The suicide bees

The New Neo Posted on by

Not killer bees: suicide bees.

Yesterday was a lovely warm day, and I had lunch with a friend. We decided the weather was so nice that we’d sit outside at a restaurant that had some sidewalk tables.

I’d ordered a small bowl of turkey vegetable soup. It had chunks of turkey, a few veggies, and broth, and was served in a styrofoam cup along with a plastic soup spoon.

I’d eaten most of it and left only about an inch in the bowl’s bottom, when along came a bee and alighted on the top of the spoon handle that was sticking out of the soup. As I watched, it slowly—and as best I could tell, deliberately—crept down the spoon handle and slid into the soup.

Well, now I wasn’t going to be eating the last inch of that soup. But I wondered whether bees drown, or whether they can swim. After a minute or so of watching it flail that question was answered: they drown, and fairly quickly, too.

My friend and I continued our conversation, and I thought no more about the bee until along came another bee and began the same approach, although I’d removed the spoon by then and so this bee no longer had an easy gangplank. But it poised at the bowl’s edge, and dropped itself into the liquid to join its fellow.

As I said to my friend, “One’s an accident, two’s a pattern.”

But why? The soup wasn’t sweet; it was a bit salty. I hadn’t thought bees liked turkey, or salt. But there the two little corpses floated, the Romeo and Juliet of the apian set.

And then along came a third. This one had a bit of trouble locating its target and getting a grip on the edge of the bowl, and so it flew away, perhaps thinking better of the whole endeavor.

And then, a few minutes later, a fourth.

By this time we were finished with lunch, and I’d had it with bees. We picked up our utensils and trays to go inside and dump the refuse. But there was that fourth bee on the edge of my bowl, still alive, and I didn’t want to take a live bee into the restaurant.

So I figured I’d dislodge it from its perch and leave it outside. That proved difficult; the thing clung on, tenaciously (and bitterly?), to the bowl’s side. I couldn’t seem to talk it down from the ledge. But finally, with a very firm slap to the side of the bowl, I caused it to fall off and onto the ground.

Then I ran into the restaurant, fast, before it followed me.

NOTE: I just found this online. So perhaps they were community-organizing environmentally-minded Canadian bees?:

soupbee

In praise of memorizing poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Here’s a post I first wrote in 2005. It’s a favorite of mine.]

I think it may be a lost pedagogical device, but when I was in grade school, we were forced by our teachers (mostly elderly women, as it happens) to memorize poetry. Lots of poetry. Most of it doggerel, but not all of it, not by any means.

There was an old-fashioned quality to their choices: patriotic and seasonal verse, concerning Presidents and holidays (“If Nancy Hanks came back as a ghost, seeking news of what she loved most”; “There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood”).

I was a good poetry memorizer. I’m not trying to brag here, since I don’t think this ability implies any particular merit on my part. But no sooner had I written the thing down, copied from the blackboard on which the teacher had slowly and laboriously written it in her beautiful handwriting, then it was firmly ensconced in my head.

And there much of it stays. To this day, actually. Fortunately, along with the Edgar Guest and the others (“It takes a heap o’ livin’, in a house t’ make it home”) we were assigned some very fine poetry, mostly in junior high. Shakespearean sonnets and Wordsworth and Milton, some Robert Frost and Kipling and Shakespeare, the Gettysburg Address (not poetry, but it might as well have been).

Much of this I simply memorized by rote. I understood the basic meaning, but it had no real significance to me, no depth. I had no context for it.

But since it had been filed away, somewhere, I experienced a curious phenomenon later on. I found that in crises or emotional times, a line of poetry would suddenly come to me—a phrase I’d never paid much attention to before—and I’d have one of those “aha!” moments.

At one point I sustained a serious and chronic injury. My physical limitations were such that for long periods of time I could not work, nor even read or write in any sustained way. I took to visiting a park near where I lived and slowly walking around a track there. Nearby was a small wooded area, and it was wintertime and snow was on the ground. Looking at the trees, the following line suddenly came to my mind, unbidden, (“Whose woods these are I think I know…”) memorized so long ago, and hardly thought of since.

