now all using the euphemism “transitioned to better plans.”

“Transitioned.”

Oh don’t mind those death panels. You’ll just be “transitioned” to a more stable, less medically vulnerable state.

Kind of like being renewed instead of cancelled. Yes, it has a ring to it:

Another problem with single payer

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a problem that most people are probably unaware of, but single payer virtually eliminates the ability to sue for wrongful refusal to pay claims:

…[I]n a private system, wrongs happen to be sure, but we have potentially robust legal and administrative remedies to both dissuade and punish. In a publicly financed single payer system, often a wronged patient is limited to an in-agency administrative appeal–or less if the state decides the malady isn’t to be covered.

Watch for it.

There’s no reason for anyone to be surprised by Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

I still don’t know why anyone on either side would be at all surprised at Obama’s behavior.

After all, this is the man who said years ago, despite an extremely thin resume of actual accomplishment other than winning elections:

When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

That sort of hubris speaks ill of a person, and that would be true even if you support their general political stance. I like to think (and I do believe) that, even had I been a liberal Democrat in 2008, it would have set off warning bells for me about Obama. Such arrogance is pathological, and can lead to mistakes (or, if you are of an ancient Greek frame of mind, to nemesis).

Almost as disturbing was this, from Obama advisor and right-hand-woman Valerie Jarrett:

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. ”¦ He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability ”” the extraordinary, uncanny ability ”” to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ”¦ So, what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. ”¦ He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Come to think of it, perhaps that’s even worse than Obama’s own arrogance. That he chose to surround himself with worshipers (and I mean that almost literally) such as Jarrett, and/or by mediocrities who could never seriously challenge his own exalted image of himself, was bound to increase the hubris problem exponentially because there was no check on his megalomania. And again, I believe that should have been obvious to both Republicans and Democrats long before Obama became president.

Maybe the danger to Obama and the Democrats from the disaster called Obamacare will not end up manifesting. Maybe it will dissipate like all the others. But it has the biggest chance of backfiring on him, and if it does it will be because primarily because of his own arrogance and that of his confederates, coupled with their actual incompetence. The two states of being—knave and fool—are hardly mutually exclusive. And if Obama is a fool, it is fortunate for those of us who happen to disagree with his agenda.

But aside from all those personality problems, there were other, even clearer indications of Obama’s way of operating in the world, very early signs that way too many people on both sides ignored. Just a sampler follows; there are plenty more:

Obama got his political start by an act of cold-blooded opportunistic betrayal.

Obama got his political reputation in the Illinois Senate by appropriating the work of others.

Obama won his Senate race by getting operatives to push the unsealing of opponents’ divorce records to smear opponents and eliminate the field.

Obama cheated against Hillary Clinton in the caucuses to clinch the Democratic nomination, according to his fellow Democrats.

Obama got access to more money by breaking a major campaign promise and blaming it on the Republicans.

Obama minimized and lied about his obvious ties to the execrable Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers.

There’s much, much more, of course. But my point is that Obama’s methods were obvious from the very beginning of his political career. No one has any excuse for not seeing who or what he is in personal terms, and as a politician. I’m not even talking about his political position as a leftist (although that could be seen, as well). I’m talking about the fact that he’s one of the more unscrupulous and personally untrustworthy of American politicians, and that’s saying something.

“Daisy Daisy” actually was one of the first computer vocalizations

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday on the “Gravity” thread we were discussing that trailblazing (and, IMHO, superior) movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Who can forget that memorable moment when astronaut Dave was forced to dismantle the malfunctioning and paranoid (hey, you’re not crazy if they really are out to get you) computer Hal? The computer was, paradoxically, the most emotional character in the entire movie.

Here’s the scene:

And here’s some background about the choice of the song “Daisy, Daisy” for the scene. I’ve cued the video to start at the correct point if you watch it on the blog:

The entire documentary is pretty good, if you’re interested in the background of “2001.”

Obamacare: it’s lies all the way down*…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and all the way up, as well.

If these dismal enrollment figures for Obamacare so far are correct, the situation would be bad enough. But even those low figures are probably inflated by some numbers shenanigans on the part of the administration:

When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.

It becomes more apparent every day that not only was Obamacare passed in Congress through some very shady dealing and parliamentary twisting, with fence-sitting legislators on the Democratic side only persuaded to vote for it by false statements (otherwise known as lies) on the part of the administration, Pelosi, and Reid, but that the lies that have followed have been multiple and various as well. The above is merely the latest, and hardly the most serious, of an entire edifice built of lies: foundation, walls, and roof.

Here’s another lie of far greater import:

Did Chao [project manager of the Obamacare website] lie to the [House Oversight] committee about not having seen the Sept. 3 memo [about major security problems on the website] before or was there a deliberate effort within CMS to withhold the extent of the site’s problems from supervisors like him so that they’d greenlight it for launch as scheduled? If the latter, who’s responsible? As it turns out, the memo was written by ”” ta da ”” Tony Trenkle, lead tech officer for Healthcare.gov who left last week under mysteriously vague circumstances. As CBS reported, Trenkle himself never signed off on security for the site in September; it was his boss, Marilyn Tavenner, who signed the authorization, supposedly because she thought that a project this big should carry the John Hancock of the head of CMS. Is that the truth, or did Trenkle refuse to sign because he knew the site’s security was a travesty and couldn’t in good conscience authorize launching it? The fact that he wrote such a dire memo about “limitless” risk suggests that he knew the extent of the problem ”” and yet, if you believe Chao, that information somehow never made its way to the project manager. Why? Why are there so many unorthodox procedures related to approval of the site’s security here? Did Tavenner, at least, see Trenkle’s memo before she authorized the launch or was it withheld from her too? If she did see it, why didn’t she tell Obama and Sebelius that security was too weak to justify rolling it out now?

