The TSA is on the ball

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I traveled by airplane, and I was pulled out of line for special consideration.

Actually, there wasn’t all that much of a line; it was Saturday night, and the airport was relatively quiet. But I was pulled out of whatever line did exist by a nice young uniformed man who asked me to hold out my hands to be swabbed. He ran a sort of Q=tip moistened with something or other over them and then ran that in front of a machine that read out a bunch of figures. And then he waved me on my way, after explaining (when I asked him) that he’d checked me for explosive residue.

Good thing I hadn’t fired any cap guns recently.

I can only hope they’re profiling, too, on the QT.

Happy Labor Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

Labor Day is the bookend on the opposite end of summer from its holiday beginning, Memorial Day.

July Fourth is summer’s early peak, with the promise of long light-filled days ahead. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp, the moment I dreaded as a child because it marked the finish of vacation and the start of the school year. Spiffy new clothes, a shiny bookbag, freshly sharpened pencils, and the promise of the beautiful autumn leaves’ arrival were nice. But they couldn’t make up for the fact that a new school year was beginning. Where oh where had the summer gone?

And it goes even more quickly these days. But let’s celebrate the fact that we don’t have to worry about the start of school anymore””except, perhaps, for the teachers among you.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy Labor Day! Barbecues, picnics, parades, beach, just hanging out in your yard, whatever you desire. And for the historically-minded among you, some information the origins of the holiday.

Why did Obama change his mind about getting Congress’ approval on Syria?

The New Neo Posted on by

The scuttlebutt is that Obama wants to get the members of Congress on the record as voting yeah or nay:

His reasoning, according to officials who were in the room [when Obama explained his change of heart to his advisers in the Oval Office on Friday night]? He wants members on the record and on the hook, rather than simply criticizing from outside whatever action he takes.

This is congruent with what we already know of Obama. For him it’s all about political jockeying for position and his own status.

He has no idea how to make a difficult decision, but he’s helped by the fact that he has had no problem reversing himself in the past and has come to think that he will not suffer any serious consequences as a result.

He knows he can blame the Republicans, and he knows the Democrats will stick by him in the ways that count to him—on domestic issues like Obamacare and immigration, that is.

He didn’t really want to attack Syria anyway—if he does, he would be doing it mostly to save face about the red line he drew. So Syria itself is not the main issue.

His favorite modus operandi when something goes wrong for him is to pass the buck. So going to Congress at this point does just that, whether Congress ends up approving or disapproving.

I keep reading articles wondering if this will weaken Obama, but I’m not sure what they mean by “weaken.” He’s already weakened the US on the world stage, but since that’s his goal, that’s perfectly okay with him and is in fact a consummation devoutly to be wished. As for domestically, he’s not running for re-election. To be weakened, his own party would have to abandon him, and though they might gripe and grouse for a while it’s temporary and will not extend to other issues he deems important. And for him to be further weakened, voters would have to turn to Republicans in 2014 and 2016, and I just don’t see that happening as a result of Syria. Will voters even remember Syria at that point?

Labor Day thoughts: college for all

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Maggie’s Farm.]

What ever happened to the skilled labor force? It went to college, and that’s not an entirely good thing:

When everybody’s special, nobody is. Getting everyone into college means you have to dumb down the curriculum until it is nothing but meaningless drivel that has no application in the real world…

Forcing everyone to become smart is like a countrywide affirmative-action plan. It doesn’t work…

The controversy that destroyed 11-plus [the British meritocracy exam system] is long and complex, but the CliffsNotes version is that some clueless politician saw educated siblings do better than uneducated siblings and thought, “They should all have the opportunity to do as well as their brother.” But the educated sibling didn’t thrive because he was educated. He was educated because he thrived. If you think his brothers got ripped off, tell it to God. He was the one who doled out the lower IQs…

I’m not denying that outsourcing and automation has made many jobs obsolete. Of course it has. But that doesn’t mean you abandon the entire concept of a working class. There is still a huge demand for skilled labor.

But our young people aren’t skilled (or interested) in hard labor, so we bring in illegal Mexicans. When you take away a young person’s ability to work, you take away their pride.

True, but we have to be careful not to promulgate the myth of the stupid-but-happy worker, singing joyfully at his/her trade no matter how menial. A lot of work is boring and nasty, and a lot of people who used to do it were crippled or broken by it and nourished the dream that for their children things would be better.

And to a great degree, it was. But the article’s author, Gavin McInness, is correct in asserting that the whole process of pretending everyone is suited for higher academic study and a job in the professions has gotten absurd, and has had the effect of lowering standards to an alarming degree.

If you think about it, it was kind of a no-brainer (pun intended) that this would be the result. No doubt there were sincere people who thought (and still think) that human beings are infinitely malleable, and that inherent differences in intelligence and personality and abilities either don’t exist or don’t matter and can be transcended through enough and better education. Or additionally, there are people who thought (and still think) that, even though education won’t equal everything out, it still is necessary to pretend that it will, and that this should be the highest and most pressing goal of a society no matter what the costs.

Not so bright, is it?

I don’t usually find myself agreeing with Syria…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but this seems completely on target:

Syria’s government on Sunday mocked Mr. Obama’s decision, saying it was a sign of weakness. A state-run newspaper, Al Thawra, called it “the start of the historic American retreat,” and said Mr. Obama had hesitated because of a “sense of implicit defeat and the disappearance of his allies,” along with fears that an intervention could become “an open war.”

Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, told reporters in Damascus that “it is clear there was a sense of hesitation and disappointment in what was said by President Barack Obama yesterday. And it is also clear there was a sense of confusion, as well.”

Not only a weak horse, but a skittish one.

We knew the Nazis were evil…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but sometimes we forget how nit-picky crazy they were [the following excerpt is from The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War]:

To enjoy full civil rights under the new regime [in Austria after Germany’s takeover] each person required a Reich Citizenship Certificate, which could be obtained only by providing proof of Aryan descent. But this in itself was often problematic. Was a Jew considered Jewish by blood or by religion? What if one of his parents was half Jewish by blood but Christian by upbringing? This muddle was supposedly resolved by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, in which it was stipulated that a Jew must be defined as anyone who descends from at least three Jewish grandparents or from two Jewish grandparents if they themselves were, on or after September 15, 1935, either married to a Jewish person or a member of the Jewish community…

In the massive confusion, the system threw up thousands of surprises and anomalies. Many had not the slightest idea about their grandparents’ blood or religion. Furthermore investigations showed that there was far more Jewish blood in the system than the Nazis had either hoped of expected to find. When they discovered that Johann Strauss, the “Waltz King,” had Jewish blood they simply erased his record from the registry. Similar complications arose with the ancestors of Richard Wagner’s wife and of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, so that special arrangements had to be made in order not to have to ban performances of the Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and the “Blue Danube” Waltz, and so that Hitler could continue to enjoy the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth in the company of the composer’s granddaughter.

Many active members of the Nazi Party were brought to a rude awakening when they discovered that they themselves qualified as Jews under the Nuremberg rules…

Unfortunately, this didn’t stop them. They just bent the rules.

The uniqueness of the long, long…

The New Neo Posted on by

…long distance runner:

…[T]here is one man whose physiological performance defies all convention: Dean Karnazes is an ultrarunner from California and, at times, it seems as if he can run forever.

Karnazes has completed some of the toughest endurance events on the planet, from a marathon to the South Pole in temperatures of -25C to the legendary Marathon des Sables, but in his entire life he has never experienced any form of muscle burn or cramp, even during runs exceeding 100 miles. It means his only limits are in the mind.

Karnazes says he once ran for three days and nights continuously, and he only stopped because he got sleepy.

Karnazes doesn’t seem to have what’s called a lactate threshold:

While supreme willpower is a common trait among ultrarunners, Karnazes first realised that he was actually biologically different when preparing to run 50 marathons in 50 days across the US back in 2006. “I was sent to a testing center in Colorado,” he recalls. “First, they performed an aerobic capacity test in which they found my results consistent with those of other highly trained athletes, but nothing extraordinary. Next, they performed a lactate threshold test. They said the test would take 15 minutes, tops. Finally, after an hour, they stopped the test. They said they’d never seen anything like this before.”

And in unrelated news, we’re getting fatter all the time.

Oh, you already knew that? Well, I’m not talking about just Americans. Or about people in general. Or even about just their pets and zoo animals. This refers to animals under many other conditions, too, such as lab rats, who are taking in the same amount of food as before and yet getting heavier.

I feel their pain.

Curioser and curioser:

Rats, mice and primates (four types were analyzed in this study) in laboratories are fed a highly controlled, known diet that has remained relatively constant over time. Why are these animals getting fatter?

Perhaps for some reason they’re choosing to eat more of what they are offered or are somehow changing how they metabolize it, he said.

Allison pointed out at least three potential contributions to this and the other observations: endocrine disrupting chemicals, pathogens such as a virus, and/or changes in temperature where the animals are kept.

I read several articles on the subject, and nowhere did I see speculation on whether animals’ gut flora might have changed in a way that favors weight gain. So I’m here to offer that idea. It’s not so very fanciful, either; a phenomenon of the sort seems to be true of humans.

President Obama announces he will strike Syria…

The New Neo Posted on by

…one of these days.

Perhaps when Congress returns and approves, which won’t be until after September 9th. But he reserves the right to do it before:

Before revealing he would seek approval from Congress, the President made clear that “we are prepared to strike whenever we choose.”

Strikes would be “effective tomorrow or next week or one month from now,” Obama said, adding that he is “prepared to give that order.”

Since this seems to be merely a symbolic gesture, I suppose it doesn’t matter how telegraphed it is, or when it occurs. Actually, for symbolic gestures, perhaps the more telegraphed and delayed the better, in order to build apprehension.

I think what happened is that President Obama may have been surprised by the relative unpopularity of his initial announcement that he might be about to attack Syria. He hadn’t intended to seek Congress’s approval, but he may have been convinced that it was necessary to win over the American people (although such considerations don’t often stop him).

This is interesting as well:

Also on Saturday, U.N. chemical weapons inspectors arrived in the Netherlands, where samples they collected in Syria will be evaluated in laboratories. The goal will be to check them for traces of poison gas that may have been unleashed in an Aug. 21 bombardment of a Damascus suburb.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Saturday “whatever can will be done” to speedup the analysis, but he gave no timeline for a report on the results…

The experts took with them blood and urine samples from victims as well as soil samples from the affected areas for examination in laboratories in Europe.

Considering it’s the UN, my guess is that it will take quite a while. I wonder, if the report were to indicate that chemical weapons were not used, whether Obama would back off (my guess, however, is that the inspectors will find that they were, although I would not be completely shocked either if the opposite occurred).

The parallels between Syria now and Iraq in 2002-2003 is ironic, including the need to try to present the evidence of weapons of mass destruction. The differences are ironic, too, because there were many additional reasons to attack Saddam Hussein besides WMDs—most prominent among them his continued and repeated defiance of the UN inspections that had been imposed on him as a condition of the end of the Gulf War.

Despite this—and the fact that Saddam Hussein had also used chemical weapons against his own people, in 1988 on a much larger scale—Obama was opposed to attacking Iraq, although he was a mere state legislator rather than US senator at the time. Another ironic difference between the Iraq buildup and the present Syria one was, of course, that unlike Obama, Bush actually got the serious cooperation of a number of countries in the international community.

So, what will Congress do? Obama may have called their bluff. If they agree, they will be partially responsible for the result of any action he takes. If they disagree, and Assad continues his behavior, they will be responsible for allowing that to happen and Obama can say “Ah, if only you’d let me do it, none of this terrible stuff would have happened.”

On Obama, Syria, and trust in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

Caroline Glick’s article on Obama and Syria seems to sum up the situation quite nicely—although “nicely” is hardly the proper word, because it makes for very sobering reading indeed:

It is important to note that despite the moral depravity of the regime’s use of chemical weapons, none of America’s vital interests is impacted by their use within Syria. Obama’s pledge last year to view the use of chemical weapons as a tripwire that would automatically cause the US to intervene militarily in the war in Syria was made without relation to any specific US interest.

But once Obama made his pledge, other US interests became inextricably linked to US retaliation for such a strike. The interests now on the line are America’s deterrent power and strategic credibility. If Obama responds in a credible way to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, those interests will be advanced. If he does not, US deterrent power will become a laughing stock and US credibility will be destroyed.

Unfortunately, the US doesn’t have many options for responding to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. If it targets the regime in a serious way, Assad could fall, and al-Qaida would then win the war. Conversely, if the US strike is sufficient to cause strategic harm to the regime’s survivability, Iran could order the Syrians or Hezbollah or Hamas, or all of them, to attack Israel. Such an attack would raise the prospect of regional war significantly.

Please read the whole thing.

The only part with which I’d disagree—and it’s not all that huge a disagreement, really—is that I think that US deterrent power has already become a laughing stock and US credibility been destroyed. The Obama administration has certainly accentuated and underlined and solidified this impression around the world, but it actually had already begun to occur in the final years of the Bush administration.

Obama’s 2008 election was a symptom of this change rather than an initial cause. It had already become clear, as the aftermath of the Iraq war and the American presence in that country wore on, and the MSM and many politicians in both the US and Britain and western Europe (including Senator Barack Obama) relentlessly pressed the liberal/left line against that war (featuring exaggerations and outright lies in addition to valid criticism in order to get the desired narrative across), that public opinion in the Western world had turned against the efforts in Iraq, and against further intervention and engagement of a similar nature.

Obama’s present waffling, red-line braggadocio, lack of focus on US interests and goals, and abandonment of allies is just icing on a cake that has been a long time in the mixing and baking. I suppose that doesn’t mean things couldn’t change at some future point, especially after Obama is out of office (after all, look at what happened in England during the buildup to World War II—first appeasement, and then Churchill’s resolve energizing the will of the people). But it doesn’t look likely, and even if it occurred it would take a long time to rebuild the trust that has been destroyed.

That does not mean that Obama is absolved of responsibility. On the contrary; he’s been working at this goal of disappointing allies, decreasing the influence and credibility of the US, and appeasing terrorists and Iran for a long time now, long before he became president. And he’s been helped by most of the Democrats in Congress and the majority of journalists.

[ADDENDUM: Also please read Richard Fernandez’s analysis of Parliament’s “no” vote.]