Blowing an agent’s cover

The New Neo Posted on by

From the start of the latest underwear bomber story, I wondered who the leaker was. Now we learn more, including the fact that the undercover agent who was exposed wasn’t even our own guy, he was a British operative:

The leaks about the operation from the American side have infuriated British intelligence officials, who had hoped to continue the operation. The leaks not only scuttled the mission but put the life of the asset in jeopardy. Even CIA officials, joining their MI5 and MI6 counterparts, were describing the leaks as “despicable,” attributing them to the Obama administration.

And especially interesting is the relative disinterest of the MSM in this matter. Remember the Plame affair? Compare and contrast. And Plame’s risk was nothing compared to this guy’s.

It’s all Scooter Libby’s fault, no doubt.

Another day, another dress

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to know quite what to say about Jennifer Lopez in this dress, except that it’s hideous, although JLo is a very attractive woman. What was she thinking? The only person who could pull this off would be a rail-thin model. And even then, why bother?

It would also help to be long-waisted—as I know, since I’m not.

I think she was going for something vaguely Grecian, plus a lot of plunging cleavage of course. Or maybe 30s Hollywood, something like this:

Instead, she just looks matronly—which is hard for JLo to do.

Poll: Obama’s a (gasp!) politician

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember when Reverend Wright owned up to the obvious when he stated, “[Obama]…says what he has to say as a politician”? Well, in the matter of Obama’s gay marriage change of heart, America seems to agree, much to the consternation of the NY Times, which is hard-pressed to explain how that can be, other than a problem with the timing of the announcement.

Obama? Politically motivated? Say it isn’t so, Joe America:

Sixty-seven percent of those surveyed by The New York Times and CBS News since the announcement said they thought that Mr. Obama had made it “mostly for political reasons,” while 24 percent said it was “mostly because he thinks it is right.” Independents were more likely to attribute it to politics, with nearly half of Democrats agreeing.

Actually, political motivation is the most logical conclusion to draw, given the fact that the change was seemingly unprompted by anything other than Joe Biden’s “chance” remarks (yea, right) and discussions Obama reportedly had with his daughters, during which he suddenly saw the light on gay marriage because they had friends with gay parents and those parents shouldn’t be treated differently. Hello? He’d never thought about that aspect of the issue before?

If we take Obama’s words at face value, his description of his own thought process on the subject makes him seem to be an unserious thinker. Better, perhaps, that we should look at it cynically and see him as offering a self-serving excuse for a cynical and pragmatic political decision—one that might end up backfiring, as the Times points out:

The poll showed that relatively few voters consider same-sex marriage their top issue amid continued economic uncertainty, and more than half said it would make no difference in their choice for president. But among those who said Mr. Obama’s position would influence their vote, more said they would be less likely to vote for him as a result; in a close race, even a small shift in swing states could be costly.

Obama, profile in courage.

Not.

[NOTE: I want to make it clear that I think Obama actually does support gay marriage. So that “cynical and pragmatic political decision” I mention ought to refer to his original decision to oppose gay marriage rather than his change to supporting it. Or perhaps we should say that both announcements were cynical, pragmatic, and political, although one represents his true opinion and the other doesn’t.]

German elections: the North Rhine-Westphalians…

The New Neo Posted on by

…just say no to the Christian Democrats.

Merkel’s party lost a lot of ground in that section of Germany yesterday, and the Social Democrats (the SPD, described as “centre-left”) picked up what the CDU lost. This follows the pattern in the recent election in France, although Merkel is still ahead nationwide:

The blow comes only two days before France’s new president, Socialist Francois Hollande, is due to visit Berlin and press Merkel for a shift away from austerity and more emphasis on growth-oriented measures in Europe.

Other big countries like Italy also want Merkel to take a more balanced approach to the debt crisis and an election in Greece last week showed massive public resistance to tough austerity.

Strangely enough, although I consider myself a fiscal conservative (especially by European standards), I’m not an advocate of austerity-only solutions. And I don’t think that most conservatives would disagree; there’s nothing wrong with growing an economy. The disagreement with the left, of course, is how to do this, and especially on what the role of a central government ought to be.

I’ve tried to discover exactly what it is that the left in Germany is suggesting as an economic growth program. But in a relatively brief search, although I found a bunch of MSM articles alluding to the German election, none of them discussed the proposals in any detail. This far-left Socialist periodical has an interesting perspective, which is that both Merkel’s party and the SDP are advocating austerity and balanced budgets, it’s just a question of the left sounding a bit better (to Socialist ears, that is):

The SPD and Greens hope that following an election win in NRW, they will be back in charge of the federal government by autumn 2013 at the latest. While they fully support the austerity measures and social cuts of the Merkel government, they are trying to create the illusion that this can be combined with investments in economic programmes, education, research, culture, etc. On closer inspection, however, the “Growth Pact” they are demanding is revealed as a further deregulation of the labour markets.

