In other shocking news of the day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it’s reported that President Obama’s State of the Union speech will be “aggressive” rather than offering “an olive branch” to Congress.

Why, I’ll be gobsmacked! Quelle surprise! Who wouldda thunk it? Finally, finally, he’s taking the gloves off.

Politico writer Glenn Thrush describes Republican disarray and Obama’s plans to take advantage of both that and his newfound post-election popularity. Everybody loves a winner, it seems, except for a few of us conservative dead-enders who remain unaccountably pouting and sulking, unimpressed by His Greatness, as we plan to continue trying to impede the great progressive vision.

And Obama’s had it with our shenanigans; no more Mr. Nice Guy:

He’ll pay lip service to bipartisanship, but don’t expect anything like the call for peaceful collaboration that defined his first address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, [Democrats close to Obama] say.

I love these narratives. Including this one:

That strategy has its dangers: If Americans perceive Obama as too partisan, he’ll lose a serious share of his personal popularity.

No, he won’t. You guys in the press will see to that, as you have before.

[NOTE: In other news, TNR shows its own snark in an article reporting on an interview with the despised Roger Ailes, who points out what is, to me, quite obvious:

Rger Ailes is kvetching. “The president likes to divide people into groups,” he huffs into the phone. “He’s too busy getting the middle class to hate rich people, blacks to hate whites. He is busy trying to get everybody to hate each other.” With that off his chest, Ailes gets back on message. “We need to get along,” he says.

It’s an unexpected plea from the Fox News CEO considering his impressive record of provocation. But recently, “getting along” has become an imperative for the conservative movement. Mitt Romney lost the Latino vote by nearly 50 points, and now almost everyone agrees that the Republican Party needs to improve with Hispanic voters to have a shot at the White House in 2016.

We kvetchy, huffy Republicans, criticizing that nice man who’s tried so hard to get along with us and has finally given up in understandable frustration.]

Pope Benedict surprises…

The New Neo Posted on by

…by becoming the first pontiff in 600 years to resign.

It’s not because of scandal or politics, it seems. Pope Benedict has been infirm for quite some time, and he writes:

After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

Benedict is 85 and has had a number of cardiovascular problems, and has been observed lately to have become increasingly frail. His more universally beloved predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was incredibly infirm during the last years of his papacy but did not take this route; the usual thought is that it sets a bad precedent if popes resign.

I can’t say I’ve followed this pope’s tenure, but it’s my impression that although he hasn’t given people the warm fuzzies like some recent popes (and some of the coverage of his resignation reflects that media grumpiness), he was a fighter against the right things (hmmm, maybe those two are related). He angered the Muslim world by a speech he gave; but hey, doesn’t everyone anger the Muslim world?

I will now turn to a blogger I deeply respect who is a devout Catholic, The Anchoress, for her take on the resignation:

Perhaps Benedict’s retirement is meant to remind this exceedingly busy world ”” the non-stop, twenty-four-hour-live and very self-important world ”” that we are none of us indispensable; that there comes a time to step back, throw oneself into the arms of the Lord and trust that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Yes, I am sad. I have loved Benedict XVI; he has been my favorite pope ”” I loved John Paul, of course, but as I have said before, he was a grand, dramatic pipe organ of a man; he belonged to the whole world and his writings are often so dense I cannot plumb them. Benedict has always been the more accessible tinkling piano, simply inviting one to come closer. His copious writings have been almost avuncular in their gently-voiced but brilliant instruction, and somehow it always felt like he belonged “to me”. I will miss him terribly.

I agree with Ed Morrissey, Fr. James Martin, and others who call this an act of extreme humility…

The story goes that when he was a POW during World War II, the young Joseph Ratzinger shot craps with another prisoner, Gunter Grass, while they argued philosophy. “There are many truths,” Grass said. “No,” answer the 15 year-old Ratzinger, “there is only one.” He went from war to seminary and has spent his entire life in service to Christ and the church. Perhaps this shy, transparently holy introvert ”” whom the mainstream media have never “gotten” ”” has earned some time for quiet prayer, and reading, before he takes his leave…

Even I, who am not so very conversant with things Vatican, noticed the negativity of the MSM coverage. The Anchoress directs us to a blog called Get Religion that seems to specialize in the ways the press disses religion, and a post there which discusses the error-ridden and/or negative coverage of this event. For example, it calls Piers Morgan “the first Vatican Truther of the day.”

And Da Tech Guy has a lot of links, too.

[ADDENDUM: And right on schedule: diversity!]

