US abortion rate falls…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to its lowest point since 1973.

That seems like unequivocally good news. The study didn’t examine why it happened, however. Theories: better long-term contraception methods, hard economic times, tighter laws restricting access to abortion in some situations, and greater awareness of fetal development through sonograms.

But whatever the reasons, here are the stats:

The study released Monday shows that, after a plateau from 2005 to 2008, the long-term decline in the abortion rate has resumed. The rate has dropped significantly from its all-time high in 1981, when there were roughly 30 abortions for every 1,000 women of reproductive age. The overall number of abortions also fell 13 percent from 2008 to nearly 1.1 million in 2011, the study said.

I hadn’t known the abortion rate had been steadily dropping. That’s interesting, surprising, and good, even though we don’t know what the reason[s] have been.

RIP Barry Rubin

The New Neo Posted on by

This is shocking news: Barry Rubin, professor, author, and PJ Media Middle East editor, died this morning at the age of 64.

From Dave Swindle at PJ:

For the last least three years, his Rubin Reports blog has served as the roadmap to the Middle East that I rely on the most. Written from the center of the storm in Israel, his typical columns are densely filled with facts and fascinating observations. Perhaps the crucial insight that I’ve gained from trying to keep up with Barry all these years ”” he tends to publish his loaded analyses very prolifically, not that I’m complaining! ”” is the depth of complexity to the Middle East. The game is not a chessboard between two sides, and there are rarely easy answers given that there are so many different actors on the field.

Swindle goes on to provide links to thirteen of Rubin’s books. Rubin had made these works of his available online, for free. I didn’t know Rubin, but that sort of act says a lot about him.

He wasn’t idle in his last year, either. Here’s a book of his that’s due to come out this April; it sounds fascinating and important: Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance.

RIP, Barry Rubin.

[NOTE: More here and here.]

A little something about the Superbowl

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that I’m already blogging this Sunday, I figure I may as well post something about the Superbowl.

And this is it.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about it. I’m not a football fan. I only watch the Superbowl when the Pats are playing, and I don’t watch all that carefully even then. I find football to be confusing and jumbled visually, not like the clearly highlighted and easy-to-follow grace of baseball, my favorite team sport (here’s why).

But I’m not a complete isolate, and I realize that football is a Big Deal. And that the Superbowl is an even Bigger Deal. I realize this in part because when I go to Walmart (which I’m about to do, to return a router) I can’t help but notice the rows upon rows of chips and dips – and cakes in the shape of footballs and football fields – lining the entryway, tempting me to get into the culinary spirit of the Superbowl if not the sports fan spirit.

So, for those of you who want to discuss the Superbowl or anything connected with it, here’s your thread!

chips

Yes, it’s – Groundhog Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

And so instead of resting this Sunday I’m reposting an old favorite. Really, what could be more appropriate on Groundhog Day than a repeat of an old essay about the movie, a personal favorite of mine?

[NOTE: For more on the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the film, please see this and this.]

In discussions of the film “Groundhog Day” on this blog, I’ve noticed a couple of people questioning why the Bill Murray character would find Andie McDowell’s Rita deserving of all those years of his devotion and energy. For example, “…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?”

My answer is that he discovered love. Yes, Rita was beautiful, and a good human being with many excellent qualities. But of course she was imperfect, and over the years (centuries? millennia?) Phil no doubt had learned just about all of her flaws. Still, it didn’t matter to him because it wasn’t about Rita, exactly—it was about the fact that, somewhere along the long path of his transformation to wisdom, he finally understood that every person in town, including the ones he couldn’t tolerate at the beginning, was worthy of his attention—and of something one might call “love,” in its broadest sense.

And somewhere along the way to that knowledge, Phil’s efforts in “Groundhog Day” stopped being about getting into Rita’s pants or even getting her to love him, although that certainly took up a larger percentage of his time (and the movie’s length) than some of his other pursuits. But he probably spent at least as much time learning to play the piano (a form of love, too), or to carve ice sculptures, or to become skilled at some of the more mindless and meaningless tricks he mastered, or learning details about the life of almost everyone in town.

Was the old derelict, whose life Phil tried to save over and over and over, “worth it” either? Such questions no longer mattered to him, because the gesture and the effort were worth it, and every life was worth something to him.