Here’s another article in the leftist press that tries to explain the situation (it’s not that I favor the left’s perspective, it’s just that they seem to be the only ones going into any detail on this. If you can list some links from the right, I’d be curious to read them.) In it, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the leader of the SPD parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, points out that Europe is in bad trouble economically—as anyone who didn’t just drop down from planet Xenon knows. Specifically, it compares unfavorably in economic growth to even the growth-challenged US:

While countries around the world are making up ground, the European economy will shrink by 0.5% this year ”“ the United States (up 1.8%) and China (up 8.2%) will grow.

And Steinmayer’s description of the problem seems pretty on-target to me:

Unless there is a breakthrough in the current recessionary spiral, no one will be able to guarantee repayment of these loans [made after the 2008 crisis to save the economies of European nations in trouble]. Europe, and especially creditor nations like Germany, are banking on a trend shift that they hope will provide new economic verve. The EU and IMF rescue packages assume that the countries receiving emergency loans today will soon be able to generate primary budget surpluses. If that fails to happen, they will keep needing new loans to prop them up. This will put the eurozone countries to a test of fiscal strength and, above all, political endurance. Ultimately, it could lead to the collapse of the monetary union.

Well, if by “the monetary union” he means the EU—and I believe he does—many would say “good riddance,” and I’d be among them. That is what tied the economies of member countries together so tightly, and put nations such as Germany in nearly the same boat as Greece.

But Europe doesn’t seem to be about to abandon that dream, and in any case it does seem that more growth is necessary for Europe, with or without the EU. But does “growth” mean stimulus spending a la Keynes? Does it mean increasing government regulation of the economy or decreasing it, or just changing its emphasis? And is the big problem something more basic, some decrease in personal initiative that has occurred in Europe in the last few decades?

Steinmeyer discusses the SDP’s proposed solutions, which don’t sound like pure Keynes to me [emphasis mine]:

The debt sustainability called for by the adjustment programmes will only be achieved when Europe regains its capacity for economic growth. That will not happen by itself. Europe will need a growth programme if the consolidation of government finances is to succeed. However, this must not lead to a new round of government debt for the sake of short-lived economic stimulus measures. Instead, Europe needs a comprehensive investment and development programme that overcomes the financial crisis, sets a course that focuses on the real economy, modernises structures, improves competitiveness, increases value added, and strengthens European unity [this last idea seems counterproductive, IMHO; it’s “European unity” that magnified the problems in the first place].

The financial crisis exposed the source of European imbalances. If we do not work to fix them, they will lead to a deeper, more serious split. Europe has lost its equilibrium. While countries like Germany and Poland manoeuvred through the crises relatively safely, the economies of countries in the southern eurozone are nose-diving. There is no end in sight to their downward spiral. No wonder growth forecasts diverge so widely between countries in Europe. Poland and Lithuania are expected to grow by 2.5% and 2.3% respectively, while Greece and Portugal are set to shrink by 3% and 3.2% respectively.

Weak growth almost always goes hand in hand with a weak status of real value added. The manufacturing sector has lost its significance in nearly every European country. During the last decade, industry’s share of GDP fell on average from 23% to 16%. However, it is clear that countries which held on to their industrial sector are now doing significantly better than countries that pursued de-industrialisation. Poland is an impressive example…Preserving a broad value chain secures jobs and creates an environment that spurs on new growth.

In addition to retaining a solid industrial basis, boldly implementing structural reforms has also paid off. Germany, for example, has spent the last decade reforming its labour market, which has strengthened its competitiveness for the long term. And following a painful slump during the crisis of 2008-2009, Lithuania introduced structural reforms that have enabled it to set out on a new path to growth.

Boy, it must hurt when Western Europe has to look to Eastern Europe for economic models and guidance.

Steinmeyer goes on to describe how different the countries in Europe are from each other, but he doesn’t draw the conclusion that the EU was a bad idea that’s got to go. And although it’s true that, as Steinmeyer writes, the economies of the European countries are dependent on each other because unless there are markets there’s no way to sell the products or services made, why not let this interdependency happen in natural fashion, rather than yoking them together in an artificially-created union that has the effect of dragging them all down if a few go under, and fails to allow them to tailor individual solutions to fit their individual differences?

