By special request: ballet + jello

The New Neo Posted on by

They said it couldn’t be done. But hey, I’m a can-do person.

So here, at commenter Gringo’s behest, is a post on ballet and jello.

Helped out by the remarkably resourceful and inventive act of Googling the words “ballet jello,” I came up with two examples of the juxtaposition of those fabulous neo-neocon special interests.

First up, we have a photo of a cute little girl in her cute little ballet outfit, holding a packet of as-yet-unmade jello. Her proud mom, the blogger, will probably be a bit surprised at the strange uptick in traffic today, if she even has a site meter. Be very kind if you go there.

Next, we have a video that I found. I think you will agree that it illustrates, not jello and ballet, but jello as ballet:

Competitor in Chief

The New Neo Posted on by

I was astounded to read this portrait of Obama that appeared in last Sunday’s NY Times magazine section. There’s plenty about how smart he is, and what a hard-driving perfectionist, but does the Times really think this sort of thing is complimentary?:

…[Obama] joked at a recent New York fund-raiser with several famous basketball players in attendance, “it is very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person.”…

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies…

For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores…

Even some Democrats in Washington say they have been irritated by his tips on topics ranging from the best way to shake hands on the trail (really look voters in the eye, he has instructed) to writing well…

For another, he may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House ”” including a “solid B-plus” for his first year ”” many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a factionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.

It goes on, but I think that’s enough to give you the flavor and demonstrate that this is not a puff piece, and that the passages I just quoted have the ring of truth.

All in all, I think it’s one of the most unpleasant portraits of a president I’ve ever read. How strange is this, to be published in the Times? Do liberals see the same things in it that I do, or do they just see a brilliant, hard-driving, hard-working, guy?

Clinton at the convention

The New Neo Posted on by

Although I didn’t plan to watch the Democratic Convention, I ended up overhearing a large portion of Bill Clinton’s speech last night. I was at the home of some Democrats; the TV was on in the background, and of course I recognized that voice immediately.

It brought me back to the 90s, when I was a Democrat myself, and he was the president whom I’d voted for, twice. And let me just say that even back then I wasn’t onboard with Clinton admiration, although I understood that lots of people really, really liked him. His speeches seemed boring and contrived to me, and looooong (again, remember I don’t like political speeches in general).

Well, that’s all still true of good old Bill, the charmer. He seemed ecstatic to be the center of attention again, and he went on too long. However, it also occurred to me last night that he is still a better speechmaker and politician than virtually everyone else in the Democratic Party (including that great orator, Barack Obama).

As for the convention itself, here’s an interesting take on it from Datechguy, as well as this from PJ’s Roger Simon.

To allow comments or not to allow comments

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse notes that Walter Russell Mead has closed comments on his blog with the following explanation:

To make the comments section work in its present form we would have to edit and curate much more aggressively than we do now and in our current judgment the effort needed to do that is better spent improving other features of the blog.

Althouse writes:

The previous post [at Mead’s blog], the last post with comments, is saying that the blog hit a new traffic record. That got 11 comments. 11 comments! Is it really that hard to “edit and curate”?

Going to Mead’s blog, I notice he adds that in three years of blogging he’s gotten 40,000 comments. That’s a fair number, about 13,333 a year, which made me realize I have absolutely no idea have many comments I’ve gotten here. Since WordPress obligingly keep count, I took a look: 166,490 and counting.

Let’s see. I’ve been blogging for about 7 1/2 years, which makes approximately 22,200 comments a year. Is it particularly arduous to “edit and curate” those comments? No, it’s really not; I’m with Althouse on this.

I’m only one person here. On my old blog, using Blogger, policing comments was difficult, I admit. But with my move to WordPress I gained a ton of much more effective tools to fight the trolls and spammers. It doesn’t take all that much time or effort, either—and much more importantly, the gains from allowing a comments section are vast.

Mead is a well-known writer in print journalism rather than primarily a blogger, so my guess is that he became used to writing without comments long before he enabled them. It would make sense that he can take them or leave them. But I learned quite some time ago that, although I’ve written articles at sites that don’t have comments, I much much MUCH prefer the immediate feedback and the camaraderie of a comments section.

In fact, I very much doubt I would blog without them. It would be like dropping a stone down a well and watching it disappear.

The Democratic National Convention

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m mega-busy right now, so I haven’t watched a moment of it so far.

But even if I weren’t busy, I’m not sure I’d be looking at it very much. After all, I’m overly-familiar with the message. Why drive myself nuts by listening to more?

If you want to discuss it, though, here’s a nice pristine thread for you. And here are some links:

Michelle Obama gave a speech last night praising her husband. Here’s an interesting quote; I do believe she’s telling a general truth here about the Gramscian goals of the left:

[Barack] reminds me that we are playing a long game here … and that change is hard, and change is slow and it never happens all at once.

See also this and this.

Tonight Bill Clinton, Democratic Party elder statesman, places Obama’s name in nomination. I’ll pass (and is Bill paving the way for Hillary in 2016? She would be almost 70 years old then, by the way. Not sure her best chance isn’t over and done with, but you never know with the Clintons.)

Fact-checking the “fact-checkers”

The New Neo Posted on by

James Taranto calls them “the Pinocchio Press”—referring, not to the Pinocchio awards they hand out when they judge a politician to be lying, but the lies they tell themselves in the supposed service of truth-telling.

I think a better term would be “Orwellian Press.” But the idea’s the same.

It’s a clever twist to write propaganda in the guise of objective fact-checking, don’t you think?

Second best

The New Neo Posted on by

What are the odds of this?

From Mia Farrow’s autobiography, What Falls Away:

My mother [actress Maureen O’Sullivan], her father’s favorite, went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. She hated it. They had to wear vests in the bath, and were told that “whistling on the stairs makes Our Lady cry.” Vivien Leigh was in the same class, the only girl in the school, according to my mother, who had any sense of direction: from the age of eleven she knew she would be an actress…Vivien Leigh was voted “prettiest girl in the school,” and when my mother came in second, she cried all day, unable to believe that anyone thought she was pretty.

I don’t know which is more astounding: that Vivien Leigh and Maureen O’Sullivan were in the same class at the same school, that Maureen O’Sullivan ever doubted that she was pretty, or that all the girls were made to wear vests in the bath.

So, who’s the prettiest girl in the school?

I dunno. I’m still scratching my head over those modesty vests.

The non-fictional Barack Obama speaks…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and accuses Republicans of having created a “fictional Barack Obama.”

And here I thought the post-modern narrative was everything, and that Obama had already created his own fictional Barack Obama, whose blanks we had been invited to fill in as we so desired.

Obama also uttered this tidbit, apparently with no awareness of its deep irony:

Gov. Romney spent a lot of time talking about himself and he spent a lot of time talking about me. He didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the American people and how their lives will get better.

As well as this one: that an element of the fictional Obama these Republicans have created is the notion that he “doesn’t think small businesses built their own businesses.”

Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright amply demonstrates…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the narrow, condescending Vision of the Anointed, in which the liberal mind fails not only to agree, but even to understand in broad conceptual terms, how women can vote for Mitt Romney— despite a recent Republican National Convention in which a succession of bright, articulate women (including one of Albright’s successors, the female Condoleezza Rice), explained their reasons for supporting him in a series of speeches that ought to have clarified the matter.

So, is Albright suffering from a failure of imagination?
A failure of intelligence?
A failure of auditory or written comprehension?
A failure of empathy?
A surfeit of partisan spin, otherwise known as propagandist BS?
Or perhaps all of the above?

Something that I never noticed before just struck me as I was writing this piece: since Albright’s appointment as first female Secretary of State in 1996, we’ve had an almost unbroken series of women in the position, the only exception being an African-American man, Colin Powell.

But maybe I failed to notice all of this because I don’t automatically think in terms of identity politics.

[Hat tip: Ann Althouse.]

[NOTE: If you haven’t read Thomas Sowell’s excellent book Vision of the Anointed, please do. And the subtitle is masterful, as well: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.]

Haidt-based morality test

The New Neo Posted on by

Want to compare yourself to liberals and conservatives on a bunch of tests of knowledge, morals, and values based on Jonathan Haidt’s research? Go here; it’s kind of fun.

I took the tests and, as you might guess, some of the time I came in right smack between liberals and conservatives, and the rest of the time I resembled conservatives.

I also did very well (perfect score!) on the three math questions (from a test they seem to have now removed). Here they are, folks. I expect my exceptionally intelligent and analytically-inclined readers (in other words, all of my readers) to get a perfect score, too:

1. A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3. In a lake there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

Ah, the mendacity!

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s fascinating, in a depressing sort of way, to see the speed, depth, and breadth of the “Republicans lie!” meme spread through the MSM and left side of the blogosphere, and then be parroted back by simpatico commenters.

There is no question it is coordinated and Orwellian, and perhaps effective. I have no idea whether it convinces the not-yet-quite-convinced, but it certainly has been good at rallying the foot-soldiers in the Cause. Just as it became clear within days (or perhaps hours) of her nomination that Palin Is a Stupidhead, now it has been proven that Ryan Is a Lying Liar (as we already knew about Romney the Liar), and that All Republicans Are Uncaring Lying Bastards.

It’s a waste of time for me to laboriously describe and analyze the details of the lies perpetrated by the left about Republicans lying. The truth will never reach those who need to see it, and besides many people (including me) have done it already (here’s a previous post of mine that contains some handy links to others who have more patience and fortitude on the subject than I, and here’s a piece in which I liken the current lies on the left to the Big Lie technique; here’s my dissection of an earlier case of lying about lies).

Suffice to say that the left’s practice of lying about lying has spun out of control (here’s a piece on that subject), which means that on some level the Democrats must have been quite frightened by the spectacle presented at the Republican Convention, because their big defense seems to be to say it’s all an illusion based on mendacity.

Maureen Dowd’s latest column reaches an absolute frenzy in this regard, a Two Minutes Hate worthy of the best propagandists of yore. And to judge from the comments section (at least the first few that I read) to her article, her readers are happy to agree with her.

Even the title of Dowd’s screed is a masterpiece of the genre: “Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball.”

The Republican Convention according to Dowd:

A preview of the Democratic one: