Bad fruit

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s been going on this summer with fruit? Has anyone else noticed that it hasn’t been as good as usual?

Mushy peaches cleverly masquerading as firm ones. Same for plums. And somewhat bland and tasteless, too.

It’s a pain in the butt to have to throw a bunch of fruit out after forking over so much money. The alternative is taking it back to return it—which can be very inconvenient—or eating it despite the fact that it just doesn’t taste like much.

So, what’s the deal here? Has the weather been odd in the major fruit-growing regions of the country? I don’t think it’s that my taste buds are atrophying, because everything else tastes just fine, and every now and then (at a farmer’s market, for instance) I’ve come across a really good batch.

And the jazz apples continue their wondrous way. Summer fruit time is over, anyway; tomorrow is the first day of autumn, otherwise known as the fall equinox. Cider, pumpkins, leaves turning, days getting shorter—I happen to love fall, except for that last bit about the darkness.

Chaos and death at a Nairobi mall

The New Neo Posted on by

There has been an attack by gunmen at an upscale Nairobi mall, killing at least 30 and wounding countless more. Hostages have also been taken.

An al Qaeda-linked Somalian-based group has claimed the credit—or the blame, depending on your outlook.

A mall attack on this scale has long been expected, since it would be relatively easy to get guns into the vast majority of such facilities and there is a huge concentration of unarmed potential victims milling about, including children who are perfect terrorist fodder. This particular mall catered to expatriates and the wealthy, all the more reason for terrorists to consider it a target-rich environment.

The CNN article I just linked is a long one with many details, including the fact that the deed was most likely perpetrated by Islamic terrorists. But it omits several items found in this article at Fox, such as the fact that the mall was owned by an Israeli company, a Children’s Day was being hosted there, and the terrorist group al-Shabab (the same one that had said the attack was their handiwork) had sworn in 2011 to attack Nairobi in retaliation for Kenya’s sending troops to Somalia to fight Islamic insurgents.

Also this:

Elijah Kamau, who was at the mall at the time of the midday attack, said that the gunmen made a declaration that non-Muslims would be targeted.

“The gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave. They were safe, and non-Muslims would be targeted,” he said.

I wonder how that would work, though. I understand that some Muslim people (particularly women and girls) might be wearing Muslim dress. But hardly all. And what about men and boys? (The CNN article, by the way, says the gunmen fired “indiscriminately”).

From the both articles, it also seems fairly clear that the attack began right outside the mall and then moved inside, and according to Fox there were armed police on the spot even at the outset. But there were multiple armed perpetrators; up to ten have been reported, and they also detonated grenades. They may have outnumbered the initial police on the scene, although backup arrived in the form of members of the military and/or more police, who then surrounded the mall.

[ADDENDUM: The Daily Mail also reports that at least one of the terrorists explicitly spared Muslims, asking people to recite a Muslim prayer in order to prove their religious affiliation. This reminds me of a report I once read (can’t recall where) of an interview with a Jewish girl from either the US or Israel, who many years ago was told by her parents to learn a Muslim prayer in case of just such an occasion.]

[ADDENDUM II: Cross-posted at Legal Insurrection.]

[ADDENDUM III: Many photos here (hat tip: Ace).]

Things in heaven and earth

The New Neo Posted on by

Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Case in point, the rainbow mountains of Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park in Gansu, China:

The vivid mountains are the result of mineral deposits and red sandstone from over 24 million years ago. Layers formed on top of one another, creating the colorful patterns of rock strata.

Some of the photos may be color-enhanced (such as this one, perhaps?):

rainbowMountains1

But this one is probably bona fide:

rainbowMountains2

On the Republican civil war over defunding Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t yet written about the fight that’s been going on for quite some time between Senator Ted Cruz and the more (for want of a better word) “establishment” Republicans in Congress.

I haven’t commented on it yet because it wearies and depresses me, as do most of the many other battles between these two factions and their predecessors, which we’ll call (for want of a better word) the beltway crowd and the renegades.

Or maybe we should call them the RINOs and the Tea Party. Or perhaps the Rockefeller Republicans (there’s some history for you) and the conservatives.

