Does the new pope have the proper credentials…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to be a latino?

That seems to be the burning question of the day. It’s not just a stupid conversation, it’s the sort of identity politics that’s become all-too-prevalent these days and has made race and ethnicity a greater force than ever, as the jockeying for position in the have-not entitlement sweepstakes continues apace.

He is being hailed with pride and wonder as the “first Latino pope,” a native Spanish speaker born and raised in the South American nation of Argentina. But for some Latinos in the United States, there’s a catch: Pope Francis’ parents were born in Italy.

Such recent European heritage is reviving debate in the United States about what makes someone a Latino. Those questioning whether their idea of Latino identity applies to Pope Francis acknowledge that he is Latin American, and that he is a special inspiration to Spanish-speaking Catholics around the world. Yet that, in their eyes, does not mean the pope is “Latino.”

These views seem to be in the minority. But they have become a distinct part of the conversation in the United States as the Latino world contemplates this unique man and moment.

”””Are Italians Latino? No,” says Eric Cortes, who has been debating the issue with his friends.

”””The most European alternative and the closest thing to an Italian,” is how Baylor University professor Philip Jenkins described Pope Francis in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

”””Does a Latino have to have indigenous blood?” asked the LA Weekly newspaper of Los Angeles beneath the headline, “Is The New Pope Latino?”

”””Latinos come in all colors and shades and features,” Ivette Baez said in an emotional debate on the “Being Latino” Facebook page.

That said, I recall that I noted the new pope’s Italian ancestry in the very first article I wrote about him, and the affect it might have on his diversity status:

I note that Bergoglio is an interesting compromise in the diversity sense. He’s from Latin America, but the name “Bergoglio” indicates Italian ancestry, as is true of a huge number of Argentinians. This would make him a semi-throwback to the days when popes tended to be Italian (skimming this list rather quickly indicates that the first non-Italian Pope since medieval times was elected in 1978).

[NOTE: The word “latino” makes me think of “ladino.” So, that brings us to the second hugely important question of the day—are Jews who speak ladino latino?]

I heart Gerolsteiner

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before about my weird beverage preferences. I’m not a picky eater, but I’m an extraordinarily picky drinker. Basically, I like two things: water and club soda.

That makes me very strange indeed, but only about beverages. However, it also makes me a sort of expert, a real connoisseur of the sparkling water world.

And in that world this is the Rolls-Royce, the Cadillac, the Porsche, and the Lamborghini all rolled into one:

gerols

You can get it very reasonably at Trader Joe’s. You can get it slightly more expensively in plenty of other places. But get it. It’s the smoothiest, punchiest, most satisfying sparkling water on earth.

And believe me, I’ve tried just about all of them.

[NOTE: I’d say get it at Amazon through neo-neocon, but it’s ridiculously expensive there, for some reason. But if you’re desperate…]

What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas

The New Neo Posted on by

Watch for this trend to spread:

With much fanfare and hullabaloo, President Obama’s former campaign, Organizing for Action, recently launched a 10-year effort to turn red Texas into a true swing state. The plan, officially unveiled in a meeting in Austin on February 26 by Obama operative Jeremy Bird, hails the onset of Battleground Texas. Texas is not a swing state, at least not yet, but Battleground Texas intends to treat it like one in a sustained and systematic way so that it becomes one…

Bird’s team has developed a five-point contact plan for identifying and courting low-information, low-frequency voters. These voters are average folks who pay little attention to politics and current events and have left no trail allowing either party to identify which party they’re more likely to vote for. Bird’s volunteers call these prospects and use a script to ascertain whether they are persuadable to the Democrats’ point of view. Volunteers perform a “gut check” on the prospective voter, and these gut checks have proven to be accurate nearly 95% of the time. If the prospect is not identified as persuadable, then the volunteer files them away and does not call them again. But if the prospect appears to be persuadable, then the five-point plan comes into play. Volunteers will call the voter again, based on current events, to deliver information crafted to shape the prospect’s beliefs. For instance, if a volunteer has identified a suburban Fort Worth mom as a persuadable Democratic voter based on social issues, Todd Akin’s remarks on rape would have generated a second phone call. Richard Mourdock’s comments would have generated a third. A fourth call may have focused on the ObamaCare birth control mandate, casting it as a service to women and casting opposition to it as a “war on women.” The fifth call would have simply given the prospect information on where to vote. Job done. Someone who probably would not have voted at all has been processed over a few weeks into a likely Democratic voter. At the very least, they have become far less likely to vote for the party of Akin and Mourdock, who have been cast along with their party as villains. Obviously, none of the recent Democrats’ remarks on rape that aired during Colorado’s gun control debate would get any play at all in these calls. They are one-sided information streams, intended to create velocity on the way to creating a vote.

I have a couple of questions. The first is: why can’t conservatives counter with a campaign of their own? Is it that conservative arguments don’t have the intrinsic appeal to low-information voters that liberal ones do?

The second is: why wouldn’t the approach described in the above quote annoy people more than it would influence them? How do the phone-bankers ingratiate themselves with people?

In his article, Preston observes that:

[Bird’s approach] succeeded in defying the polls that in 2012 showed 2008 Obama voters less likely to turn out for him a second time, by minting entirely new voters through fear and disinformation.

But 2008 Obama voters did stay home—or perhaps even voted for Romney (who got a million more votes in 2012 than McCain did in 2008, whereas Obama got three and a half million fewer in 2012 than in 2008). And although many new voters most definitely voted for Obama, if they were young people (and we can assume the vast majority were), they would have been natural Obama voters anyway, since that was by far his strongest demographic. So how do we know what Bird’s approach did or didn’t do?

In fact, even though Obama continued to do very well with young voters in 2012, he did not do better with them than he had in 2008. It’s instructive to revisit the age breakdown of 2012 Obama voters:

In winning reelection, Barack Obama won 60% of the vote among those younger than 30. That was down somewhat from 2008, when Obama won nearly two-thirds (66%) of the votes of young people.

So he lost support among the young—many of whom of course were different people than in 2008, since anyone 26 or over in 2008 was over 30 in 2012, replaced by those who had been between 17 and 21 in 2008 and unable to vote at the time. And he lost support among all other age groups as well:

He also maintained a slimmer advantage among voters 30 to 44 (52% Obama, 45% Romney), while losing ground among those 45 to 64 and those 65 and older.

And it was not even all the young with whom Obama did so very well in 2012—it was the non-white young:

Obama’s support among young voters declined among many of the same subgroups in the overall electorate in which he lost ground, particularly whites, men and independents. Obama won a majority of white non-Hispanics under 30 in 2008, but lost this group to Romney this year. In contrast, Obama won young African Americans and Hispanics by margins that were about as large as in 2008.

His losses among young voters since 2008 might have been even greater, but for the fact that the under 30s are by far the most racially and ethnically diverse age group. Just 58% are white non-Hispanic, compared with 76% of voters older than 30.

So the reason Obama won seems to boil down to the fact that the demographic of under-30 voters has become much less white than the rest of the population, and they carried the day. I am fairly certain that some people would say it’s racist to point out that fact (of course, they are probably the same people who say it’s racist to criticize Obama for anything). But facts are facts; I merely report them.

So in summary: although Obama did worse among most demographics in 2012 than he had in 2008, he didn’t do worse enough to lose the election. And Romney didn’t do better enough than McCain to win it. So it’s not so clear how much effect a program such as Bird’s actually would have.

So why are conservatives so much gloomier in 2012 than they were right after the election of 2008, when Obama’s support has declined rather than increased between the two elections? The real difference between the results in 2008 and 2012 was that Obama’s victory in 2008 was understandable to conservatives, who knew it was at least in part a reaction to widespread weariness and hatred of Bush, the recent financial crisis causing people to want a change, and Obama’s newness and promise (albeit false promise). In 2012, Bush was long gone, the financial crisis should have been owned by Obama, and his newness and promise had been replaced by a dismal record. And yet he won.

