“Hey, I’ve got an idea!” say the obesity police. “Let’s bring back the stocks for fat people!”

The New Neo Posted on by

Yeah, that’ll work.

No, it’s not really the stocks that David Callahan, former Harvard lecturer and president emeritus of health policy think-tank the Hastings Center, is asking for. He:

…calls for increased stigmatization of obese people to try spur weight-loss across America.

The senior research scholar says fat people should be treated like smokers who have become increasingly demonized in recent years and thus ‘nudged’ by negative attitudes of those around them into giving up the unhealthy habit.

There’s a lot going on these in that single suggestion. First and foremost, we have the increased empowerment of the do-good-nanny-state police who’ve received so much support recently from Obama, Bloomberg, and the like.

Second, we have a profound misunderstanding of how weight loss works:

…health and obesity experts have criticized Callahan’s paper branding him ignorant and irresponsible

Dr Yoni Freedhoff, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa and an author on obesity, told MailOnline: “The one thing that’s not lacking in society is the stigmatization of people with obesity.

“If guilt and shame were sufficient to fuel long term weight management, the world would be a very skinny place indeed. Obesity is mulch-factorial and driven by the world in which we live.”

Callahan’s article itself is well worth reading for a look into the Brave New World we face if the health police have their way—and they are increasingly having their way. I make the reference to Huxley’s dystopia purposely; it is not at all far-fatched. Most of Callahan’s article shows an interesting combination of bad science and coercive politics, a winning combination in which he details the seemingly-intractable problem—that nothing we do seems to help overweight, except for a few individual outliers who manage to lose weight and keep it off—and then offers a fairly alarming solution (government “nudging”) without any evidence that it might work either, except a false analogy to smoking, a problem with a very different mechanism.

Not to mention the fact that there’s a fair amount of evidence that being overweight (not obese, but overweight) is not a health problem at all—and you have a perfect storm of non-science plus leftist social engineering masquerading as science. Here’s a little sample of the article to give you a taste of its flavor [emphasis mine; as well as correcting multiple spelling errors]:

I believe only the government’s power to tax, to regulate, and on occasion to come close to mild coercion would be sufficient to make a difference. The private sector could have a role to play by voluntary self-regulation and incentive programs, but that could likely be done only in ways that would not financially hurt industry or alienate its customers. Yet fully deploying government power has been difficult politically. Not only does industry oppose regulation, but there are political limits to how much government can do to change individual behavior””whether by limiting television viewing, requiring exercise, or restraining market forces…

It will be no less necessary to find ways to bring strong social pressure to bear on individuals, going beyond anodyne education and low-key exhortation. It will be imperative, first, to persuade them that they ought to want a good diet and exercise for themselves and for their neighbor and, second, that excessive weight and outright obesity are not socially acceptable any longer. They need as well to be mobilized as citizens to support a more invasive role for government. Obesity is in great part a refection of the kind of culture we have, one that is permissive about how people take care of their bodies and accepts many if not most of the features of our society that contribute to the problem. There has to be a popular uprising when so many aspects of our common lives, individually and institutionally, must be changed more or less simultaneously. Safe and slow incrementalism that strives never to stigmatize obesity has not and cannot do the necessary work.

This isn’t really about overweight, is it? It’s not even about science, since it doesn’t rest on science. It’s about one out of many increasing inroads on personal liberty in the name of public health—a public health that, as the government becomes more involved in health care insurance and therefore in health care itself, will afford the health policemen such as Callahan more and more opportunities for government power and intrusion into our lives in the name of furthering that health.

I’ll close with a passage from Brave New World, just to refresh your memory (before the book is banned as subversive):

“Isn’t there something in living dangerously?’

There’s a great deal in it,’ the Controller replied. ‘Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.’

What?’ questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.

It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.’

V.P.S.?’

Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconvenience.’

But I like the inconveniences.’

We don’t,’ said the Controller. ‘We prefer to do things comfortably.’

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’

In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.

I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.”

Gregory Corso: up down and all around

The New Neo Posted on by

I was introduced to Gregory Corso’s poem “Marriage” by a boyfriend long ago, and it stuck in my mind because it was one of the few poems I’ve ever read that is genuinely funny; more a comedy monologue than a poem, really.

The poem was written in 1958 but I didn’t encounter it till the late 60s. But I’d never heard Corso’s voice till now, when I watched this YouTube video of him reading the poem, and his voice surprised me by sounding something like Fiorello LaGuardia and something like the mid-20th-century New York cadences of most of the boys I went to high school with (although they weren’t writing poetry):

After I watched it, I realized I knew next to nothing about Corso except that he was one of the Beat poets, and so I looked him up. When I did, I found a life so wildly picaresque, so varied and so improbable, that it leaves fiction sprawled behind in the dust.

Read it. Corso was clearly one of the most lucky and unlucky people who ever lived, as well as a being possessed of a charm that helped account for his survival against gigantic odds, and an intelligence and love of learning that quite literally saved him.

Throughout his life, especially before he became famous but even afterward, Corso seems to have brought out the mentor/caretaker in others. He kept meeting people who wanted to help him; how many people can say that about themselves? And the people who were eager to do him favors tended to be the literary and the famous themselves.

Corso did get married, by the way: three times.

“What difference does it make?”

The New Neo Posted on by

The more I think about Hillary Clinton’s question yesterday—“what difference does it make?”—the more important it becomes; a sort of leitmotif, not only for this administration, but for our times in general.

For the moment, let’s not talk about Benghazi itself. Let’s just mull over the fact that the priorities of the majority of Americans seem to have shifted. If the public doesn’t care about a certain tree falling in the forest, does it actually make a sound, even if the right is fussing about it?

The right has been outraged by a sequence of events and statements that have occurred under Obama’s watch, beginning with his 2008 campaign. Some are rather trivial (“corpse-man”) and some important (“bankrupt” the coal plants; “spread the wealth”). All have gained traction only on the right, because a majority (perhaps a small majority, but a majority nonetheless, and I believe a growing one) has answered the question “what difference does it make?” with the words “none at all.”

These are things that would have outraged an earlier generation. In fact, they have outraged an earlier generation; older people did not vote for Obama in large numbers (among voters 65 and older, Romney won 56% to 44%). But Hillary is correct; to most voters, Benghazi, and a host of other things that used to be considered important, make no difference at all.

One reason, which may seem somewhat paradoxical but really is not, is widespread cynicism. If the public doesn’t expect integrity or truth from what used to be called our public servants (what a quaint phrase!), then lies and strategic stonewalling will not bother most people at all. What matters is what those public servants can get for you, and what they can scare you into thinking the opposition will take away from you (tampons, anyone?)

I began to realize how exceedingly widespread this attitude of cynicism had become, and its effect on public perceptions about Benghazi, around the time of the 2012 election. I wrote about the incident afterward, here:

The American people do not seem to be “concerned,” [about Benghazi] either, not at all. Major Garrett can ask all the questions he wants…but few people except us blogophiles on the right are listening, and Carney and Obama have learned that simply thumbing their noses at the American people is an excellent way to get the people to shrug…

I discovered this myself a few days after the election, when I had dinner with an old friend who is an intelligent, moderate, non-leftist Democrat with some conservative tendencies. This friend just didn’t care about Benghazi or the administration’s handling of it, didn’t know the details and was cynically dismissive of the topic because “all politicians lie.”

Well, they surely do””but not this brazenly, because most politicians at least have the fear of being called to account by the media and then the American people…

Another big factor at work here is our decades-long education in moral relativism. What is truth, and can it be determined? Way way too many people answer “no,” and so they’ve given up trying or caring. And if they don’t care, why should our public officials answer inopportune and potentially embarrassing questions? No; what’s important is feelings, and so it made perfect sense for Hillary to act as though the best way to show concern about the deaths in Benghazi was to raise her voice in frustration and anger at the questions and cite her determination to “figure out what happened,” rather than actually exhibit that determination by answering questions about her own possible negligence in fostering conditions that may have contributed to those deaths. As for the subsequent cover-up of the reasons for the deaths, she’s implying that it’s just political business as usual, no biggee. And most Americans will nod, if they’re paying attention at all.