So, here’s my question for Nancy Pelosi:…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when you say it’s “almost a false argument,” does that mean it’s like, you know, true?:

It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem. We have a budget deficit problem that we have to address,” [Pelosi] told Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday.

The Democratic House leader said she backed a “big, bold proposal,” to curb long-term spending, and, short of that, a plan that ended subsidies for large oil companies and eliminated loopholes in the tax code.

“It isn’t as much a spending problem as much as it is priorities,” she said at another point, arguing that tax subsidies were a better target than cuts to programs such as education.

“Nothing brings more money to the Treasury of the United States than investment in education of the American people, so we have to recognize that,” she said. “Cuts in education, scientific research and the rest are harmful and they are what are affected by the sequestration.”

Methinks Ms. Pelosi is just a tad confused. I’ll help her out here.

If I buy, let’s say, a diamond ring, and I don’t have the money to pay for it, do I have a spending problem? It’s certainly not “almost a false argument” to say so, although it’s also true that if I can manage to get enough money to cover it then I’ll be able to pay off my debt to the jewelry store. To do this I could work more hours, rob a bank, win the lottery, or borrow the money from a friend. Of course, in the latter event, I’ll still have debt that I’ll have to cover, debt I need to get more funds in order to pay.

In other words, a spending problem. Oh, and yes, also a related lack-of-funds problem. You really can’t have the first without having the second, too.

Plus, buying that diamond ring is a one-shot deal, unless a person is continually living beyond his/her means and continually buying things he/she can’t afford. The latter is far more analogous to the state of the US right now: our spending problem is ongoing.

But Pelosi knows all this. It just doesn’t serve her needs to say it that way. She’d much rather use bizarre and almost laughable (note that word “almost”) sophistry to advance the interests of her party and its patrons.

And speaking of false arguments, I’d say this is an example of one, “Nothing brings more money to the Treasury of the United States than investment in education of the American people.” Nothing? And I’d add that, with the direction education has been going in this country in the last couple of decades, further investment in our present educational system without substantial changes in its leftist PC content will bring no further money to the US Treasury at all.

I am extremely happy to report…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that I still have power.

So far.

I’m so surprised. Of course, it’s still snowing a teeny weeny bit, and, more importantly, the wind is still gusting. But as time goes on and the power holds, it becomes more and more likely that I’ll weather this one with heat and light intact.

This storm was inordinately hyped, but it turns out the forecasters were completely on target. At least two feet of white stuff seems to be out there now—although I don’t know for certain since I haven’t yet investigated in depth, as it were.

Periodically during the evening last night I’d look outside towards an area that was lit up in a way enabled me to see how fast the snow was falling. It turned out that “falling” was not the correct description; the swirling snow was being blown so hard that it seemed to be coming down horizontally, fast and furious.

Obama cares

The New Neo Posted on by

A couple of days ago, I had paused at a red light and noticed that the car in front of me was festooned with bumper stickers. The one that particularly caught my eye, the largest and most prominently placed, read “OBAMA CARES,” with a big red heart between the two words.

Short and sweet: “Obama cares,” the exact sentiment that the entire election seemed to come down to for a lot of Obama voters. Plus, it’s a clever inversion of the negative implications of one of the unpopular albatrosses that ought to have sunk the president, but did not: Obamacare.

Below that one was another prominent sign. This one was considerably longer, with a somewhat more complex sentiment to convey:

Turn off FOX
Bad news for America.

I’m not sure whether the driver wanted official action on this pressing concern—whether Fox should be banned—or whether she (I think of the driver as a “she,” although I couldn’t see through the SUV’s rear window) was merely exhorting anyone following her to take the initiative and turn the channel if tempted to view that dreadful station.

And the phrase “bad news for America” was deliciously ambiguous. Did she mean that Fox itself was a bad thing for this country; that having an alternate, somewhat more conservative (or somewhat less liberal) perspective on the news was somehow going to harm the country or its populace? Or did she mean that the Fox reporting of the news was “bad,” as in inaccurate, poorly done, or pessimistic? Or did she mean (and I very much doubt this was her intent, although it would have been mine) that the desire to silence Fox was bad news for freedom of speech and/or the press in this country?

I tried to find a photo of either bumper sticker for this post, and I quickly discovered what the latter one was all about:

fox

So I learned that apparently there’s some sort of campaign to keep Fox from being shown in airports or dental offices or wherever there might be a public TV. That’s sort of humorous, in a way, because I wrote a post not long ago complaining that Fox is never, never ever, shown in such venues, and that it’s always CNN. I’m not asking for much, just that once in a blue moon the station might be Fox instead. But apparently no Fox news is good news for my bumper-sticker-sporting fellow-driver.

As for “Obama cares,” I couldn’t find a photo of the variation with the heart, which might have been nice for Valentine’s Day. But I did discover that “Obama cares” was a very popular slogan for bumper stickers this election cycle, and apparently an extraordinarily effective one at that:

Obamacare did not help the President get reelected Tuesday, but exit polls suggest the narrative that Obama cares more may have been the difference between winning and losing…

On the attribute of whether the president or his GOP rival was ‘a candidate who cares about people like me’ Obama had a massive lead over Romney.

Here’s a version that may have worked to drive the message home about both candidates—an emotion-laden twofer, as it were:

careScare

And in a way, that pretty much sums up the president’s approach to the 2012 election.

It worked, too.

On trading in for a better model

The New Neo Posted on by

Julian Schnabel, 61, definitely must have something pretty special.

He’s an artist and filmmaker, and both endeavors have been so successful that they’ve also led to extraordinary wealth. Beautiful women are drawn to him like flies to honey (or perhaps, in the end, moths to the flame).

If you don’t believe me, take a look. I don’t have any photos of his first wife (and the mother of his oldest three children), Belgian clothing designer Jacqueline Beaurang, when she was young. But here she is at 54:

Beaurang

Next up is wife number two, French actress Olatz Lé³pez Garmendia, mother of two more children with Schnabel. Here’s the couple in happier times, with their twin sons (who look not all that happy in this photo):

Schnabelwife2

Then there was four-year-long post-Olatz girlfriend, Italian-Palestinian (Israeli-raised) author Rula Jebreal. If you notice an unsurprising trend towards a widening age disparity between the artist and his women, you’d be correct:

schnabelJebreal

But now, quite suddenly, Schnabel is engaged to be married again, and not to Jebreal. Rather, it’s to Danish model (are you noticing another pattern here, one of non-American women for the Brooklyn-born Schnabel?) May Anderson, who is thirty and pregnant:

SchnabelAnderson

Also not a happy camper, at least in that particular photo.

Now well you might ask: why do you care? Well, I can’t say I do actually, although I’m writing this post; Schnabel can leave wife/girlfriend after wife/girlfriend (or be left by wife/girlfriend after wife/girlfriend), and it’s really his and their business. But the phenomenon itself interests me.

What possible point could there be to all of it? After a while, doesn’t it all feel just faintly ridiculous, all this chasing and all this novelty, despite its powerful draw and the resultant feeling of desire for the other mixed with a sense of one’s own enhanced desirability?

Perhaps not. Perhaps they’re looking for something quite different than you or I would be in relationships—and they’re getting it, at least temporarily. And then, after that, the opportunities for replacement abound. if a person moves in these particular money/power/art circles, there’s always more beautiful people to meet. Yes, at a certain point it gets old, and the person gets old. But money and power never get old.

When I thought as a child

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Here’s a repeat of a favorite old post of mine.]

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. —1 Corinthians 13:11

Children have a lot of time on their hands. In my case, there was a fair amount of solitary time, and I filled it with musings and experiments.

For example, there was lying-down-on-the-grass-and-looking-up-at-the-sky, great for studying floaters and musing on what they might be. Insects trapped in the eye? Single-celled creatures, likewise (close, but no cigar)?

And then there was the eating of dirt, an activity I tried only a few times before I abandoned it as unsatisfactory. But I still remember the taste—gritty and complex. Likewise, sucking on a wet washcloth during down time in the bath, an interesting combination of rough and refreshing.

Shining a flashlight on the fingers to see the red glow was rather nice. Lying in bed at night, waiting for sleep to overtake me, an entertaining feature was to press gently on my eyes with my fists and rub, causing the activation of phosphenes and a bit of a light show (the Greeks had described the phenomenon long before my time, but I was unaware of that and thought I’d invented the activity on my own).

Then there was the repetition of a familiar word until it became strange. This was accomplished by simply saying it aloud over and over to the point where it was leached of its original meaning and devolved to a mere sound. I recall this happening most effectively and dramatically with the word “pink,” but others will do quite nicely.

Many of these explorations took place in my yard, which had some dirt patches where grass stuggled to grow, and in the summer anthills were plentiful there. These were opportunities for some very mild ant torture that involved covering an ant with a bit of fine light sand and watching it emerge after a very short struggle, now temporarily and somehow satisfyingly light-colored rather than dark (did that make me both a budding racist and a PETA offender? Mea culpa!)

Our block—a dead-end street—featured areas that had been patched over with tar, and on hot days these bubbled up in splendid fashion. There was a plentiful supply of rocks in the gutters, the pointiest of which could be used to strike the tar bubbles and cause a pleasant pop, similar but not quite as good as the scented zap! of that same rock used on the dots that lined the paper rolls we otherwise would load into our cap guns as ammunition.

I wonder whether children still have the time and inclination to do these things. If they do, they’re not telling the adults. Nor did we—till now.

The press and propaganda—and evil

The New Neo Posted on by

Found yesterday in the comments section of the Wall Street Journal:

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” – Joseph Goebbels

Goebbels, of course, was a genius. An evil genius, but a genius nonetheless. Here are some more of his observations. When you read them, you’ll see why I consider them so apropos these days:

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”

“That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”

And of course there’s the quote more universally known:

“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. ”

In addition to these statements about the craft and use of propaganda, which was Goebbels’ field of special expertise, he had this to say about Nazi Germany. It shows remarkable and chilling prescience:

“If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.”

Indeed.

Long-time readers may remember that many years ago I wrote a 2-part series of posts about Goebbels’ wife Magda (here and here). As part of my research, I read a biography of Magda that also had quite a bit to say about her husband. Here’s an excerpt describing Goebbels and his motivation. If you don’t know much about the man, it may surprise you, because it’s somewhat counter-intuitive:

As far as one could tell, Goebbels had no beliefs at all. People still living [the book was written in 1980], who were part of his immediate circle or his household, agree absolutely about this. To him all human existence was nothing but chaos. He considered himself one of the very few intellects capable of surveying it and mastering it.

In the post, I added:

In fact, it may be that Goebbels didn’t even particularly hate Jews, at least no more than he hated the entire human race. His interest was in power, self-promotion, and persuasion, and he was a rare genius at all three, willing to do literally anything to further those causes. A short and unattractive man with a crippled leg, he””like Hitler””was a mesmerizing speaker.

Unlike most of the other Nazi leaders, Goebbels was a highly educated man with a doctorate in philosophy and literature—and in those days, a doctorate from a German university was nothing to sneeze. He almost certainly was a sociopath, however. Virtually any photo of the man conveys an ice-cold visage that emanates almost pure evil.

And evil—well, I’ll repeat a section of a post of mine on that subject:

But one of the most fundamental errors people make when judging evil is to think we understand it, when we don’t. The fact that Hitler [or Goebbels, for that matter] was most definitely a human being leads us to think that if we knew enough facts about him, we could explain the etiology of his evil…

The other fundamental error people make when judging evil is thinking it is less evil than it actually is, and more amenable to persuasion, argument, or kindness. Because those who do evil are human, we think they are subject to the same fears and doubts, loves and anxieties, concerns and scruples, as the rest of us. Perhaps when they were children they were, although in the cases of sociopaths and psychopaths the notion is that they were born lacking something we tend to call a conscience. At any rate, by the time we know about them, something quite unusual seems to be going on in their psyches.

I think of the example of Stalin who said, on hearing that his son had tried to commit suicide but had only managed to shoot himself in the stomach and live, “He can’t even shoot straight.”

People such as Stalin or Hitler or Ahmadinejad or Saddam Hussein are about power. That is the coin of their realm, and power is their mother tongue, even though they can learn to speak secondary languages in order to give the appearance of reasonableness. Do not forget that it is a facade, and do not believe that you know them.

Waiting for the “monster” storm

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night, I was about to go to bed when my cellphone made an alarm sound.

It was not the same as the noise it makes when I set the alarm to wake me up in the morning. This was a sound I’d never heard before, a significantly more alarming alarm.

When I checked, I saw there was a message from the National Weather Service that a blizzard was coming. It told me not to travel, and to listen to the radio.

Is it the government sending these messages, the cell phone company, or what? Who has taken it on themselves to use this method to warn people of what they already probably know, which is that a “monster” storm is hitting New England?

I say “hitting” as though it’s already happening, which I suppose it is. There’s some light snow outside the window even as I type these words, and the wind is starting to pick up, although it’s not too bad yet.

Wind. That’s what I’m most concerned about. Where I live, the power goes out when someone breathes heavily. I fully expect to lose it some time today or tomorrow, and I hate hate hate when that happens.

Wish us all luck. If the blog goes silent for a day or two, you’ll know why.