Finally, Steinmeyer gets to the specific proposals of his party, the SDP. The first suggestion is a financial transactions tax to raise revenue. Again, I don’t understand the fine points, but my first thought was, “wouldn’t that impede economic growth rather than help it?” And I’m certainly not alonge; there’s some support for that conclusion. The tax would probably be limited, however, to the secondary financial markets (derivatives and their like), the area that supposedly engendered the 2008 problems in the first place, although that would hardly seem to change the fact that the tax would be likely to inhibit growth.

The rest of the SDP plan seems to involve ideas to strengthen what Steinmeyer refers to as “industrial renewal.” Again, nothing wrong with that. The main question on which left and right differ is the government’s role in achieving such a goal. The SDP seems to think that the EU must be involved in a trans-European project to do it, which is about what you’d expect from the left but seems both unnecessary and potentially counterproductive to me.

The devil tends to be in the details, and in the amount of time available to me to write this post I couldn’t become expert enough on the economic policies and proposals of the different political parties in Europe to be able to critique them as effectively as I’d like. I rely on you, my trusty readers, to take up the discussion—especially a few of you who live in Germany and could probably shed a lot more light on the subject than I.

Cover wars

The New Neo Posted on by

In the matter of the dueling shock-value Newsweek and Time magazine covers, Ed Driscoll explains it all for you.

And there’s something so disturbing about the Time cover that I’m not putting the image on the blog. It’s certainly not because I’m a prude, or that I’m anti-breastfeeding. I’m very pro.

My objection is not to the woman so much as the boy. If she wants to flaunt herself in whatever fashion, and finds a willing co-conspirator in the now-tabloidesque Time, so be it. But there’s something about using the kid in that way that seems very, very, very wrong. He’s not of the age of consent, just a prop who’s being exploited by his mother and the magazine.

Happy Mother’s Day: mothers and babies

The New Neo Posted on by

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

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

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

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

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

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

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

Etudes in Boston

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw the Boston Ballet perform last night. The first dance was forgettable, the second a great classic, Jerome Robbins’ “Fancy Free.”

That alone would have been worth the price of admission, with its Bernstein music, its swingy 40s ambiance, and its fabulous three solos for its three show-off sailors that perfectly express their differing personalities, with steps choreographed by Robbins that flow so freely that it seems as though the dancers are improvising them on the spot through an excess of high spirits.

But I was surprised that it was the third ballet, Harald Lander’s “Etudes,” that turned out to be the highlight of the evening for me and much of the audience. It’s a piece I’d seen many times before and liked well enough, back in the 70s and performed by American Ballet Theater, although I’d not seen it since then till last night. A classroom-to-stage ballet, starting with a stylized, revved-up version of the dancers’ daily barre exercises and segueing through various styles of ballets (Romantic, imperial, character), “Etudes” is an ever-accelerating high-speed train ride of a ballet. Forget plot; this is ballet stripped bare of everything but its classical elements: tradition, tutus, and technique.

In the many decades that have passed since I first saw the Boston Ballet its technical skill has vastly improved, as was made abundantly clear last night. “Etudes” is totally unforgiving; it requires ensemble work of tremendous difficulty and everyone not only has to be on the beat, but incredibly powerful and of major soloist caliber. The music (a live orchestra last night, always a huge treat) is based on familiar Czerny exercises, but with the full complement of instruments it built and built along with the choreography until the usually staid Boston audience was practically in a frenzy.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a video of that production, so this will have to do. It’s the Royal Danish Ballet in the last few minutes of what’s actually a 40-minute performance. Recall that dance on video is two-dimensional and only has about one-tenth the impact and depth and pizazz of the same thing seen in person—which last night included, of course, the full orchestra in the glorious Boston Opera House. What’s more, the Boston dancers were significantly better than this crew (who are awfully good, too), even though the piece was originally choreographed for the Danes back in 1948:

JP Morgan and regulation

The New Neo Posted on by

So, does the debacle at JP Morgan mean banks should be more regulated?

In Business Week, Henry Blodgett answers “yes”—because, despite the fact that Morgan’s CEO Dimon is one of the best and smartest of the bunch, the situation has grown so mathematically complex, and the incentives are all in favor of risky investments:

…[T]he gambling instruments the banks now use are mind-bogglingly complicated. Warren Buffett once described derivatives as “weapons of mass destruction.” And those weapons have gotten a lot more complex in the past few years.

…Wall Street’s incentive structure is fundamentally flawed: Bankers get all of the upside for winning bets, and someone else””the government or shareholders””covers the downside.

As for the remedies—as Hamlet would say, “Ay, there’s the rub.” We don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease, and the law of unintended consequences is ever in operation.