And then there’s the future. Such projections are always tricky, but because the birth rate among minorities (most particularly latinos) is higher than among whites it is predicted that forty years from now whites will become a minority in this country. That is almost sure to change voting patterns and skew them ever leftward.

Marriage trends: later

The New Neo Posted on by

Ross Douthat describes what’s been happening to marriage lately (pun intended):

…[L]ate marriage is entangled with the story of rising out-of-wedlock births, thanks to what the authors [of this report] call “the great crossover” – the fact that the age of first marriage, which was once about a year earlier than the average age at which the first child was born, now lags the average age of first birth by about a year. Hence the report’s most attention-grabbing statistic: That 48 percent of overall first births, and 58 percent of first births to what the report calls “Middle Americans” – women with a high school diploma and maybe some college, but no 4-year degree – now take place outside of marriage, a trend whose negative consequences for children probably don’t need to be rehearsed here.

Douthat calls the statistic “attention-grabbing,” but it’s hardly surprising, especially considering the way western Europe (and particularly Scandinavia) has been going. In Scandinavia, not only are the majority of children born out of wedlock, but there seems to be no stigma at all when it happens. Marriage itself has become a sort of after-the-fact ceremony that certifies that the already-ongoing experiment in living together and having a family has become something that particular couple wants to declare permanent (or at least that they intend it to be permanent—or perhaps that they just want to have a big party).

Douthat points out that the study describes a situation in which delayed marriage works differently in regard to men and women:

Upper-class women reap a large wage premium from delaying marriage – a college-educated woman who marries in her 30s earns over $15,000 more annually than a woman who marries in her early 20s, and when you look at household income, the premium for marrying later rises to more than $20,000. Women without 4-year degrees also enjoy a wage premium when they delay marriage, albeit a smaller one (and a very small one when you look at household income). Men, meanwhile, reap a wage premium from marrying earlier, so late marriage tends to hurt their economic prospects: For men without a 4-year degree, the earlier the marriage, the higher their income, and even college-educated men earn more if they marry in their 20s than in their 30s.

Note that I wrote “the study describes a situation in which delayed marriage works differently” rather than “the study indicates delayed marriage causes.” Correlation alone is not causation, although it is often erroneously assumed to be. In the case of the above statistics, it’s not at all clear whether late marriage causes the financial differences or whether the financial differences reflect other differences that end up causing the late marriage (for example, personal instability), but my guess is that it’s a bit of both.

Societal changes such as feminism, the so-called sexual revolution, the almost-nonexistent stigma against cohabitation or bastardy, tough economic times, the prevalence of divorce, the welfare state, and probably fifty others I haven’t named have all combined to cause this state of affairs (double pun intended). And has the sum total of human happiness increased as a result? I don’t see that it has.

Here’s a set of curious charts that lists the age of first marriage around the world for both men and women. If you peruse them, you might be surprised (as I was) to see that the ages are fairly uniformly later than one might think, even in many less-developed countries. What’s up with Libya (approximately 32 and 29), for example? I’d guess it might have to do with lack of economic opportunities and/or assistance (from family and/or government) for young people (although that doesn’t seem to create the same barriers in Egypt, where both sexes get married at around 24).

Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway just might have the highest age of all at first marriage (35/32; 34/32; 35/32; 33/31). No surprise there; we already knew that. It’s interesting, however, that a highly developed country such as Israel clocks in at around 25 for both sexes; does the average come down because of the early age of marriage among the Orthodox, who represent about 25% of the population there (about 10% are ultra-Orthodox, the strictest group)?

These statistics have undergone an enormous change in my lifetime. I was married for the first time at 26, but among my friends that made me an outlier. Almost everyone I knew was married before me, actually long before me. In my case I was following a family tradition; my parents had gotten married at almost the same age as my husband and I, but they had been outliers too. My friends who were married in their late teens and very early twenties (sometimes before getting out of college, often immediately after) are not only all still married, but seem to have all pursued various jobs and careers with success and satisfaction, and have had families and raised (for the most part) children who are functioning very well as adults today. That’s mere anecdote, of course, rather than statistics. But it shows the extremity of the changes in a small amount of time.

