On small breasts

The New Neo Posted on by

NOTE: I thought everyone might enjoy a break from politics and world events, and so I’m recycling the following old post with some minor updating.]

In an effort to boost my traffic, I am writing about breasts today.

Small breasts. But breasts nonetheless

As did the NY Times a few years ago, in a piece about a new trend: lingerie stores that cater to and celebrate the less-endowed woman.

I’ll keep a respectful silence about my own particular form; that much traffic I’m not seeking. But back when I was a dancer, I observed that small-breasted women had it kind of good, at least in the ballet and fashion world. Their bodies created a better line for both dance and the display of fashionable clothing.

And I never understood the later trend towards implants, especially of the perfectly round variety, a shape that does not exist in nature for the human female breast but has since become a standard of sorts. After viewing enough of these orange- or grapefruit-like objects in catalogs such as Victoria’s Secret which purport to show the ideal female body, the unreal becomes the sought-after, although it is unobtainable except through surgery.

Men being men, there’s a certain tendency I’ve noticed for them to consider larger breasts better—at least, up to a point (pun intended). But men also being men, there’s a certain tendency I’ve also noticed for them to consider a pretty wide range of possibilities more-than-acceptable for the desirable female form.

And speaking of wide ranges, there is actually a website dedicated to photos of unenhanced, non-surgically-altered female breasts. It’s not meant to be prurient, although some might certainly find it so. It’s meant to demonstrate to girls growing up in the age of the ubiquitous implant what a natural breast actually looks like, so they don’t get the idea that theirs are abnormal. That’s what it’s come to.

[NOTE: You might enjoy Nora Ephron’s comic 1975 meditation on her own small-breast woes. I especially love this sentence; a perfect description of the bathing suits I recall from the late 50s and early 60s:

That was the era when you could lay an uninhabited bathing suit on the beach and someone would make a pass at it.]

Don’t sit on a hot stove…

The New Neo Posted on by

…till President Obama weighs in on this case:

A man allegedly went on a rampage in Union Square on Wednesday afternoon and left a complete stranger brain-dead in the process.

Police said that the attack may have been a hate crime.

Friends of Jeffrey Babbitt, 62, were shocked to hear about the random act of violence that left the gentle, retired train conductor in a coma, CBS 2”²s Dave Carlin reported on Friday…

Babbitt was minding his own business as he walked through the crowd near the chess boards in Union Square when a man made a hateful announcement and began his rampage, witnesses said.

“He said ”˜the next white person who walks by I’m going to [expletive],’” one woman said. “His fist went in and the man’s head bobbed and he hit the ground and you could hear his skull hitting the ground.”

The man continued his rampage before demanding to see police officers.

“He stood there and hit two more people and asked for the police to come,” Michael Benson said.

Stunned witnesses counted a total of three people attacked. The suspect, Lashawn Marten, 31, remained at the scene until police arrived.

Sounds like a variation on the “knockout game,” except that in this version the perp had a few more years on him than is usual, and he was going solo rather than being part of a group competition. Otherwise the m.o. is similar to that of the knockout game, as is the choice of victim: an older white person.

The knockout game isn’t all that common, fortunately. But even one case would be one too many. Here’s a description of a St. Louis, Missouri version of the phenomenon:

They created a game. The objective was to knock out a stranger with a single punch, get them off their feet. Stealing a wallet or cellphone was not the point. “Do the lick,” in Eisele’s words, and get on with it…

They flaunted their TKO status on Facebook. They sought out other kids to join their nascent gang. They taught recruits to pick vulnerable, older adults. One rule was that a TKO member had to witness the assault, “kinda like a performance evaluation,” Eisele recalls.

Police are described as baffled, because the motive is so unconventional. But I don’t know why they’re baffled. Thug and gang culture glorifies violence for violence’s sake, and Facebook gives youths a venue for bragging about it. The juvenile justice system (as you will see if you read the article about the St. Louis situation) gives the perpetrators the sense that, if they are underage, they will get a mere slap on the wrist if caught. The Zimmerman case—and yes, our president’s comments about it—have heightened black anger at whites, and have probably made people even more reluctant to defend themselves for fear of becoming a George-Zimmerman-type pariah. What’s more, the method of attack, which takes the victims by surprise, makes it unlikely they would have enough time and warning to strike back, and in cities such as New York the perpetrators know that spectators are almost certainly unarmed.

Coming soon to an Amazon near you: the Kindle Paperwhite

The New Neo Posted on by

The Kindle Paperwhite is coming out on September 30, and although I don’t know that it’s “the best device for reading, period,” as the ad claims, it seems like a pretty nifty gadget nonetheless. As this reviewer says, it represents an improvement over an already-good product.

The Paperwhite is available for pre-order, and (here comes the pitch, of course) if you want to buy one you can click on the above link or on any of my Amazon widgets—pretty please!—so I can get a cut of the action.

I cannot tell a lie; I don’t use one. I’m a bookish Luddite. But I’ve often thought that, when my chronic arm injuries were at their worst and I had great difficulty holding a book and turning pages (I still am reluctant to hold a book for very long in the conventional way; I prop it up on a countertop or table when I read), a Kindle would have been absolutely wonderful.

Samantha Power’s obtuseness about Iran is no surprise

The New Neo Posted on by

Our highly-credentialed UN Ambassador Samantha Power either believed, or pretended to believe, that Iran and/or Russia would be cowed by the international community’s revelations about and reaction to Syria, and would be convinced to turn on Assad as a result:

“We worked with the UN to create a group of inspectors and then worked for more than six months to get them access to the country on the logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country might deter future attacks,” Power said at the Center for American Progress as she made the case for intervening in Syria.

“Or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran ”” itself a victim of Saddam Hussein’s monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 ”” to cast loose a regime that was gassing it’s people,” she said.

This is—well, I’m not sure I can come up with an adjective, or even a string of adjectives, that describes it. Stupid? Delusional? Naive? And yet, completely unsurprising, if you know much about Samantha Power.

One of the worst things about the Obama administration is not just Obama and his own beliefs and policies, but the kindred spirits and/or mediocrities he has appointed to high places. I’m not talking about just one or two or three people, either; it’s pretty much a clean sweep. One subgroup of simpatico appointees is composed of people who tend to be (like him) academics with lofty notions about how the world works and their own power to persuade. Perhaps there’s something about academic life that leads to this sort of thing, or perhaps a great many of those who choose that life in the first place are of that ilk. But Obama seems to have a special gift for selecting them.

Samantha Power is a classic example. As I noted three months ago:

Power has a long record of supporting [Obama’s] foreign policy, is a fellow graduate of Harvard Law School, and is married to well-known leftist law professor Cass Sunstein. In an interesting twist, Power (like another close Obama adviser, Valerie Jarrett) was born outside the U.S. ”” in Power’s case, in Ireland to non-citizen parents who emigrated to the U.S. when Power was nine (Jarrett”˜s parents were expat Americans in Iran during her early childhood)…

Power has what one might call a western European sensibility and attitude toward the U.S. That outlook is hardly limited to Europe, of course; it’s one that is also rampant among most of the American left. What’s more, it seems to be shared by Obama himself ”” although for political reasons he has rarely articulated it quite as fully and clearly as Power ”” the conviction that the U.S. has blood on its hands and that we, like the Germans after WWII, must go on bended knee in order to achieve a similar catharsis.

Power is in her early forties, and until the start of her affiliation with Barack Obama (beginning in 2005 and continuing till now with only a brief hiatus when she had to step down from his 2008 campaign for calling Hilary Clinton a “monster”) she had been an academic and author/journalist. Her specialty was genocide, and she spent a great deal of time and effort opining on what should be done about such killings, as well as similar but less comprehensive atrocities (the gassing of civilians in Syria would no doubt qualify).

Well, now she gets the chance to put her ideas into action. And if her assumptions about Iran and Russia are any indication, it appears that, in addition to her stellar academic career, she (and we) may be about to get some instruction from the school of hard knocks.

The Diplomad takes on the “Obama, fool or knave?” question…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and offers the answer “both”:

The chaos we see throughout the world results from the Obama misadministration’s lack of preparedness and manifest incompetence from the start. Or does it? Either that or we are left with a much darker possibility: This misadministration deliberately has sought to undermine the power and influence of the United States throughout the world. Increasingly I am of the view that there is a noxious mix of both tendencies, or that we have two-sides of the same coin. I might have been wrong when I stated in the March 16 excerpt above that, “to call it a policy designed for America’s defeat gives it too much credit.” I am reluctantly coming to conclude that the Obamistas do not prepare, and do name inept National Security Advisors and ignorant Secretaries of State and Ambassadors precisely because it fits in with their world view, to wit, that all would be better with a less active, less effective, less influential United States. They want a post-American world…

Our stupid leftists at home and in Europe referred to Bush as a “cowboy.” Nope. They had their Western character wrong. He was the sheriff, and when the sheriff asks you to join his posse to nail the bad guys, well you have a choice. Bush made clear what that choice was, “You are either with us or you are against us.” The Bush administration put together some amazing coalitions. This misadministration has thrown that all away.

It will take years to repair the damage, if it can be repaired.

Yes, it will take years, but someone has to want to try to repair it, and to know how to go about it. Obama is hardly the only problem. If Hillary Clinton (or any other Democrat that comes to mind) is elected in 2016, one or both of those criteria will be lacking.

It turns out that no one has been around to answer that 3 AM call. Or they’ve answered and said, “Sorry, wrong number.”

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Word-coining bot:

Hmm it looks like your site ate my first comment (it was etlmerexy long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up and say, do you have any tips and hints for rookie blog writers?

Here’s the first: it would be etlmerexy good if you used words already in existence.

Putin: Kerry is lying

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, of course he is. He’s moving his lips.

I know, it’s a cheap shot. But anyone who has followed the career of John Kerry can’t help noticing he’s a frequent liar.

I knew it back in the early 70s, and I was a liberal Democrat then. I had a visceral reaction to the man during the Vietnam years and it has only gotten worse over time.

I started blogging back in 2004 when Kerry was running for president. At the time I could hardly imagine a worse candidate for the Democratic Party to have nominated. Now, of course, I realize that this was a major failure of imagination on my part. But still, it came as no surprise recently that Kerry and Obama might be kindred spirits and that Kerry was chosen by Obama to replace Clinton as Secretary of State, a position for which Kerry has been angling his whole life.

And no, I certainly don’t believe everything Putin says, either. He has his own agenda, to say the least. But when Kerry claims that the “rebels” in Syria are moderates, it’s a lie on the order of “the Benghazi attack was in response to a video.” In other words, it would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

The left is nothing if not consistent, however. The Ayatollah Khomeini was a moderate before he came to power. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, likewise. And for Kerry, back in the day, the North Vietnamese were moderates too, when he made this prediction:

There is no interest on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to massacre the people once [we] have agreed to withdraw.

History has proven Kerry to not have been the greatest prognosticator on these matters.

[NOTE: One of my very first posts on this blog was about Kerry’s habitual lying.]

Obama, lines, and the international community

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama passes the buck again, this time to the world:

“My credibility is not on the line — the international community’s credibility is on the line,” President Barack Obama said Wednesday in Sweden…

President Barack Obama said Wednesday the “red line” he previously spoke of regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria wasn’t his own, but the world’s. “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line. The world set a red line when governments representing 98%” of the world’s population “passed a treaty forbidding (chemical weapons) use, even when countries are engaged in war,” Obama said in Sweden.

We can go back to that recurrent question: does Obama actually believe this is the case, or is he just saying it for face-saving effect? I believe the answer is: both of the above. As I wrote yesterday, one of Obama’s guiding principles is internationalism. His understanding of the international community, however, seems to have stopped at the level he achieved as a Columbia undergraduate.

The international community doesn’t really care about its treaty or its credibility. Or rather, it “cares”—words will be spoken, but words are not acts. The international community is composed of nations, and only sometimes do a bunch of those nations of the international community come together on something and act. To Obama, considering the self-interest of the US is a foreign notion, but foreign nations do consider their own self-interest first and foremost, and it’s not at all clear that he gets that concept.

[NOTE: There is so much news on the Syrian decision that I’ll just refer you to memeorandum, which has links to many articles and posts on the subject (go here and start scrolling down) This is of interest as well, as is this.]