Maybe I shouldn’t have written “lies all the way down.” It’s more like “lies and corruption all the way down.”

And speaking of corruption…but I repeat myself.

[*NOTE: That saying “[blank] all the way down” is a riff on a funny story related by Steven Hawking in A Brief History of Time. But Hawking didn’t make it up; it’s an oldie but goodie.

Here’s Hawking:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s tortoises all the way down!”

But J. R. (Haj) Ross’s, in his 1967 linguistics dissertation, indentified the scientist is identified as William James:

After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, William James was accosted by a little old lady.

“Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it’s wrong. I’ve got a better theory,” said the little old lady.

“And what is that, madam?” Inquired James politely.

“That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle,”

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

“If your theory is correct, madam,” he asked, “what does this turtle stand on?”

“You’re a very clever man, Mr. James, and that’s a very good question,” replied the little old lady, “but I have an answer to it. And it is this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him.”

“But what does this second turtle stand on?” Persisted James patiently.

To this the little old lady crowed triumphantly. “It’s no use, Mr. James—it’s turtles all the way down.”

There are written versions of the story going back all the way to 1779.]

Veterans Day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repost of an article originally written in 2005.]

Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to very vaguely remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day, or at least to imagine that I do. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans.

Since then, the original name has largely fallen out of use—although it remains, like a vestigial organ, in the timing of the holiday: November 11th, which commemorates the day the WWI armistice was signed (eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month).

I’m also old enough–and had a teacher ancient enough—to have been forced to memorize that old chestnut “In Flanders Fields” in fifth grade—although without being given any historical context for it. I think at the time I assumed it was about World War II, since as far as I knew that was the only real war.

You can find the story of the poem here. It was written by a Canadian doctor who served in the European theater (there is no separate URL for the discussion of the poem, but you should click on the “John McCrae´s Poppies in Flander’s Fields” link). It’s not great poetry in the poetic sense (that’s my opinion, anyway), but it was great propaganda to encourage America’s entry into what was known at the time as the Great War.

The poem’s first line “In Flanders fields the poppies blow” introduces the famous flower that later became the symbol of Armistice—and later, Veterans—Day. Why the poppy?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.

Now a day to honor those who have served in our wars, Veterans Day has an interesting history in its original Armistice Day incarnation. It was actually established as a day dedicated to world peace, back in the early post-WWI year of 1926, when it was still possible to believe that WWI had been the war fought to end all wars.

The original proclamation establishing Armistice Day as a holiday read as follows:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

After the carnage of World War II, of course, the earlier hope that peaceful relations among nations would not be severed had long been extinguished. By the time I was a young child, a weary nation sought to honor those who had fought in all of its wars in order to secure the peace that followed—even if each peace was only a temporary one.

And isn’t an armistice a strange (although understandable) sort of hybrid, after all; a decision to lay down arms without anything really having been resolved? Think about the recent wars that have ended through armistice: WWI, which segued almost inexorably into WWII; the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine; the Korean War; and the Gulf War. All of these conflicts exploded again into violence—or have continually threatened to ever since.

So this Veterans/Armistice Day, let’s join in saluting and honoring those who have fought for our country. The hope that some day war will not be necessary is a laudable one—and those who fight wars hold it, too. But that day has not yet arrived—and, realistically but sadly, perhaps it never will.

“Gravity”: gravitas?

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though I don’t go to the movies that often, I went to see “Gravity” the other night. It’s one of those movies that’s more like a theme-park ride, which doesn’t work too well on DVD. So I donned my special glasses, sat in my reclining-rocker ergonomic seat, and settled in.

I felt like I needed a seat belt before I was through. And a massage to relax my clenched muscles. The movie works very well on the level of spectacle and action and suspense, to say the least. Who wouldn’t be enthralled by an hour and a half of gazing at a large computer-generated view of the stars and earth from space? That alone was worth the hefty price of admission.

But that’s not all you get, of course. The rest of the movie is a space-age version of “The Perils of Pauline” with Sandra Bullock as the modern-day damsel in distress, who gets some help but ultimately (unlike Pauline*) is forced to rely on her own resources in her attempt to save herself. It’s hard to imagine anyone doing better in the role than Sandra Bullock, who delivers her relatively laconic lines perfectly. A lot of the role involves panic and breathing fast, and she does that very well, too.

The movie is a cascade of special effects that will leave you wondering “how?”, and there are plenty of websites and videos online that will explain if you want to understand what’s behind the tricks.

But…but…for me, the whole thing evaporated rather quickly. Its visual wonder and splendor are what give it a force and dimension and gravitas beyond the usual action flick. But despite the thrills and chills, there seemed to be some important human element missing. We want the characters to survive, but we hardly know them—except that they are movie stars, which for me they always remained.

That doesn’t ruin the movie, or even come close. But it keeps it in the realm of good rather than great.

[* NOTE: Wiki says that Pauline herself was “more resourceful and less helpless” than is commonly thought. It also states that the Pauline series was filmed in (of all places) Fort Lee, New Jersey.]