But the words were all there, waiting for me, and when I came to the lines, “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep” they hit me with the force of near-revelation. Frost seemed to be talking about wanting to give up, to surrender to something dark and restful (what? death?) in a time of great weariness such as I was experiencing. And then the next line came, too, offering hope and resolution, “But I have promises to keep…”

This sort of thing kept happening to me. Keeps happening to me, actually. In situation after situation, a line or passage of poetry will announce itself—something that I’d apparently held in my mind, in suspended animation as it were, without any true reflection or understanding—and suddenly, it would be freighted with deep and poignant meaning.

So I’m hereby declaring myself in favor of the practice of poetry memorization in schools. I know there are many many children—adults, too—who hate poetry. I don’t think that will change; I’m not imagining that poetry will gain a lot of converts from the mere act of children being required to memorize it. But for the rest, I think there’s great value to be had in carrying around a small library of poetry in one’s head, to draw upon in the hard times—or even the joyful times.

Right after 9/11, Yeats’ “The Second Coming” was the poem that kept swirling around in my brain. It doesn’t really offer any comfort; it’s a very bleak vision, after all. But for me, even the act of recalling the lines, somber and frightening as they are, had its own sort of solace, saying to me, “Others have had this fear, others have passed through terrible times of chaos,” and, paradoxically, lending words of great beauty to the description of that terrifying state:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

Perhaps the worst thing about the Obamacare rollout…

The New Neo Posted on by

…from the Democrats’ point of view is not that it will keep people from enrolling for a while.

After all, there’s no enormous rush, although it would have been nice to have gotten the ball rolling faster.

It’s the undermining of whatever lingering trust anyone might have retained in the federal government’s ability to run such a thing. It’s on that trust that Obamacare depends.

Some of you might say, “What are you talking about; who trusted the government even before this?” I contend that there are many people who did—although most of them are not on the right—and this has to make those folks feel a lot shakier about that trust.

And I wonder whether anyone except the right remembers—ah, it was so long ago—that part of the original argument for Obamacare and how it would be funded was that waste would be trimmed from other programs. Yes, you may laugh, but that was the drill. Now that we know about the huge waste of money that was the rollout itself, I wonder whether many of those who believed such savings would happen have managed to hold on to those ideas? I’m not talking about the bureaucrats and officials and pundits who either believed their own projections or were lying to cynically exploit what used to be called The Masses, but those ordinary voters who accepted what they were saying and thought it plausible. Do most of those voters still believe?

Now, it’s possible that all this messiness is just a passing phase and that the Obamacare website will get its act together soon enough. But at that point a lot of people will be getting some very, very bad news about their premium rates, their deductibles, their co-pays, and/or which doctors and hospitals are now out of their networks.

Others, of course, will be getting some good news.

Which group will be larger? And how many of the people who get bad news will be Democrats who might then begin to wonder about giving their votes in the future to a party that has so grievously betrayed its promises to them?

Research proves lab rats are just like humans

The New Neo Posted on by

That is, they’re addicted to Oreos, and they like to eat the insides first.

happyrat

I kid you not.

I wonder if, given the opportunity, they also would do what I used to do when I was a little girl: break the Oreos into pieces and mix the pieces into Mott’s applesauce. The apples gave it a little kick, and the entire concoction had a nice crunch if you ate it before the cookies became soggy, a feat I always managed.

Alas, I no longer eat Oreos, because I now can’t eat chocolate since it gives me migraines. I suppose this inability to eat Oreos is a good thing, though, because that’s one less addictive fat-and-sugar-laden treat that can beckon to me. The news that they are addictive is no surprise, nor is it any surprise that in general foods loaded with fat and sugar are addictive.

And “addictive” isn’t just a figure of speech in this case:

New research suggests that sugary, fatty treats can elicit the same reaction and activate the brain in a similar manner as cocaine and morphine, at least in lab rats…

The experiment was…repeated with…rats being offered injections of cocaine or morphine in one room and saline in the other…[T]he researchers found that the rats had an “equivalent preference” for a room when it contained an Oreo as when they were given injections of morphine and cocaine.

Further examination of the rats’ brains found that they had higher cellular activity in the “pleasure center” of their brain after eating an Oreo versus being injected with one of the drugs.

But the rats didn’t “seem to get much pleasure” out of eating rice crackers. My guess is that they’re not partial to cardboard, either.