But that’s all semantics. The point is that this particular war within the Republican Party has been going on for a long, long time, although this is the latest skirmish in it and the latest case of players.

The battle weakens the Republican Party; its enemies are laughing and celebrating as they watch. Get out the popcorn and the beer; what could be a better spectator sport than seeing your opponents attempt to destroy each other?

Just take a look at today’s roundup at memeorandum. It’s sad, and bodes ill for the success of either faction. And yet it is not a fake battle; it’s a real one about real issues and principles, and it’s been going on since at least the middle of the twentieth century, perhaps longer.

One thing I do know: when a similar big showdown happened during the Gingrich years it ended up helping the opposition. People don’t like the specter of a government shutdown.

Nevertheless, I have no good suggestions for the warring factions. They can’t kiss and make up. Defunding Obamacare is a worthy goal, and not only is the “base” behind it but the majority of the public still does not like Obamacare. But unfortunately there’s no magical way to undo it; Republicans do not control the Senate, and Obama has veto power. These are facts, which are stubborn things.

I’m no hunter, but…

The New Neo Posted on by

…this certainly doesn’t sound like “hunting” to me:

The gunman who slaughtered 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard stalked his victims as if he was “hunting” them, officials said Thursday as they painted a chilling portrait of how the carnage unfolded.

FBI Director James Comey told reporters that former Navy sailor Aaron Alexis had roamed the offices and corridors of the Navy Yard’s 197 building, blasting victims at random with a sawed-off shotgun before being shot dead…

He emerged from the bathroom a few minutes after 8:00 am with the shotgun and almost immediately started to shoot folks on the fourth floor in a way with no discernible pattern,” Comey told reporters.

“It appears to me that he was wandering the hall like hunting people to shoot.”

Poets of the right

The New Neo Posted on by

British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a complicated man, like many poets. But unlike most of them these days, he was politically of the right, at least in some respects.

Larkin wrote in forms, which is inherently conservative. But his language, although direct and very accessible, was most assuredly not conservative (liberal use of the f-word, for example). There’s a tension between the traditionalism of his forms and the modernism of what he was saying, and in that conflict lay his uniqueness and a good deal of his appeal. He wrote about things people tend to understand and care about: love, death, time, country, religion, sex. And he wrote in a way that doesn’t need special training to understand, although he’s a good (and many think great) poet.

Here’s a poem of Larkin’s that I recently discovered. Seems that England went through a lot of things before we did, or simultaneously (the poem was written in 1969 and published in 1974, around the time of the wind-down in Vietnam):

HOMAGE TO A GOVERNMENT

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

It’s a fitting coda to the warning voiced by an earlier British poet, Kipling, on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. His foreboding has borne fruit (Kipling was a poet of the right, too):

RECESSIONAL

God of our fathers, known of old–
Lord of our far-flung battle line
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe–
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the law–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard–
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard–
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!

Kipling’s tone is much more archaic; he was a man of his time, after all. That’s not the only difference; another is that Kipling believes in God and invokes him to help a nation that is beginning to forget religion, but Larkin senses that religion has almost entirely deserted a land that once pulsed with it. We know this about Larkin because he wrote about the phenomenon, in one of his most famous poems “Churchgoing,” in which he reflects on his visit to one of England’s increasingly deserted churches:

….Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep…

DeLay wins his appeal…

The New Neo Posted on by

…after some delays.

(Some puns are simply irresistible.)

The evidence in DeLay’s 2010 trial for money laundering to influence an election was ruled “legally insufficient to sustain DeLay’s convictions.” In other words, the case should never have been brought in the first place. The offenses were alleged to have occurred during a 2002 campaign.

I’m not a DeLay fan, although I wish we had more people in Congress now with his toughness. But neither am I a fan of trumped-up politically-motivated charges. Remember Ted Stevens of Alaska?