Rita, of course, had always been physically attractive to Phil. But as the film (and time) wore on—and on—she became the object not just of eros, but of agape as well. By the end of the movie, I think that Phil had come to appreciate the idea of the theme and variations versus the symphony, which I wrote about here:

And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.

And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.

It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.

Towards the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), Phil makes it clear that he has given up the pursuit of Rita entirely, and immersed himself in his love for her instead. Is this what finally frees him?

[NOTE: In the original post, there was a more complete version of the ending, but YouTube seems to have taken it down and this was the closest one I could find. To those of you unfamiliar with the movie, it won’t seem like much, but trust me; in context, it’s extraordinary, especially in contrast to Phil’s original snarky personality.]

[ADDENDUM: In one of the links I recommended in the “UPDATE” above, I just noticed an error (maybe that’s because it’s the NY Times, natch). The article states, “Of course, this being an American film, he [Phil] not only attains spiritual release but also gets the producer [Rita] into bed.”

Well, that may be literally true; on the final night, Rita and Phil do sleep in the same bed. But what the writer is implying—that they have sex—is completely untrue. Note, also, the snide “American film” reference.]

[ADDENDUM II: I also just noticed that, surprisingly enough, the other essayist, Michael P. Foley, makes the same error as the Times. He writes:

I should add, though, that the movie is not perfect. Rita’s final “redemption” of Phil, for instance, results in their sleeping together the next morning. (Call it the incense that had to be thrown on the Hollywood fire.)

I am quite surprised that so many thoughtful viewers of the movie have made such an elementary error. But it seems quite common. How odd. As commenter “Ed Bonderenka” points out, “Rita says, the next morning, that Phil fell asleep the night before.”

That’s not to say that Phil foreswears sex. We can be fairly certain that, when he returns to normal time with Rita, sex is part of their lives.]

We may have just learned a little bit about Obama’s college transcripts

The New Neo Posted on by

And he probably didn’t take art history.

By the way, I took a few courses in art history in college, although I was definitely not an art history major, and I can tell you that art history is hard. At least it was back then. Ever try to tell one Gothic church from another? Hard, hard, hard.

Leonard Cohen and “Going Home”: a brief elaboration

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Going Home.” In that song he’s his usual lugubrious, hypnotic, philosophical, mystical self. The lyric could only have been written by a writer who’s no longer young. You may think the song boring, but I think it could grow on you:

In one of the song’s many manifestations on YouTube, there was a discussion in the comments section about the lines “Though he knows he’s really nothing/But the brief elaboration of a tube.” Several people seemed to think the person offering the lyrics had heard the word “tube” in error, and that Cohen’s actual word was “tune.”

Well, no. Not only is it “tube,” but I love that line. It makes me think of embryology as well as Zen-ish philosophy; it’s literally true that our entire digestive system and even the liver and other organs start out as a simple tube. But there’s nothing at all simple about the “elaboration” that goes on. It seems more like a miracle.

Here’s a brief elaboration on that brief elaboration of a tube:

And you might also say that YouTube itself—that wonderful place where a person has only to think of a song and type in a few words in order to get nearly instantaneous access to many versions of it, like having some magical genie who says “Your wish is my command”—it occurs to me that YouTube itself is another elaboration of a tube.

[NOTE: I just noticed that in the Cohen video there’s no picture; it’s just audio. I chose that one because the sound was best, and the original just had some stills of Cohen anyway.]

Targeted political prosecutions

The New Neo Posted on by

Harvey Silverglate weighs in on the motivations for the Justice Department’s current spate of prosecutions of politicians and ex-politicians. Many of the accused are Republicans, of course, but not all:

What has become clear, however, is that the department’s war against local politicians will continue, and that its motivations will lie somewhere between the quest for federal power and partisan politics.

The Chicago way is only for the folks in power in Washington and their lackeys, I guess. They don’t want anyone else taking a leaf out of their book. And of course any Republican frontrunner must be taken down, and there are many tools available to do that.

“It makes no sense”

The New Neo Posted on by

Another pundit agrees that the current House Republican stance on immigration makes no sense.

That makes it pretty much unanimous, doesn’t it? I haven’t seen a single pundit, whether RINO/establishment or conservative/Tea-Party, say it makes sense, except when turning themselves into pretzels trying to guess at what might be going on in Boehner’s Byzantine or simpleton mind. I’ve tried to figure that out myself (today’s earlier post, for example), but it doesn’t change the fact that the deal appears to make no sense at all.