There was no way New Jersey’s Cory Booker was going to lose…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and he didn’t. But Chris Christie almost certainly will win, big time:

One New Jersey Republican source noted that, if anything, the dichotomy between the two outcomes will only further crystallize Christie as a “unique” player in an increasingly partisan national environment.

“I don’t think the Senate election outcome says much about Christie’s future, except that if Booker wins handily even after running a lackluster campaign, it will underscore just how blue New Jersey is, and how unique Christie is to be able to carry it,” the source said.

You may recall that Christie may have had the chance four months ago to appoint a Republican senator but did not, and chose to have this special election instead. Note I wrote “may have had,” because it wasn’t at all clear that Christie had the right to make such an appointment in the first place, and he would have faced legal challenges by Democrats had he tried.

Many conservatives were angry about it (a lot of them were already mad at Christie), but that single increased Republican presence would not have made a difference to anything in the current Senate, and whomever he’d appointed would have almost certainly lost election next year, because New Jersey hasn’t had a Republican senator in over forty years and shows no indications of wanting one.

But it looks like Christie will sail to re-election in a deep blue state:

A Monmouth University poll released Tuesday found Christie leading his Democratic challenger, Buono, 59 percent to 35 percent. That’s in a state President Barack Obama carried in 2012 by 17 points.

“We are looking at a potential 20-point margin in a blue state and an outright win among Hispanic voters,” Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray said in a statement. “What more could a 2016 GOP presidential contender ask for?”

Well, he/she could ask for being able to appeal to conservatives nationwide. My reading is that a great many of them strongly distrust him, in particular holding it against him that he acquiesced to a love-fest photo-op with Obama after hurricane Sandy and just prior to the 2012 election.

What do I think? I think it’s way premature to talk seriously about 2016. There may be some Republican candidates in the running that I’ll like better than Christie.

But I will say one thing (well, actually, more than one): if Christie is the Republican nominee, I will vote for him with something akin to enthusiasm. That’s because I think for the most part he does have conservative principles, and unlike so many, he is able to articulate them clearly, colorfully, and forcefully. He’s a politician all right (the plus side is that he’s not naive about politics and has good political instincts), but he talks like a straight shooter. He’s funny. He’s a fighter, and he has guts. He’s smart. He has a proven record of knowing how to appeal to Democrats and minorities (for example, he earns over 30% of the black vote in New Jersey, which is extraordinary for a Republican) without turning into a Democrat. Stylistically he is nothing like Mitt Romney, with none of his vulnerabilities in terms of appealing to the blue collar crowd, a very important demographic.

Christie is a potential winner, no doubt about it. Is he perfect? Far from it. But he is a fiscally conservative Republican, and one tough cookie. He can take the heat that will no doubt be thrown his way.

Debt ceiling raised, shutdown ended

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course. The Senate voted last night, the House will approve today.

Now it’s time to emphasize what a train wreck Obamacare is. However, that could end up leading to single payer if the Republicans don’t do well in the 2014 elections. That should be Republicans’ next focus: doing everything they can to keep the House and win back the Senate.

But I’m not knocking the effort that led to the shutdown and the debt-ceiling brinksmanship. I understand why they made it, although I thought it was poorly planned and would lead to this end almost inevitably. Unfortunately, even if Republicans get control of the legislature in 2014 (which could happen; I think the bad feeling engendered by the last few weeks will blow over), Obama will retain veto power and he will not be the least bit shy about using it. That is one of the many reasons why his re-election in 2012 was such a blow.

I know that many of you see all this as merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe yes, maybe no. The actual implementation of Obamacare will be quite the wild card.

Remembering the 60s: were you there?

The New Neo Posted on by

Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane famously said that if you can remember anything about the 60s you weren’t really there.

Cute, but not really true. I bet even Kantner remembers quite a bit (as you can see by this), and he was most definitely there.

As was I.

In my post earlier today about Cornell in the late 60s, commenter “mizpants” had the following to say:

How terrible the sixties seem in retrospect – more and more so, the older I get. It was truly the opening of a Pandora’s box. The anarchic glee looks diabolical from here. I used to nod vaguely when people waxed nostalgic about that time. Now I leave the room.

Well, I ain’t going to wax nostalgic; I didn’t much care for the 60s even at the time. Oh, it was nice to be young, and the music and the fashions were fun and fine, and there was a sense of something new beginning. But I was very uneasy about what that new thing actually would turn out to be.

People seemed silly, full of themselves and self-indulgent, histrionic, violent, and (this is rarely written about) misogynistic or even misanthropic as they mouthed platitudes about the rights of women and of mankind. Those things gave me an uncomfortable feeling that fools and reckless idiots, or people up to no good, were in the driver’s seat of the movement. They seemed pretty drunk on their own power, too, while simultaneously accusing others (the older folk, of course) of being power-mad.

Now that I’ve learned more about the repercussions over time, it seems even worse. But even some of that was hinted at then, as I learned in a course I took that was called “Russian Intellectual History”:

It was there I learned – without anyone ever telling me directly – that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form. No, my generation was not unique; that was clear. No, we were not inventing something that had never been tried, going down some wonderful path that had never been trod. We were going somewhere that in the past had led to nothing good.

I could see it for myself; all I had to do was read, and think. If we don’t learn history we are indeed condemned to repeat it. And even if we do learn it, we may be condemned to repeat it anyway.

It was not only reading about it in the abstract; I was experiencing it more up-close and personal:

I also remember attending an SDS meeting at that same university…I was flirting with Leftist thought at the time – trying it on for size, as it were. And what I saw there made it clear to me that it was not a good fit for me. The level of mindless rage was immediately apparent. The speeches seemed nothing but name-calling and obscenities, with a few prepositions and conjunctions and verbs thrown in to aid the flow. It was assumed that everyone was on the same page and no argument or reasoning was necessary. The type of language used reflected the jettisoning of the conventions of rational discourse on the part of speakers who fancied themselves revolutionaries.

It was all there, even then. And this is not 20/20 hindsight. I well remember my visceral feeling of slowly-dawning horror when attending that meeting. I didn’t totally understand it all at the time, but I sensed both on an intellectual and a gut level that what I was seeing was wrong, dangerous, and would lead to no good.

Nothing I’ve seen since has disabused me of that notion.

You might ask how I managed to remain a liberal Democrat for decades after that experience. I’d refer you to my change series for the answer, but I’ll add that I simply did not connect the radicals I saw at that meeting with most of the liberals in the Democratic Party. Also, I didn’t know much about conservatism and never thought to seek it out because what I read about it in my usual and trusted sources, the NY Times, the Boston Globe, and the New Yorker, made it seem not worth the trouble. It really took the advent of the internet to introduce me to it and get me to realize its value.

Attention, Walmart shoppers

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve probably already heard about the EBT card breakdown during a power outage in which shoppers at a couple of Louisiana Walmarts purposely took advantage of the situation by “buying” a huge number of groceries for amounts that greatly exceeded their EBT limits in normal times.

You might say the Walmart managers were stupid not to ban the cards or limit the amount that could be charged on them for the duration of the problem, and perhaps you’d be right. But perhaps they thought that if they did that they would face a riot, or at least very bad PR, and so they decided to let people continue to use their cards freely (pun intended) and hope for the best.

As for the lawbreakers, we don’t know what percentage of the EBT-carrying population they represent. But it seems that quite a few cheaters happened to be in Walmart that day. They stole from Walmart (if Walmart is left holding the bag) or from the taxpayers, or perhaps from both. Why did they feel they could and should do it?

I don’t profess to know all the reasons. Some of it is mob mentality, some greed. But some of it is that the welfare system itself, and especially its more recent political manifestations (let’s soak the rich; they owe it to the rest of us to help us) engenders the idea that it’s your right to get free stuff if you’re poor or even just somewhat poor. So, why not get more free stuff when you can?

For some people, it’s a very slippery slope from one idea to the other. The payor is unseen and unknown in each case. The people who might be hurt by it are unseen and unknown as well. The mechanism is the same for each transaction: a card. And the venue is the same: Walmart.

Cream cake, dream cake

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I went to Whole Foods.

I don’t live very close to one. But not too very far away, either. Perhaps just right (in the Goldilocks sense), because any closer and I’d be a lot poorer and a lot fatter, and any further away and I’d be sadder.

Yesterday I succumbed, as I sometimes do, to the seductive call of a piece of Whole Foods almond cream cake. After I’d partaken of its delicately perfumed, almond scented, moist and tender—well, you get the idea—it occurred to me that, unlike its policy with much of the rest of its food, Whole Foods is mum on the calorie content.

No accident, that. I thought perhaps I could find it online and write about it here. But when I Googled “whole foods” almond cream cake calories there was nothing among the first few except some recipes for supposed-but-bogus equivalents—and then, at number four on Google’s list, this previous post that I’d written only a year and a half ago on the very same subject, and which I’d already forgotten about.

I guess I could use the fact that I write approximately three posts a day as an excuse. But anyway, I really, really, really like that cream cake.

The day the university died

The New Neo Posted on by

A trip back in time to the epicenter: Cornell, 1969.

As Allan Bloom wrote:

…[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

It was a turning point, and we’ve never looked back. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Remember civility?: Roger Simon, racism, and polemics

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger Simon (not to be confused with PJ’s Roger L. Simon) was long a respected and supposedly objective journalist. And yet take a look at his column:

Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved?

Answer: America.

Harsh? Look around you at what is happening to America and you will see harsh. I am not talking about closed parks and monuments. I am talking about the funds cut to nearly 9 million mothers and young children for food, breastfeeding support and infant formula.

That is harsh. Making a war against babies is harsh. And for what? Because Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, has grown so drunk on the sound of his own voice and so besotted with illusions of his own grandeur that he believes halting government today will propel him into the White House tomorrow?

You can read the whole thing if you wish, but that’s a sample of what passes for political discourse from a respected and middle-aged reporter-now-turned-opinion-writer. And from the comments section there (which you are welcome to peruse) the “Tea Party Racists” theme that Simon is flogging has become entrenched truth among Democrats (although if you want to see racism, just read some of the comments about Thomas Sowell in the comments section to Simon’s article).

It’s a feeding frenzy on the left because the sharks think they smell the blood of the dying GOP. It’s not the display of an isolated fringe, either, but a mainstream display by people who don’t think of themselves as polemicists.

Polemicists? Noted journalist Roger Simon neglects to convey a few itty bitty facts when he writes:

Remember Samuel Wurzelbacher? Known as “Joe the Plumber,” he was selected by John McCain as his presidential campaign mascot in 2008 with the same care McCain used to select Sarah Palin.

Over the weekend, Wurzelbacher posted an article on his blog titled: “America Needs a White Republican President.”

“Admit it,” the article said. “You want a white Republican president again. Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American.”

America has come to a sorry pass. Not because there are still racists among us, but because the racists among us think they can tell us what makes an American.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? But here are the facts: (1) Joe the Plumber didn’t write the article, although he did put it on his site; (2) the article was written by a black man, Kevin Jackson, and is actually quite different than what one might think from reading the title (have a read). In it, Jackson is saying that if we had a white president people couldn’t argue that every criticism of him was due to racism.

Ironic, isn’t it, how Simon turns that around, and accuses Jackson (or whoever he thought wrote it) of racism? Either Simon didn’t even do his homework and failed to read the article and/or find out who wrote it, or he knows all of this and prefers to dissemble to his readers. I would bet on the latter.

[NOTE: Note, also, that Simon fails to link to the Jackson piece. Perhaps he doesn’t want his readers to actually read it and see what it really says.]

What’s in a name: healthcare.gov

The New Neo Posted on by

It has not escaped my notice that the Obamacare website is named “healthcare.gov.” That sounds innocuous enough, so why am I calling anyone’s attention to it?

It’s emblematic of the insidious nature of the language around the ACA that we hardly notice. But I very doubt doubt the site’s name was chosen casually. It is a very deliberate attempt (although almost beautiful in its subtlety) to make the populace think that what Obamacare—and government—dispenses is health care itself.

Government as healer, and as beneficent portal to doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medication; to treatment.

But what the government is actually offering here is health insurance. “Healthinsurance.gov” is not too unwieldy a phrase for a website URL. Of course, health insurance facilitates the procuring of health care for the majority of people (although the price of health care has risen so much partly as a result of widespread third-party coverage).

You won’t be seeing the website renamed “healthinsurance.gov” any time soon. Or any time at all. Even if we went to single payer—in which case it really would be healthinsurance.gov—the government would call it something else. In Britain, for example, they skip the “care” and just call it the National Health Service.