I didn’t follow the DeLay trial closely at the time, nor do I see a lot of detail about the evidence now, so I don’t know whether I think it was sufficient or not. But, looking up a few facts, I see that the decision to file charges was made by Travis County (includes very-liberal Austin) DA Ronnie Earle. And looking at Earle’s Wiki entry, I see that Earle is a Democrat, and that he has prosecuted several Texas Republican political figures in addition to DeLay, although DeLay was his only conviction.

In the DeLay matter:

For over two years, Earle and eight separate grand juries investigated possible violations of Texas campaign finance law in the 2002 state legislative election. Earle denies that his pursuit of Delay was part of a “fishing expedition.” His investigation of two political action committees that spent a combined $3.4 million on 22 Republican Texas House races focused on a political action committee founded by DeLay, (Texans for a Republican Majority PAC). During the investigation, DeLay charged that Earle was a “runaway district attorney” with “a long history of being vindictive and partisan”.

On September 28, 2005, the grand jury indicted DeLay for conspiring to violate Texas state election law. Texas prohibits corporate contributions in state legislative races. The indictment charged that Texans for a Republican Majority, DeLay’s PAC, accepted corporate contributions, laundered the money through the Republican National Committee, and directed it to favored Republican candidates in Texas. The presiding Democrat judge in the case, Pat Priest, eventually threw out this charge and the Court of Criminals Appeals upheld his decision in 2007.

Earle failed in a second attempt to secure new indictments against DeLay. That grand jury returned a “no bill” due to insufficient evidence according to at least one grand jury member. That member also claimed the “no bill” visibly angered Earle.

It goes on in some detail; read the whole thing. This certainly has the appearance of having been a politically-motivated pursuit and trial.

And you know what? As in the Stevens case, it worked. DeLay’s gone from political office, isn’t he?

[ADDENDUM: More here and also here:

Unless the state appeals the ruling, this means that DeLay cannot be retried on the charges. The court could have ordered a new trial if it restrained its scope to just procedural issues. However, the court apparently believed that the prosecution simply couldn’t make a case for wrongdoing, and as a result took the relatively rare step of overturning a jury’s findings on guilt.

That’s pretty strong.

In addition:

The man who should be under scrutiny now is Ronnie Earle, whose years-long legal grudge match against DeLay and other Texas Republicans has been thoroughly discredited by the appellate court.

That would be by the mechanism of charging Earle with prosecutorial misconduct, and I have no idea whether this case or any of the others rises to that level. In addition, I’m not sure who would have standing to bring the charges—my guess is that it would be Earle’s successor, who apparently shares his political persuasions.]

The mother of Aaron Alexis speaks

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s her statement:

Alexis’ mother, Cathleen Alexis, read a brief statement to reporters in response to her son’s murderous rampage Monday at the Navy Yard, saying she had no idea why he would do such a thing.

“Our son Aaron Alexis has murdered 12 people and wounded several others,” she said in the statement. “His actions have had a profound and everlasting effect on the families of the victims. I don’t know why he did what he did and I’ll never be able to ask him why.”

“Aaron is now in a place where he can no longer do harm to anyone and for that I am glad. To the families of the victims I am so, so very sorry that this happened,” she said. “My heart is broken.”

That is exceptionally sad—and exceptionally admirable for its lack of excuses. I think almost everyone can sympathize with this woman, whose son appears to have been a mentally ill individual (probably schizophrenic) who turned violent. Most schizophrenics are not violent. But some are, and if they don’t seek treatment, or if treatment is ineffective, there is virtually nothing a family can do.

Except grieve, afterwards.

The Continuing Resolution, the debt ceiling, and defunding Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I’m not going to write the definitive analysis of these things. I’m going to turn into a linker and refer you to the analyses of others, because I don’t have much to add to what they say:

Here’s Ace:

The short version of the leadership’s plans: the House will pass a CR that defunds Obamacare and send it to the Senate to see if Senate GOP can make it stick. The House, anticipating that Senate Dems will strip out Obamacare defunding, will also pass a 1-year debt ceiling increase in exchange for an Obamacare delay until 2015, some tax and budget reforms, and the Keystone pipeline.

That’s divided government for ya.

Here’s the usual White House spin.

John Podhoretz criticizes Republican strategy or lack thereof.