It’s not a whole lot that can unite the warring wings of the Republican Party. But dislike of what Boehner is doing seems to have accomplished the difficult feat.

Maybe that’s his real goal. Nope, probably not.

[ADDENDUM: This would make a certain amount of sense, if it were true. I wouldn’t bet on it.]

Who is Boehner, who is he?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to say at the outset that I think John Boehner is a poor leader, and I don’t trust him—either to do what’s right for the Republicans, the conservatives, or for the country. As long ago as December of 2012 I said he should be replaced as Speaker.

But I don’t agree with those who would call him “clueless, gullible, stubborn, out of touch, and a Dunce,” although I have absolutely no difficulty seeing why a person might call him that. Maybe they’re even right, although I hope not, for all our sakes, because he’s Speaker at a time when we need someone very very smart and very very principled.

Well, we’re not going to get that; I’m not alleging that’s who Boehner is. And I confess I find him very opaque (and no cracks about orange skin, either). He certainly seems like a simple, cloddish sort. But I don’t think he is, because I don’t think a person gets to be Speaker of the House that way.

I’ve already written about this topic, and so the next portion of this post is going to be a recycling (slightly edited) of something I wrote back in October of 2013, when I was trying to puzzle out this same question: who is Boehner, and what does he think he’s doing?:

Conservatives are predictably lashing out in frustration at John Boehner, whom they already neither liked nor trusted.

Sellout. RINO. Wuss. You know the drill.

But I don’t see it quite that way.

Before there’s any misunderstanding (although as Popper said, misunderstanding’s gonna happen no matter how you try to head it off), let me say I’m not a Boehner fan. He’s uninspiring, seems naive, and exhibits nothing especially superior in either the brains or the rhetoric or the spine department.

But I don’t think he’s dumb, nor do I think he’s all that naive. It’s been my observation over time that people don’t get to be head of a party (either party) in Congress without having some smarts in at least the strategy and tactics department. Or without being somewhat good at playing political poker.

Now, Boehner may be one of the worst of recent political party leaders at that. Or he may be one of the better ones, given the not-so-great hand he’s been dealt. I don’t know; I can’t really tell because I sense that most of what goes on in Congress right now (or ever) is hidden from view. But I’m willing to at least entertain the idea that Boehner may (as this American Thinker piece by Fisher Adams claims) be playing a smarter game than is immediately apparent.

As commenter “T” (who linked to Adams’ article) wrote:

I am reminded of Henry Kissinger’s comment about foreign affairs: he said that there are always two chess games being played, the one on the table that everyone watches and a second game under the table that no one sees. Could that be the case here?

Could be. Fervently hope so, anyway. Because the alternative is pretty grim.

Boehner has a rather interesting history that at least indicates the possibility of a considerable amount more toughness than is apparent on the surface, as well as more devotion to conservative principles than many people credit him with. For example, he had a hardscrabble childhood and young manhood and managed to work his way up from it:

[Boehner] grew up in modest circumstances, having shared one bathroom with his eleven siblings in a two-bedroom house in Cincinnati. His parents slept on a pull-out couch. He started working at his family’s bar at age 8, a business founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938…All but two of his siblings still live within a few miles of each other; two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

Boehner attended Cincinnati’s Moeller High School and was a linebacker on the school’s football team, where he was coached by future Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust…[Boehner was] the first person in his family to attend college, taking seven years as he held several jobs to pay for his education.

If Boehner’s a RINO now, he certainly wasn’t at the outset. Or, if he was a RINO even back then, he certainly managed to keep it pretty quiet:

Boehner, along with Newt Gingrich and several other Republican lawmakers, was one of the engineers of the Contract with America in 1994 that politically helped Republicans during the 1994 congressional elections during which they won the majority in Congress for the first time in four decades.

By 1997, when Gingrich was perceived by the others as a political liability, Boehner was also one of a group of Republicans that tried to get Gingrich to resign as Speaker. But when Boehner ran for Majority Leader in 2006, he “campaigned as a reform candidate who wanted to reform the so-called ‘earmark’ process and rein in government spending.” Of course, because Republicans lost in the House in 2006, he was demoted to Minority Leader and it wasn’t until 2010 that he got to be Speaker.

For the most part, Boehner’s political positions have been conservative. So if he’s actually a RINO, he’s a very odd one indeed. What he is, however, is a guy who’s been in Congress and in some position of party power for a long, long time, which would officially make him an “establishment Republican.”

As for naivete, there’s very good evidence that Boehner knows at least some of what he’s up against in Obama and Pelosi, et al. He may not know exactly what to do about it, given that the Senate is in Democratic hands. But he knows the intent of today’s Democratic leaders:

House Speaker John Boehner told a group of Republicans the day after President Barack Obama’s [2012] inaugural ceremony that the president’s focus was to “annihilate the Republican Party.”

In remarks to Republicans attending a closed luncheon sponsored by the Ripon Society, Boehner pointed to the president’s speech as evidence Obama recognizes he can’t achieve his agenda because of the GOP-led House of Representatives.

“Given what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans. So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party,” the House speaker said.

Boehner underlined his point, adding, “And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal ”“ to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

My only disagreement with what he says would be that it’s not merely “the Republican Party” they want to “annihilate.” It’s the whole idea of small government and conservatism which they wish to discredit and demonize. They are well on their way to doing so, with the help of a compliant MSM, and unfortunately events such as the shutdown and the debt ceiling negotiations have the paradoxical effect of helping them in that endeavor with a large segment of the American public.

Republicans face a dilemma. The Congressional elections of 2014 are of the utmost importance. They have a chance to take the Senate (although even if they manage to do so—and to keep the House, which they must also do—Obama will retain veto power). But the conservative wing of the Republican Party is clamoring (and understandably so) for more action now, and threatening to defect if more isn’t done to stop the Democrats in their tracks. Boehner is in the position of having to weigh approaches that could backfire, knowing he will be reviled if he fails, and knowing it is very late in the day and the stakes are incredibly high.

But that’s the role he asked for.

So, now that it’s about three and a half months since those words were first written, what would I add? That it may be that Boehner’s most salient characteristic is personal ambition, and that he’s more interested in saving the “Republican Party” than saving its supposed principles, that of conservatism. And it is likely that those principles of the Republican Party are not especially conservative at all.

But in terms of the current immigration battle in Congress, aren’t at least some of the interests of the Republican Party as a whole and conservatives as a whole one and the same? Not that there isn’t a conflict—we can assume that the big donors are more in favor of caving on immigration than holding firm, and that’s certainly a large conflict. But if the Republicans vote for a law that multiplies the demographic advantages for the Democrats in a way that will “annihilate” the Republican Party anyway, it doesn’t seem like a self-serving move, much less a good one in principle.

Perhaps the best move would be to placate the donors by pretending to cave to the Democrats on immigration, but pulling away from passing a bill at the last minute? So Republicans such as Boehner can say to the donors, “at least I tried”? Or perhaps it’s the other way around and they’ve pretended to placate the conservatives but in the end will do what the donors want. But both the withdrawal of donor funds and the act of giving many millions of potential Democratic voters a way into the system threaten Boehner and his fellows, because who’s going to be donating a lot of money to them when they’re no longer in power? Yes, they may be getting cushy jobs in the private sector as a result, and that could be a sufficient motivator. But somehow I don’t think that money with a loss of political power is what they’re after, although it may be what they’d be willing to settle for.

Politics is a dirty business. Even those who start out clean (and I have no idea whether Boehner was one of them) have to fight to stay clean, and many aren’t interested in that fight.

The GOP’s present stance on an immigration bill…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is not only maddening, it’s puzzling.

Why are they doing this? And especially why now? Doesn’t it constitute an unforced error of major, major proportions?

I’ve been mulling it over for a while. I’ve had a lot of thoughts: money, some hidden Machiavellian but brilliant agenda (would that it were true), stupidity, a doomed attempt to curry votes that will end up losing them votes, and the odd idea that they are afraid of winning and want to sabotage themselves. Why would they be afraid of winning? Because they don’t want to actually have to take responsibility for what they do or don’t do.

But Sean Trende has a lot more to say about it all. His piece is probably the most intelligent thing I’ve read so far on this almost impenetrable subject. That doesn’t mean he’s correct; I still think what the Republicans are reportedly considering defies logic and understanding. But I give him a gold star for effort and imagination.