Paleo: the dubious joy of dieting

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Here I am, venturing again into the dangerous topic of dieting. I guess I just can’t resist temptation.]

I seem to recall that quite a few of you swear by the paleo diet, but I cannot imagine treating food in as complicated a way as Sébastien Noé«l seems to do at this website for paleo aficionados.

Remember nuts? Once upon a time when I was a kid they were just—well, they were those little yummy things that people put out in small bowls when company came, or shelled and ate at the circus, or put in stuffings or fruit cakes at Thanksgiving and Christmas time. You didn’t have to worry all that much about whether they were good or bad for you because food was food and anyway nuts were kind of expensive and they weren’t around in such great quantities or too often.

Then they became bad for you—too fattening, too fatty, too much fun, too something. And then they were rediscovered and became really really really good for you, although you still couldn’t eat as many as you might want. Something like an ounce a day was considered optimal. But how many people stop after an ounce of nuts—especially when they’ve become afraid that at any moment nuts will be declared verboten again (in mid-bite, as it were), so best eat up while you can?

But Noé«l makes the situation so complex, turns it into such a lengthy process of weighing pros and cons and the minutiae of each type of nut and its idiosyncratic effects that it’s hard to believe any enjoyment whatsoever could be salvaged from the process of ingesting these over-analyzed nuggets. I’m all for paying general attention to what we eat and the health consequences, but do we really know enough to fine-tune our health to that degree? And after it’s done, what’s left of the gusto of life?

More Obamacare prognostications

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever since Obamacare was proposed and then passed there has been rampant speculation on what its actual effects will be. It would almost be funny, if it weren’t so sad, how little anyone actually knows about precisely how this new system—one that will affect all of us in ways that are likely to be major—will actually work. We are almost certainly in for some surprises.

But there should come as no surprise that the current prognostication is that a great many individuals and small businesses will find their rates going up, sometimes a great deal (doubling in some instances).

Of course, the least affluent among us will receive subsidies and will probably come out ahead. And those with greater incomes will be paying more twice over: once in unsubsidized premiums and again in taxes to support the others. No surprise there, either. And some larger businesses may see premiums fall.

We just don’t know, but what I do know is that there’s no reason to call the system “insurance” any more. Insurance is based on assessment of risk, and under Obamacare insurance companies will no longer be allowed to issue policies and set premiums on the basis of health status, which is a huge part of the way risk is evaluated:

Starting next year, the law will block insurers from refusing to sell coverage or setting premiums based on people’s health histories, and will reduce their ability to set rates based on age. That can raise coverage prices for younger, healthier consumers, while reining them in for older, sicker ones.

I don’t know what you call that, but it’s not insurance as insurance has usually been defined.

Dr. Ben Carson: from hero to villain in one easy step

The New Neo Posted on by

As a brilliant and tremendously successful black man who emerged from humble beginnings in beleaguered Detroit to become an eminent and pioneering neurosurgeon, you’d think Dr. Ben Carson would be a hero to the black community and to liberals.

And he was, he was:

Each February, schoolchildren hear the story of the impoverished African-American boy from Detroit, a struggling student whose mother made him read two books a week until he bloomed into a scholar.

Leaving Detroit for Yale, Carson eventually found his way to John Hopkins, where he became one of the world’s most preeminent neurosurgeons, gaining international acclaim in 1987 for performing the first separation of twins conjoined at the head. He is held as an African-American hero.

That is, until Dr. Carson opened up his yipper and came out as that putative oxymoron, a black conservative. Then the sharp knives came out for Carson, and the all-too-familiar epithets that greet all black conservatives were hurled. You know the drill, if you have ever followed the careers of Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.

There are so many things I’ve come to detest about the left that it’s hard to choose which one I detest most. But right up there would be this piling on when black people reveal themselves to be conservatives. Those who would otherwise have been heroes become goats, and the charges against them take on the peculiar (although not to the left) form of their being traitors to their race, Uncle-Tom toadies to whitey, with the accusations couched in the vilest of racist terms.

Let’s take a moment to review Clarence Thomas’ beginnings:

Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, predominantly black community founded by freedmen after the American Civil War. When he was a child, the town lacked a sewage system and paved roads. He was the second of three children born to M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams, a domestic worker. They were descendants of American slaves, and the family spoke Gullah as a first language”¦Having spoken the Gullah language as a child, Thomas realized in college that he still sounded unpolished despite having been drilled in grammar at school, and he chose to major in English literature “to conquer the language”.

A person to be celebrated, not reviled.

But to the left, blacks are not allowed the luxury of intellectual and political freedom. The left’s narrative dictates that the interests of black people lie only with the politics of the left, and therefore anyone on the right cannot have black people’s best interests at heart. Some of this is a sincere belief on the part of some people on the left, but much of it is a cynical pose on the part of others on the left.

The reality is that the left desperately needs the monolithic support of black people to win elections. And someone like Dr. Ben Carson—a well-known and charismatic black man who can state the conservative case in a way that might appeal to other black people as well as white people—is the biggest threat of all.

Want to have sex in outer space?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not been tops on my list, either.

And what’s more, this article says it can be hazardous to your health.

Although I must say I haven’t a clue what dangers they’re actually talking about. Can anyone decipher this?:

…[E]xperiments on mating plants by scientists at Montreal University show that weightlessness affects the way cells are transported inside living things, causing ‘traffic jams’ on the vital highways that connect different processes.

Although researcher Anja Geitmann said they could not draw any specific conclusions on the implications for animal – and human – sex in space, she added that intercellular transport is important in a variety of human cells.

Actually, I lied; I do have a clue. But I’m not sure it’s exactly the right clue.

In the meantime…remember Benghazi?

The New Neo Posted on by

Lindsay Graham does:

We have not heard from the people who went through this debacle who were there on the ground. I guarantee if this had been a good news story we would have heard from them the next day. The fact we haven’t heard from them for six months should make every American worried about what this administration is covering up.

Ace notes:

In the first part of [Jay Carney’s] sentence, he claims the White House is not blocking these people from talking. In the second part, he adds in that they are, of course, precluded from discussing sensitive topics due to their positions…

The second part of the sentence blows up the first part. This is the game the White House is playing: They are putting these people on notice they might be prosecuted for revealing state secrets if they say something Obama doesn’t like…

The press just rolls over for Obama on this. They want people kept in the dark. The only people being prevented from knowing “state secrets” are the American public. Al Qaeda knows all about the details of its operation, after all.

The House is working on giving them some sort of immunity if they testify.

I’m all for this investigation and testimony—although again, Benghazi has become old, old news that is of no interest to most people. It was very effectively defanged as an issue during the campaign by the combination of the Obama administration and the MSM (Candy Crowley gets a special certificate of appreciation). But still, this must be done.

And Lindsay Graham continues his odd meandering course of veering from capitulation on many issues to standing strong on others.

Budget passes House: so what?

The New Neo Posted on by

The House has passed (221/207) what’s known as the “Ryan budget,” after the Democratic proposal failed to garner enough votes.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think it’s good that Republicans did something. On the other, it makes no difference whatsoever, as far as I can tell. Yes, it’s a statement, but one that has absolutely no chance of being anything but an empty exercise. That’s true for many reasons—chief among them the fact that the Senate would never vote for it. But another reason is that only us political junkies are paying attention.

And Democrats will of course use it in 2014 in order to try to gain back the House by saying the mean old Republicans want to take away your Medicare and Social Security. In that way the left preys on the fact that people don’t look at the details. Of course, if they did look at the details, they might get disgusted with both parties.

Justin Timberlake, Leonard Cohen, and love

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a big Yahoo feature on Justin Timberlake’s new video tribute to his grandparents and their 63-year-long marriage.

Made me think of this Leonard Cohen video, which I think is far superior (although I kind of like Timberlake in general) and which can always stand some revisiting. Ignore the literalism of the burning violin and the hokiness of the young actors; it’s the older couples I’m talking about, and they’re the heart of the video: