Ariel Castro and the monsters among us

The New Neo Posted on by

Jack Dunphy has a piece at PJ about Ariel Castro and how ordinary he must have seemed to his neighbors and acquaintances, and how it would have been very difficult to perceive the evil that lurked within.

Although I understand what Dunphy’s referring to—the man’s ordinary demeanor seems to have emanated a kind of general affability that gave no clue to the horrors he perpetrated—I disagree strongly that those who knew him better, or who lived near him, would have had no clues.

Of course, it’s easier to see these things in retrospect; 20/20 hindsight and all that. And there’s no way that, even with these clues, a person would necessarily think he had kidnapped three women and held them captive all those years of torture both physical and psychological.

Dunphy refers to Castro’s house, for example, as an “ordinary looking clapboard home.” But tell me whether you think the back of this house is business-as-usual, even for a pretty sketchy neighborhood such as the one Castro lived in—considering that people knew this house was inhabited and not vacant:

Ariel Castro's Backyard

Of course, that’s the back of the house rather than the front. But still, it appears to have been quite visible to neighbors, and it seems at the very least rather suspicious in terms of activity that might be going on in there that the owner didn’t want observed.

Dunphy (an officer with the LAPD) also writes: “And as for those who say the police should have done more to find the women, one must ask: What more could they have done?”

I would submit the following: they might have heeded the suggestion of Fernando Colon, who allegedly fingered Castro as a probable suspect back in 2004 when Georgina de Jesus had first disappeared:

Fernando Colon [boyfriend of Castro’s ex-wife Grimilda Figueroa] said that he was intensively interviewed, followed by officers and made to give samples of his DNA following the disappearance of Georgina DeJesus, who was then 14, in 2004.

Ms DeJesus had last been seen walking home from school by her friend Arlene Castro, the youngest daughter of Ariel Castro and Grimilda Figueroa, who had by then left the school bus driver.

Mr Colon, who as Ms Figueroa’s boyfriend was a stepfather figure to Arlene, was suspected by police of being involved with her friend’s disappearance and became the focus of their inquiries.

“Ariel wasn’t investigated at all,” Frank Caraballo, his former brother-in-law, told The Daily Telegraph. “Why was Arlene’s actual father out of the picture? He’s the bus driver, he knows where all these kids go.”

Mr Colon, now 49, claimed to have told his FBI interviewers that Mr Castro was a more likely culprit, but said that his suggestion was totally ignored by investigators.

In addition, Castro’s ex-wife Figueroa and her family members claimed Castro had physically and mentally abused her in very severe and provable ways (multiple physical injuries), systematically, and continually. But the case was dismissed and never pursued again because of legal irregularities involving non-appearances of Castro as well as non-appearance of Figueroa’s attorney.

Obama: nobody ever tells me anything

The New Neo Posted on by

They say the president’s always the last to know.

Actually, they don’t say that. But Obama seems to be saying that—and he wants us to believe him.

Either way it’s an exceptionally weak response: it makes Obama look clueless, or we must assume he’s lying and actually did know. Of course, some of his worshipers will excuse him on the grounds that he is so serene and lofty and above-it-all that he doesn’t bother with the mud beneath, and so his ignorance of IRS audits and other nefarious matters would actually be the result of his virtues.

Obama’s no good, horrible, very bad week

The New Neo Posted on by

I have no idea whether the revelations of the last week or so will end up eroding Obama’s support in any way that matters. But I do know that they appear to have presented him with the worst set of political problems since his presidency began, and at least have the potential for finally making the American people distrust him in a major way.

It’s not Benghazi that makes the difference. Benghazi, important as it is to us blogosphere wonks, is just too complex, too distant in time and place, and therefore too difficult for most people to process and relate to. And it’s probably not any single one of the rest of the machinations, either, although they come closer: the IRS audits, the AP press phone records being obtained by the Department of Justice, or the “unusual” fundraising methods Sebelius used in an attempt to fund Obamacare (a scandal-in-the-making that has so far raised less of a ruckus than the others, but which could become more prominent with time). It’s the picture presented by the whole thing, the sense of something very much not right with the Obama administration, its vaunted “transparency,” its sneaky and heavy use of power, and the atmosphere it has created in government as a whole. Simply put, these actions—whether or not Obama personally ordered them—foster distrust and feed into people’s already-existing paranoia about possible government excesses.

The IRS investigations, especially, may have this effect. As many people have pointed out, everybody hates the IRS. And so the IRS audit of conservative groups is both easy to understand and easy to fear even if a person isn’t conservative him/herself. As for secretly invading AP reporters’ privacy—including their personal cell phone records—to find a leaker, that’s a case of the Obama administration actually doing what many people feared about Bush. The airwaves are full of people explaining that the information could, and should, have been obtained in a number of simpler ways, and that this was way too broad a fishing expedition.

What’s more, the administration has by this action bitten the very hand that feeds them—the AP, which has been nothing if not kind to Obama. What an excellent way to turn allies in the press into enemies.

Whether or not Obama was aware of all or most of these goings-on (and I believe he was), the multiple and almost simultaneous disclosures create a strong suspicion that he was aware—either that, or that he has been incompetent at reining his people in, and/or has created an atmosphere in which his underlings feel they can flex their powerful government muscles without ever being checked. As William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection asks, “The whole fish is rotten, but the head doesn’t know?”

[ADDENDUM: If you’re having trouble sorting all the Troubles out, here’s a guide.]

Why was there no Benghazi rescue attempt?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been thinking that the very simplest explanation is that unless the administration was assured of success they weren’t going to try, because the last thing they wanted was a failed mission. And just when I was thinking of writing a post to say that, I found that commenter “JJ” had written much the same thing:

That is the thinking on the progressive side. You cannot risk a failed military operation that will make your decision making look bad. Bad for the legacy, and all that. It’s my opinion that Obama’s instructions to Panetta that evening were: “Do what you can, but take no risks of a failed operation.” Thus, Panetta and Dempsey (Head of the Joint Chiefs) were extremely conservative and took no risks…

Precisely. But I would add one thing: the historical precedent in mind was almost certainly that of Jimmy Carter, whose Operation Eagle Claw of April 1980 not only failed abysmally to rescue the Iranian hostages, and led to the death of eight American servicemen, but was a humiliation for America and Carter and almost certainly helped Reagan beat him in the ensuing 1980 election.

Benghazi took place seven weeks before the 2012 election. Obama decided to play it safe in the political sense, and it worked, didn’t it? He was re-elected.

[NOTE: For a previous post of mine about Operation Eagle Claw, please see this.]

Republicans on a witch hunt…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the agreed-upon MSM frame.

Obama has had a bad week, probably the worst of his entire presidency, and it threatens to get even worse if the investigations and revelations continue. The MSM’s nightmare right along has been that there will be something so egregious that happens under Obama’s watch that they will be forced to cover it (as opposed to cover up for it) or risk losing what little credibility they have left.

Thus, the frantic spinning continues. The best way to deal with the Benghazi and IRS crises—or potential crises, or impeachment-worthy-had-they-been-committed-by-Republicans crises—appears right now to be to acknowledge a few little problems but to deny that those problems are particularly serious at all, and to blame Republicans.

How can Republicans be to blame? Easy-peasy: they’ve been looking for a way to get Obama, and now they’re overjoyed because they finally found one. What a mean bunch of SOBs (and almost undoubtedly racists too, which is the subtext—after all, why else would anyone want to “get” Obama?) they are.

You may wonder why I keep focusing on the MSM. After all, this sort of behavior by the press is hardly a surprise, and really very old news. Well, on slower news days the MSM becomes the news. On blogs, especially blogs on the right, we tend to underestimate how influential the MSM is in setting the “narrative.” But I can tell you that among my friends, almost all of them medium-information liberal voters who get their news from a combination of the MSM and NPR, if I were to ask them what they think of Benghazi and/or the IRS auditing of conservatives, I’m fairly sure they would either be vague on what those things might be, or tell me that the nasty witch-hunting Republicans have been searching for a way to get Obama and have finally dug up these very minor charges.

[NOTE: Two typical examples, one from the WaPo and one from the NY Times.]

Monkeys first came to the Americas on vegetation rafts

The New Neo Posted on by

Or on spaceships.

No, actually it was vegetation rafts.

I kid you not:

Primates came to the New World (meaning North and South America) from, we think, Africa. As improbable as it sounds, scientists think early primates crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed on the shores of both continents tens of millions of years ago, probably on some kind of vegetation raft…Fossils have been recovered of early primates in Texas a whopping 43 million years ago, the oldest primate fossil ever found in North America. But the continents looked very different then, compared to now; most importantly, North and South America were completely different islands. The Isthmus of Panama, which we now refer to as Central America, didn’t appear until much later, by which time the climate on both Americas was very different from when the primates first landed there.

When they did first land here, the climate was much warmer than it is now, and the primates evolved and diversified to take advantage of that…Then the planet began to cool, and cool quickly. Forests died out. The poles covered with ice. Many of the flora and fauna that had populated the planet during the Eocene just couldn’t survive in the new, colder world. This event is called the Grande Coupure–occurring about 33.9 million years ago, it was a mass extinction of animals, in which most of the world’s creatures (aside from a precious few, like the Virginia opossum and the dormouse) were unable to adapt to the new climate and perished. It hit the primate family especially hard. In the New World, the primate population shrunk significantly. Any primate living in, say, the Great Lakes region simply went extinct, unable to cope with the new Wisconsin winters.

In South America, the primates contracted to the region around the equator.

Those New World monkey survivors all occupy a particular niche: they are arboreal tropical-forest dwellers. Some of them journeyed back up to Central America later, when the isthmus connected the continents, but were stopped by the deserts in Mexico.

I keep trying to picture those monkeys on those rafts, though. What did they eat? How did they survive? It seems so improbable. And yet I found a Wiki entry dealing with the general phenomenon, entitled “oceanic dispersal.” These “rafts” are not the Huckleberry Finn variety—they are big.

Here’s an article on how rafting works, although it doesn’t go into the monkey story. But it describes a large raft (20-meter by 6-meter by 2-meter) that came to Oregon from Japan after the 2011 earthquake tsunami, which had to be dealt with because it constituted a threat to the Oregon coastal ecosystem.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[Hat tip: Ace’s.]

Happy Mother’s Day: babies and mothers

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post, slightly edited.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too—as is her own mother.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us. The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that her parents had actually decided to have their baby’s ears pierced (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

Mark Steyn…

The New Neo Posted on by

…sums up Benghazi so far:

A terrorist attack isn’t like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it’s more like a tennis match: Whether it’s all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. Not only did they not deploy out-of-area assets, they ordered even those in Libya to stand down. Lieutenant Colonel Gibson had a small team in Tripoli that twice readied to go to Benghazi to assist and twice was denied authority to do so, the latter when they were already at the airport. There weren’t many of them, not compared to the estimated 150 men assailing the compound. But they were special forces, not bozo jihadists. Back in Benghazi, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty held off numerically superior forces for hours before dying on a rooftop waiting for back-up from a government that had switched the answering machine on and gone to Vegas.

I was reading some comments at a liberal site, and one of them said that the scandal was “all about a memo.” That’s what Obama would have you think. But the memo is actually the least of it.

Again with the not-so-Great Gatsby

The New Neo Posted on by

Another day, another Gatsby movie, and I will go out on a limb to predict another mediocrity. They keep trying to make this story into a film, but the book is just too gossamer for that to be done successfully.

And when I write “they keep trying,” I’m not just whistling Dixie:

The Great Gatsby (1926 film), a silent film starring Warner Baxter and Lois Wilson
The Great Gatsby (1949 film), starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field
The Great Gatsby (1974 film), starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow
The Great Gatsby (2000 film), a TV film starring Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino
The Great Gatsby (2013 film), an upcoming Baz Luhrmann film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire

Of all of these, I’ve only seen the 1974 film, which was hyped to the skies when it came out. It was almost unutterably boring.

I must confess, though, that I’m not objective about this because I’ve never liked Gatsby even in book form. I just don’t get it, and believe me I’ve tried. I’ve actually plowed through the book several times because it’s supposed to be such a masterpiece, but I keep losing my concentration and it becomes a big chore. I find I just don’t care one iota about Jay and his shirts and Daisy and her dreams.

This guy seems to have liked the newest cinematic effort at Gatsby, though it sounds dreadful to me. This very-faint-praise Variety review seems more on the mark: it’s a spectacle without heart and pretty much without point. The clothes are always great, though.

[NOTE: Ouch! I find that a lot of critics agree with me. Rex Reed eviscerates the movie; Kathryn Schulz does the same for the book.]

Yesterday’s Republicans vs. today’s Democrats: Watergate vs. Benghazi

The New Neo Posted on by

David Gelernter nails it:

It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media. For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?…

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud? We know exactly how. It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate””but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee. Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?” Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador? Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup? Will John Kerry rise to the challenge?

The answers, unfortunately are “none” and “no.”

The name of David Gelernter, the author of the piece, struck a bell with me, so I went to Wiki to discover whether I remembered correctly. Sure enough, there it was:

On June 24, 1993, Gelernter was critically injured opening a mailbomb sent by the Unabomber. He recovered from his injuries but his right hand and eye were permanently damaged. He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

Since when did the prom…

The New Neo Posted on by

…morph into just plain “prom”—as in “I’m going to prom”?

I’ve noticed this is the way proms are referred to these days. Or is it a regional thing? When I was growing up (in New York), it was always the prom.