Yeah, but how many divisions…

The New Neo Posted on by

…does the DC Circuit have?

In an opinion released today involving the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Executive Branch has no authority to disregard congressional mandates merely on policy grounds.

We can applaud the decision but the question still remains: how does the opinion get enforced if the executive wishes to defy it? How many divisions does the DC Circuit have? What recourse is there against an executive determined to seize more power for himself, is unchecked by the need to be re-elected, and is unafraid of press criticism because the press is in his pocket?

Republicans who don’t want to challenge Obama on his delay in implementing so many parts of Obamacare because they think the delay will weaken Obamacare are ignoring the dangerous precedent this sets about presidential power vis a vis their own power. In other words, if presidents are allowed to ignore duly enacted federal laws as they wish, what’s the point of Congress at all? Checks and balances? What’s that?

Perhaps the only remedy left is impeachment. But impeachment is one of the most political legal processes in the world. The court is Congress itself—first the House to impeach, and then the Senate to convict. And even if this particular House could manage to muster the votes to impeach Obama, this particular Senate never would no matter how egregious his overreach.

Of course Obama is well aware of that. He is nothing if not a political animal.

The entire situation brings home the fact that our entire government, with its delicately and brilliantly-engineered system of checks and balances, is in the end a gentlemen’s/women’s agreement. It runs on respect for the rules and the fact that if you violate them the whole structure could come tumbling down to everyone’s detriment. But Obama doesn’t play by those rules, and he doesn’t have to.

The key in all of this has been the press’s abdication of its duty to be a critic of the powerful. We can ridicule the press all we want, but it is one of the most important linchpins of our republic, and if it fails to function to keep those in power under check then tyranny can more readily flourish because of a compliant and soothed public. Still another key, of course, is the acquiescence of Republicans, which cannot be blamed on Obama or the press but on their own cowardice and lack of principle.

My response…

The New Neo Posted on by

……to articles like this one is: what about political changers like me? How do you explain us?

Political preferences seem to come packaged with a whole set of other kinds of tastes, with liberals and conservatives having separate preferences when it comes to things such as humor, food and even whether they want poetry to rhyme, according to John Hibbing, coauthor of the forthcoming book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the Biology of Political Difference.

Hatemi, the Penn State political scientist, has written a forthcoming study that indicates political inclinations are deeply rooted ”” all the way down to the sensory level. Politically like-minded people tend to share preferences in taste, sense of smell and what their eyes are drawn to.

The article goes on to discuss the fact that most couples are uni-political. That does seem to be the case; although I know quite a few couples whose politics differ from each other and they appear happy enough, most of the couples I know do share each others’ politics.

But of course most of the people I know share each others’ politics: liberal all the way.

Being a changer is one of the things that has made me such a misfit nearly wherever I go. I’m no longer part of the liberal circle dance, and perhaps I never really was. But I’m not quite of the right, either, in some undefinable way. I’m not sure why, but just the way I look seems to make people assume my politics are at least somewhat to the left, and if and when I reveal the situation to be otherwise they tend to express shock.

Perhaps it’s that I smell like a liberal?:

How deep does it run? Make conservatives and liberals wash with the same shampoos and soaps, and like-minded people can still sniff them out. “Liberals found the body odor of liberals more attractive,” Hatemi says. “Conservatives found the body odor of conservatives more attractive.”

And here’s a finding that shows how much more divisive the country’s politics have become since I was a girl. This rings true to me:

A recent Stanford University study that people are more likely to have hostile feelings toward people of the other party than members of another race. The who say they would disapprove of their children marrying someone from the other party has shot up from 5 percent in 1960 to 40 percent in 2010.

You see that politics has become, among other things, the new religion. Very few people these days would object to racial intermarriage and probably the same is true of religious intermarriage. We are now “tolerant” of diversity in those things. But politics has a lot more emotional valence now, and it’s those on the other side of that divide who have become the enemy.

[ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that a lot of readers may not be familiar with the many posts I’ve written about the experience of being a political “changer.” So here are some links:

There’s a whole bunch on the experience of leaving the circle and becoming a political apostate. Here’s a good one to start with.

Then there are the ones about my own change experience, and that of other political changers.

Enjoy.]

Oprah plays the race card

The New Neo Posted on by

Who do you believe? And do you care?:

Winfrey was in Switzerland in July when she walked into the Trois Pommes boutique in Zurich looking for a handbag…

She claims the sales assistant refused to show her the black crocodile leather bag because – seeing a black woman – she automatically assumed she would not be able to afford it.

Now the saleslady has hit back, stating: ‘I wasn’t sure what I should present to her when she came in on the afternoon of Saturday July 20 so I showed her some bags from the Jennifer Aniston collection.

‘I explained to her the bags came in different sizes and materials, like I always do.

‘She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag.

‘I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags.

‘It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds. I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag.

So this is what the great civil rights movement of the 20th century has come down to in the 21st century and the Age of Obama.

And this is what handbags have come down to. “Jennifer Aniston collection”? 35,000 Swiss francs? Of course, as a capitalist, I defend Oprah’s right to buy whatever crazy bag she wants to, despite the price, if she’s gotten her money legally, which she has.

Here’s the bag in question. It’s the one on the right, according to the newspaper; sure doesn’t look like crocodile to me, but what do I know about crocodile?:

bag

Another astounding factoid in the article, one I almost missed first time round, is that Tina Turner is getting married (Oprah was in Switzerland for Turner’s wedding). After the problems she’s supposedly had with Ike, I was surprised. She’s also marrying a German guy 16 years her junior (not that surprising, if you’re Tina Turner) with whom she’s been for 27 years. That’s longer than most Hollywood marriages, for goodness sake.

So you go, girl, glad to hear you’re tying the knot. But oh, that wedding dress! Let’s just say I hope it didn’t cost
35,000 Swiss francs, or even 1000 (and by the way, the Swiss franc is roughly equal to the American dollar):

TurnerBach

Whitey Bulger found guilty

The New Neo Posted on by

The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine:

Jurors in the trial of James “Whitey” Bulger, the onetime Boston gang boss, have found him guilty of racketeering and conspiracy.

Bulger, 83, wearing a gray long sleeve shirt, dark trousers and white sneakers, stood stoically and showed no reaction as the verdict was read.

Bulger was charged primarily with racketeering, a catchall offense that listed 33 criminal acts — among them, 19 murders that he allegedly helped orchestrate or carried out himself during the 1970s and ’80s while he led the Winter Hill Gang, Boston’s ruthless Irish mob.

Anyone with connections to Boston and New England probably already knows about Bulger and the long-running hunt to find him. Perhaps one of the happiest people today will be sardonic Boston radio talk-show personality Howie Carr, who’s been hounding Bulger for decades:

Before Bulger fled in 1994, Carr was such an implacable foe of the serial killing gangster that Whitey tried to kill him as he left his house in suburban Boston””an incident reported in 2006 on 60 Minutes. Whitey’s younger brother, Billy Bulger, then the president of the Massachusetts State Senate, publicly referred to Carr as “the savage.”

If you want to listen to Carr, here’s the way to do it online (3:00 to 7:00 PM Eastern time). Right now, as I write this, he’s talking about the Bulger verdict. I don’t generally listen to talk shows, but every now and then I tune into Carr because he’s often genuinely funny, very smart, and isn’t puffed up with his own importance and sanctimony like so many talk show hosts.

New York’s stop-and-frisk

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a new ruling curtailing New York’s controversial police practice of stop-and-frisk:

In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that on hundreds of thousands of occasions since 2004, the police have systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. She further found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops.

Judge Scheindlin has “called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms” of the practice.

If there really were a huge number of instances in which the NYPD stopped people merely because they were black or Hispanic and in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than actually being prompted by the proper standard of “reasonable suspicion,” it seems clear that the practice would need stricter guidelines. But were there?

Here’s an example of the sort of statistical wrangling on which the charges of racial bias are based:

…[N]umbers [released by the mayor’s office] showed that 87% of the people stopped under stop-and-frisk in 2012 were black or Latino, and that 9% were white. That same year, more than 90% of those identified as murder suspects were blacks or Latino; just 7% were white.

Critics of stop-and-frisk charge that such numbers are irrelevant. They charge that cops indiscriminately go after young black and Hispanic men on bogus grounds, and that nearly nine out of ten people who are stopped are innocent.

That last fact—that most people stopped are innocent—was also cited by the judge in her ruling. But law by statistics is a dangerous game. Of course most people stopped are innocent, but this does not tell us why they were stopped and whether those reasons constituted “reasonable suspicion” or not, which are the important issues. It merely tells us that stop-and-frisk is a highly imperfect instrument for locating criminals.

Nor does it tell us what the relationship of New York’s stop-and-frisk has been to the decline in crime experienced by that city. Is it causative, or is the drop merely another instance of a more general drop in crime during the same period that has occurred even in jurisdictions that don’t practice the sort of tactics employed by the NYPD?

It will be “interesting” to see what happens to the crime rate in the city if New York’s stop-and-frisk is dramatically cut back as a result of this ruling. Because make no mistake about it—there is a good chance of some very serious negative consequences if stop-and-frisk is watered down:

Even compared with other cities where crime has also declined, New York has experienced dramatic changes. Since 2002, major crimes across the country have declined fourteen per cent; in New York, they have declined thirty-four per cent. The contrast is even more striking between New York and other big cities. If New York had Detroit’s murder rate last year, there would have been forty-five hundred murders in the city–more than ten times the actual number.

One thing is pretty certain: just as this ruling affects mostly black and Hispanic male residents of New York, who are mostly the ones being stopped and frisked, so the crime rate mostly affects the black and Hispanic population of New York, because those groups are enormously over-represented not only as perpetrators but as victims of crime.

To get more details about the legal reasoning behind the Judge Scheindlin’s decision, read the 165-page text. But this article on Scheindlin and New York’s stop-and-frisk, which appeared in The New Yorker last May, contains some troubling information. The following is only a small sample:

“What I really like to do is write opinions,” the Judge [Scheindlin] said. “There you get to do what you think is right, what you believe in. You’re pushing the margins of the envelope, being willing to be creative.”…

As one of her former law clerks put it, “What you have to remember about the Judge is that she thinks cops lie.”

According to a study prepared by the Mayor’s office, Scheindlin suppresses evidence on the basis of illegal police searches far more than any of her colleagues–twice as often as the second-place judge. This may mean that Scheindlin is uniquely courageous–or that she is uniquely biased against cops…

Whether Scheindlin herself is biased or neutral on this subject, the proper legal question is whether the NYPD actually is just stopping and frisking willy nilly (or based merely on race and nothing else) in high-crime areas without “reasonable suspicion.” If so, the practice needs to be stopped and/or revamped. But let’s hope that doesn’t lead to New York coming more and more to resemble Detroit.

Sherman on kinder, gentler war

The New Neo Posted on by

Did William Tecumsah Sherman foresee the future?:

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

But his words seem archaic and bloodthirsty to most non-Jacksonian modern liberal ears:

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.

Those are the themes Sherman harped on over and over: that you can’t make war easy because that will make things worse rather than better, because war cannot be made better, only worse. But far from being bloodthirsty, you can almost hear the profound regret in his voice that this be so.

He doesn’t like it, he hates it. He is only stating it.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it [war]. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

Sherman was most famous for saying “War is hell.” Here’s the toll war took on him—how old is he in this photo?

Sherman

Hint: that black armband he’s wearing was an emblem of mourning for Lincoln, and Sherman was born in 1820. Therefore he’s 45 years old in the picture. He’s dealt out and seen way too much suffering, and it’s aged him.

[NOTE: Sherman‘s friends and family always called him “Cump.” He was one of eleven children of a prominent attorney, but his father died when he was young and William was taken in by the family of another prominent attorney. Sherman later married one of that man’s daughters.]

Obama’s opponents

The New Neo Posted on by

What an odd offering from Frida Ghitis.

I wasn’t previously familiar with Ms. Ghitis, but her bio indicates a liberal—all those years at CNN—as does her article’s excuses (“There is no question that Obama was dealt a difficult hand”) for what she sees as Obama’s foreign policy failures even as she describes that foreign policy as going into a “tailspin.”

Ghitis seems unaware—or unwilling to admit—that Obama may have different goals for his foreign policy than we usually assume for presidents. A strong America in a stable world may not really be what he has in mind.

All these are things we’ve discussed here many times before. But what caught my eye in Ghitis’ article and caused me to write about it was this [emphasis mine]:

America’s foreign policy has gone into a tailspin. Almost every major initiative from the Obama administration has run into sharp, sometimes embarrassing, reverses. The U.S. looks weak and confused on the global stage.

This might come as happy news to some opponents of the administration who enjoy seeing Barack Obama fail, but it shouldn’t.

So not only does Ghitis not recognize that the U.S. looking “weak and confused on the global stage” may in fact be Obama’s goal, and that it would be Obama who’d be enjoying this spectacle, not his opponents, but she also doesn’t seem to realize what actually does motivate his opponents.

I don’t know whether Ghitis actually believes what she wrote there (the old “fool or knave?” question), but it hardly matters. Whether she believes it herself or not, it’s what she would like her readers to believe. And what she’s saying is that Obama’s opponents are driven by an animus that has nothing to do with principle but is just opposition for opposition’s sake. Whether that opposition arises because of Obama’s race (the accusation so many of his supporters make) or because of his liberalism or is merely reflexive political opposition for the sake of gaining power themselves Ghitis does not say. But she displays no realization or acknowledgement that the reason Obama’s opponents are so opposed is what Obama has actually been doing, and that this most definitely includes his foreign policy which was clearly on track to be a disaster to the U.S. from the start.

In other words, a great many of these “opponents” are patriots with the good of the country in mind. They see what the damage has been and what the further damage could be, and many of them saw the potential for this foreign policy disaster from the start of Obama’s administration and probably even before.

I certainly did. Most commenters here certainly did. Thing is, it wasn’t hard to see.

But demonizing his “opposition” allows Ghitis to observe (correctly) how bad things have gotten under Obama’s watch, simultaneously blaming him and exonerating him by accusing his opponents of ill will. She closes the article by encouraging Obama to do better, and by chiding those opponents:

It is time for Obama to spend some time thinking about what America stands for, what its goals are and then explain it in a clear and credible way. Even if we disagree with his conclusions, at least there will be a North Star guiding his policies.

Obama’s supporters and his critics should hope he can pull America forward.

Poor dear beleaguered Obama’s just a bit confused. He just needs to think and explain more clearly. And then those nefarious opponents should start hoping the results are good for America even though it’s Obama doing it. They should finally put their country’s welfare above their animus against Obama.

This would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that writing like this is everywhere in the MSM, and it influences people. Most people just swallow what they read and don’t think too much or too critically about it. They’re busy with their lives; they’re doing well to even take the time to skim it in the first place.

And besides, people like Ghitis have been declared experts. They write about this stuff, and they’ve been doing it for most of their adult lives. Some are actually experts at writing propaganda. Some are experts at divining what they’re supposed to write and doing so. And some are experts at following and echoing what others write. But to step outside the box and say “wow, it seems Obama’s critics were correct” would be just too difficult and just too threatening—both to psyche and to career and to the liberal cause.

This may just be the cutest baby elephant video ever

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, I haven’t seen all the baby elephant videos in the world, so we can’t be certain.

But I think I’m on safe ground when I assert that it’s probably the cutest baby-elephant-in-an-inflatable-swimming-pool video ever:

And it almost immediately reminded me of this, which features a hippo in a pool:

That hippo dance from Disney’s “Fantasia” works not only on the level of humor, but of movement as well. It is a fabulous spoof of ballet, too, featuring authentic ballet steps performed exactly as one would imagine a hippo would perform them if a hippo were able to do ballet. Those early Disney animators were geniuses at that sort of thing; it’s my humble and curmudgeonly opinion that recent Disney computer animation has none of the same magic.

A little more YouTube research informed me that the inspiration for the Fantasia hippo dance above, in particular the prima’s grand entrance, was this choreography by George Balanchine for his then-wife Vera Zorina as a water nymph in the 1938 movie “The Goldwyn Follies.” Zorina herself bore very little resemblance to a hippo, as you will see:

And just to come full circle, here’s more of that sequence from Fantasia. Unfortunately I can’t find the section I’m looking for, with an elephant chorus blowing bubbles from their trunks. But this is a portion of the finale, which brings back all the animal dancers—including, for one very brief moment, the elephants. The choreography is a brilliant send-up of the cliches of dance, and expresses the feel of the music about as well as most serious classical ballet old chestnuts do:

Islam, algebra, Nobel prizes, and our PC sensibility

The New Neo Posted on by

Richard Dawkins has created a bit of a stir by tweeting:

All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

And when the usual uproar ensued, and someone pointed out the invention of algebra* [see NOTE below] and alchemy by Muslims, Dawkins tweeted in reply, “Indeed, where would we be without alchemy? Dark Age achievements undoubted. But since then?”

For the record, Muslims have received 10 Nobel Prizes to Trinity grads’ 34. And there are indeed a few more Muslims in the world than Trinity grads.

I can’t say I’m familiar with Dawkins, but he’s apparently a scientist who champions Darwin, as well as a proselytizing atheist, if there be such a thing. In other words, he’s an equal-opportunity anti-religionist. Dawkins’ remarks remind me of nothing so much as the flurry caused a few years back when Larry Summers had the temerity to voice the truth that women are dramatically under-represented in the ranks of the mathematical stratosphere and that such a fact needed to be studied scientifically, and the PC feminist world excoriated him for it (see my posts on the subject here and here).

Truth is apparently no defense to such heinous slanders. In fact, truth seems to make it all worse in the eyes of the offended.

And it’s certainly true that the Muslim world has contributed little in recent centuries, other than the refinement of suicide bombing techniques. And before anyone accuse me of anti-Muslim sentiment—I’m well aware that most Muslims are fine people. And the food is fabulous. But the cultures involved (particularly those of the Arab wing) have a great deal of bad stuff in them and no longer encourage intellectual innovation of the type that would lead to Nobel prizes. That’s an incontrovertible fact.

It’s also a fact that, although most Muslims are not terrorists, the vast majority of terrorists are Muslims. That’s another inconvenient fact that happens to be true. If we can’t say it (and it’s getting harder and harder to do so) we can’t begin to do much about it.

This sort of PC reticence (although not about science) seems to have led directly to the military’s failure to call out Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter, before he committed his violent acts. Hasan did everything but rent a skywriter to spell out for them what he was planning, and they still couldn’t bring themselves to bust a Muslim officer for fear of being considered bigoted.

The terrible results are well-known. But bad as they were, they are almost nothing compared to the possibilities if this attitude on the part of the non-Muslim West continues. And it seems it will continue. One thing Osama bin Laden got right: we are the weak horse, at least in the psychological sense.

[*NOTE: So, did the Muslims invent algebra? The answer is a bit complex, but it appears to be a modified “yes.” They certainly coined the word algebra, and Arab Muslims contributed a great deal to its development, building on Greek roots and also aided by some Indian players. Later on in the 1600’s Europeans took the ball.]

Slow news days

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t mind slow news days like today has been (so far, anyway). In fact, I rather like them.

I like not having to write about Obama’s latest outrage, or the press’s latest whitewash of Obama’s latest outrage, or the newest stupidities/ignorance and/or threats and/or disasters (or disasters-in-making) around the world.

Which of course doesn’t mean they go away. They are present whether they are pressing at a particular moment or not.

I like being able to contemplate—as I did today, although I ultimately rejected the idea—writing a post about the vital subject of Beyonce’s new short-short hairdo (see the photos! Join the discussion!) At any rate, I’ve already doled out my opinion on very short hair for women (you might say I’ve doled it out at length), which is that it takes a very special kind of face to pull off successfully. And Beyonce, although a beautiful woman, doesn’t have the kind of look that lends itself to the gamine persona.

Neither do I, by the way. You’ll just have to take my word for that. I’ve tried the hairstyle—particularly during the years when my arms were so injured that I really couldn’t fuss with my hair—and it’s a no go on me.

Hey, have I just written a post about Beyonce’s hair anyway? Oh well.

So consider this an open thread, for talking about anything you want.