This administration has been stonewalling right from the start on whatever it just doesn’t feel like answering. Although previous administrations have done a little bit of that here and there, with Obama it is his recurrent m.o., made possible by the MSM’s abdication of its traditional role as questioner and challenger, and its adoption of the mantle of enabler.

A terrible development, to be sure. But it would not be possible if the American people didn’t allow it.

Crickets. Not chirping.

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t think this is actually child abuse. Of course, Brangelina would say it is merely the mark of having well-traveled and open-minded children:

According to E! News, the actress’ boys discovered their love for crickets on a recent trip to Cambodia, where she adopted her nine-year-old son Maddox.

“My boys love to eat crickets. It’s their favorite thing,” Jolie said. “They ate them like Doritos.”

“I had to actually ban the cricket eating at some point, because I was afraid they were gonna get sick from too many,” Jolie added. “But they’re good””they are like a potato chip.”

No doubt, they are exactly like a potato chip, only better.

Especially when made Cajun-style (and please note the alliteration—“crispy Cajun crickets”):

Tired of the same old snack food? Perk up your next party with Crispy Cajun Crickets. Roasted crickets are a tasty and unique addition to any social occasion, with a crunchy-tangy flavor all their own. To prepare, place 1 cup of healthy Cajun Crickets into a large, clean, and airy container (add a pinch of oatmeal for food). After 1 day, remove sick crickets and freeze the remainder. Wash frozen crickets in tap water, spread on cookie sheet, and roast in oven at lowest setting. When crickets become crunchy, sprinkle them with butter sauce and serve. Prepare butter sauce by adding salt, garlic, paprika, chili, or tabasco sauce to melted butter. — Mmmm – Good.

I guess almost anything is tasty if you put enough butter on it. As far as I can tell, the above recipe is not a joke. And yes, I know that insects can be an important food source in areas where there aren’t many ways to ingest protein. But I wouldn’t say the Western world is included in that category.

Also, I discovered that “Cajun crickets” is not actually a food preparation style but a type of cricket:

Cajun crickets are of course specially pampered house crickets, Acheta domesticus, the “cricket on the hearth” of English literature.

Of course.

(I don’t know whether to file this under “food” or not.)

[ADDENDUM: I just noticed, to my intense delight, that the recipe calls for “healthy Cajun Crickets.” As opposed to what, diseased ones? Actually, I originally believed this to be an example of an error that is a particular pet peeve of mine, the ubiquitous substitution of the word “healthy” for the more correct “healthful.” You can see what troubles it can cause. But now I see that the person is instructed to remove diseased crickets before completing the recipe. Yum.

So now I can add a “language and grammar” tag to the mix.]

Hillary Clinton. Benghazi. Who cares?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, we do, of course. But we cared about Benghazi and this administration’s role in it even before Hillary Clinton testified, which finally happened today.

I submit that most people care in certain ways. Those who like Clinton probably see this as more of those nasty Republicans picking on a poor woman who is nevertheless strong and smart and tough and can take whatever they dish out. Those who don’t like her are probably those same people who were interested in the mess in Benghazi in the first place, and disinclined to accept the administration’s refusal to talk about it.

But most people don’t care in the sense that those who weren’t already following the details are not going to follow the details now. This National Journal piece explains why this will end up being a tempest in a teapot. But in my opinion it leaves out by far the most important point, which is that if the parties were reversed, the MSM would make a very big deal of it indeed, and people would react accordingly.

Highlights—or lowlights—would be Ms. Clinton shouting, “At this point, what difference does it make?” when asked whether the killings in Benghazi were really the result of a protest or a planned attack.

My answer to her question is twofold. My first answer is that it makes a great deal of difference in terms of whether Obama and members of his administration purposely lied to the American people to protect their own political ambitions or whether they were stupidly and ignorantly out of touch. But my second answer would be that hey, in a way, she’s right: at this point it makes no difference if it makes no difference to the majority of the American public.

It is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…bloody cold in New England today.

I knew it before I even glanced at the weather report. How did I know? Well, it got quite warm in my place. When it gets really really cold outside, even though I keep the thermostat at the same level as always, the heat seems to crank up more to compensate.

Why is this, oh ye engineer types?