Blodget suggests the following:

(1) increase banks’ capital requirements

(2) re-institute Glass-Steagall

(3) have a plan for dealing with similar events: “by stepping in, seizing the bank, firing management, zeroing out shareholders, haircutting bondholders, and then injecting new SENIOR capital (fully protected) and re-floating or selling off the firm. This will allow the entity to keep operating, and it will stick the losses where they belong””with the idiots who bought the bank’s stock or loaned it money. Meanwhile, the systemic threat will be eliminated.”

I’ve written about the first point (complexity) years ago, for example here and here. I also wrote about the second suggestion, here. And that’s not because I was so smart, but because it was a very common suggestion at the time.

Nothing was done, and I don’t think it’s because Congress is so stupid or so corrupt, although there’s quite a bit of both around. It’s because of that pesky law of unintended consequences again. There are arguments against restoring Glass-Steagall. And although I happen not to find those arguments all that convincing, many very smart people do, and I don’t know who’s right.

Do you?

Facebook loneliness

The New Neo Posted on by

Is Facebook making us more lonely?

Well, it’s not making me more lonely, because I’m not on it—although I suppose if I thought about it, the fact that I’m not on Facebook could make me feel more lonely. But I do think there’s a tendency for the computer in general to make people less likely to have face-to-face encounters, although paradoxically I’ve probably had more face-to-face encounters because of it, not fewer, because I’ve sometimes met fellow bloggers and even a few readers who might live near me or near places I often visit.

A critique of the article is offered here, but somehow I don’t buy it. I think the author isn’t going far enough back in time to make the proper comparison.

What I’ve seen of Facebook tends to remind me of those annual Christmas letters. We can create a narrative of our lives that looks good, whatever it has to do with reality.

Kind of like in this song:

And, of course, someone did take our Kodachrome away in 2009, although it wasn’t mama. It was just the declining market, due to digital photography.

You know when I first noticed the decline of face-to-face socializing, at least in the community where I lived? The 80s, with the advent of the video store. People didn’t have to go out to the movies, or have people over to schmooze or play cards or whatever people used to do (that’s what my parents used to do). Of course, they could rent a movie and have people over to watch that—and of course, sometimes that happened—but it was really easy, after a hard day, to just rent the movie and kick back at home alone, or just the two of you. I used to meet half the people I knew at the local video store on a Saturday night, getting ready to watch movies at home rather than going out together as they used to. Now, even that minimal amount of socializing at the video store doesn’t have to happen; we can stream the movies directly.

Progress. Convenience. But what is lost?

The WaPo goes macaca over Romney the homophobic bully

The New Neo Posted on by

The WaPo has trouble getting its Romney-the-wicked-and-abusive-gay-bashing-haircutter story straight. A source it quoted in the WaPo story as having “long been bothered by the…incident” said in an ABC interview the next day that he was not present when it happened and didn’t know about it until he was informed of it this year by the WaPo.

Well, I guess a couple of months (or weeks? or days?) can seem a long time when you’re deeply, deeply troubled by something.

Big Journalism writes that there’s more: the WaPo has done a stealth correction on its original piece at its website, eliminating the incorrect assertion without owning up to the change. Not proper journalistic standards, but then the whole piece isn’t up to proper journalistic standards, which are rarely honored any more so who cares?

And two sisters of the supposedly harassed fellow-student of Romney’s in question, John Lauber, have denied knowledge of the story and issued this statement:

“The family of John Lauber is releasing a statement saying the portrayal of John is factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda. There will be no more comments from the family.” Said [his sister] Christine, “If he were alive today, he would be furious [about the story].”

Ah, but he’s not alive today, which makes him the perfect victim for the WaPo’s purposes. And the disclaimers won’t matter to those who already support Obama, and maybe some others, too, who won’t necessarily get word of the corrections, as the WaPo is no doubt fully aware.

Allahpundit says what I was thinking:

I thought we were going to spend the next six months having a dumb conversation about whether Romney’s too rich and square and “out of touch” to get the economy back on track. But no, between this and the mind-numbingly stupid Seamus attacks, we’re actually going to have a dumb conversation about whether Romney was some sort of psycho several decades ago.

What’s next?

[NOTE: for those with short memories, the title of my post refers to this.

And yes, of course, the contrast with the lack of interest in Obama’s school days—except those facts that support the preferred narrative—is profound. But that’s to be expected.

And by the way, while we’re at it, that the original allegations have anything to do with actually being gay is preposterous. I was around in the mid-60s, when boys with long hair (such as my very heterosexual first boyfriend, for example) were routinely taunted as looking like “girls” without there being any particularly deep gay sub-context.]