Musical interlude: a walk with Knopfler down Telegraph Road

The New Neo Posted on by

For all you Knopfler fans, and for all you soon-to-be Knopfler fans (the only two kinds of people in the world), let’s take a walk down Telegraph Road:

Here are the lyrics, which are worth perusal all by themselves:

A long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a pack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
Made a home in the wilderness
He built a cabin and a winter store
And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore
And the other travellers came riding down the track
And they never went further, no, they never went back
Then came the churches then came the schools
Then came the lawyers then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the telegraph road
Then came the mines – then came the ore
Then there was the hard times then there was a war
Telegraph sang a song about the world outside
Telegraph road got so deep and so wide
Like a rolling river. . .
And my radio says tonight it’s gonna freeze
People driving home from the factories
There’s six lanes of traffic
Three lanes moving slow. . .
I used to like to go to work but they shut it down
I got a right to go to work but there’s no work here to be found
Yes and they say we’re gonna have to pay what’s owed
We’re gonna have to reap from some seed that’s been sowed
And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles
They can always fly away from this rain and this cold
You can hear them singing out their telegraph code
All the way down the telegraph road
You know I’d sooner forget but I remember those nights
When life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
But believe in me baby and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
‘cos I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again. . .
From all of these signs saying sorry but we’re closed
All the way down the telegraph road.

The song was written in the early 80s by Knopfler while on a visit to the Detroit area:

In an interview on RockLine, a “rock radio network” call-in show, broadcast live on 10 May 1983, Mark Knopfler said, while on tour, he… “in fact was driving down [Telegraph Road near Detroit] and I was reading a book at the time called Growth of the Soil [by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun], and I just put the two together. I was driving down this Telegraph Road… and it just went on and on and on forever, it’s like what they call linear development. And I just started to think, I wondered how that road must have been when it started, what it must have first been. And then really that’s how it all came about yeah, I just put that book together and the place where I was, I was actually sitting in the front of the tour bus at the time.”

Before he gained rock star fame, Knopfler was an English lit professor (can’t find the reference right now, but I’ve read that in several sources). I think it shows.

Yes, Obama said “peace in our time”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it’s not such a big deal, although my saying that may surprise you.

First of all, let me state that I have disagreed, and continue to disagree, in the strongest possible terms with Obama’s actual foreign policy, which can be summarized as “concessions to your enemies, insults to your friends, and naivete (at best) and encouragement (at worst) towards the forces of Islamism in the Middle East.” So there’s that.

Obama did indeed use the famous phrase “peace in our time” in his inaugural speech yesterday [emphasis mine]:

And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice–not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

One could poke several holes in that, including the fact that sometimes, unfortunately, war is the best way to promote human dignity and justice. But it’s the phrase itself I’m interested in at the moment, and the fact is that, widespread belief notwithstanding, Neville Chamberlain didn’t say it.

What he actually said was, “peace for our time.” For some reason his words have been widely misquoted, but perhaps it is because “peace in our time” is a famous expression that occurs in other contexts:

The phrase echoed Benjamin Disraeli, who upon returning from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 stated “I have returned from Germany with peace in our time.”…[However,] “peace in our time”…had appeared long before in The Book of Common Prayer as “Give peace in our time, O Lord”, probably based on the 7th-century hymn ‘Da pacem Domine! in diebus nostris, Alleluja’.

Perhaps I am giving Obama and his speechmakers way too much credit here, but in the interests of accuracy I have to set the record straight. And along those lines, let’s hear what Chamberlain actually had to say [excerpts from two speeches on the day of his arrival back in Britain; emphasis mine]:

The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem, which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine. Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains but I would just like to read it to you: ‘ … We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.’…

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.

If you look at that second quote, you’ll note that Chamberlain was clearly referencing Disraeli’s earlier trip to Germany, after which Disraeli had actually said “peace in our time.”

Unfortunately, in Chamberlain’s time, peace was not to be. Hitler was a different species of crocodile to feed, and the amount of time that was bought by Chamberlain’s concessions was short, and purchased at great price.

[NOTE: It is not as widely remembered that Chamberlain died in 1940, not all that long after these events occurred. His reputation has been the subject of controversy, both pro and con. It’s a complicated story.]

Beauty in the ear of the behearer

The New Neo Posted on by

I still haven’t listened to Obama’s inaugural speech; don’t plan to. I’ve mentioned several times before that I don’t like speeches in general, unless they’re by Churchill or Lincoln (I guess Patrick Henry could sneak in there, too).

And Obama’s no Churchill. The funny thing is that he would like us to think he’s a Lincoln, and that many people do think so. These people tend to be (surprise, surprise) liberals and the left—not always exactly the same thing, but close enough for our purposes.

In the commentary on Obama’s address the split is massive, as one would expect when talking about a man who specializes in dividing the American public while talking about uniting it, a neat trick indeed. The right hears his combative, arrogant rhetoric, while the left hears a new assertiveness and confidence, and a determination to avoid struggling to compromise so hard anymore (!) with those intransigent, nasty Republicans.

Why would Obama feel more confident, rather than less, compared to 2008, when his mandate was much greater back then and has diminished since? Because, as was obvious, a second term frees him from the need to be beholden to the electorate. That is his triumph, and it is from whence his renewed confidence [arrogance] comes.

Those of you who are conservative and yet refused to vote for Romney for whatever reason no doubt have your ways of rationalizing that act (or failure to act). I’ve heard them all, and fought against them all, for at least a year. I continue to disagree about as strongly as possible, and it is with an especially heavy heart that I watch Obama begin his second term, thinking that his victory was achieved not only by the support of those who voted for him, but by the indirect support of those who failed to vote against him.

But I am not here to fight that battle any more; what’s done is done, and of course we’ll never know what sort of president Romney would have been (I believe a very good and also quite conservative one; your mileage may certainly differ). We can’t go back, we can only go forward; life’s not an alternate history book.

It puzzles me that so much of what I and many others see in Obama, those personal qualities that alarm us, are seemingly invisible to the vast majority of his admirers. It’s a bit like the ability to detect PTC by its bitter taste. Some have the trait and some don’t:

In 1931, a chemist named Arthur Fox was pouring some powdered PTC into a bottle. When some of the powder accidentally blew into the air, a colleague standing nearby complained that the dust tasted bitter. Fox tasted nothing at all. Curious how they could be tasting the chemical differently, they tasted it again. The results were the same. Fox had his friends and family try the chemical then describe how it tasted. Some people tasted nothing. Some found it intensely bitter, and still others thought it tasted only slightly bitter.

Soon after its discovery, geneticists determined that there is an inherited component that influences how we taste PTC. Today we know that the ability to taste PTC (or not) is conveyed by a single gene that codes for a taste receptor on the tongue. The PTC gene, TAS2R38, was discovered in 2003.

I don’t think the ability to detect bitterness in Obama is a mutation, but it almost seems as cut and dried. To his admirers, Obama’s a nice guy who’s been dealing with some difficult things. To me (and to many of you), in practically his every appearance he seems to radiate signals of narcissism, duplicity, insincerity, power hunger, and sheer nastiness. This has nothing to do with his race, although his supporters like to think that (or at least like to accuse the right of that). It’s funny, but Obama’s blackness is just not his most salient characteristic (or an important characteristic at all) for most on the right. Rather, it’s his personality and his politics.

But it’s actually much more than that. For the first time in my lifetime, anyway, I’ve seen a cult arise for a major political figure in America (that happened a little bit with Kennedy, too, but nothing like with Obama). Not only that, but the figure has been instrumental in personally nourishing and nurturing and encouraging that cult attitude mightily; perhaps that’s the most disturbing thing of all.

Not everyone who voted for Obama buys into the cult aspects, but enough do to make me very very worried about the future of this country, and that’s separate even from Obama’s politics. The adulation surrounding him, especially that of the press, is one of the most troubling aspects of his administration, and bodes ill for our future.

The wisdom of…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Michele Bachmann?

Bachmann, like Palin, has been relentlessly attacked and has become somewhat of a laughingstock. She does have a certain tendency to go off in ways that seem overblown and even absurd, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid, and it certainly doesn’t mean she isn’t correct a good deal of the time.