Dance: three genres

The New Neo Posted on by

A friend sent me two videos of the precocious preteen dancer, Israeli Gaya Bommer.

The first featured Bommer in the sort of weird, techno, robotic, gymnastic sort of choreography that’s known as “contemporary” but that I don’t quite get and I really don’t like, although I can see she’s technically accomplished. The second shows her remarkable versatility, because it features classical ballet of a very traditional sort. She is twelve years old in both of them:

I find Bommer more interesting than most young dancers today. She’s highly precocious, but in a way that’s unusual—startling technique isn’t uncommon among youngsters lately, but it’s Bommer’s presentation more than anything else that makes her stand out. Her extremely mature use of her upper body (especially head and arms), and her focus and intensity and what’s known in dance as “attack,” are usually the last things a dancer develops, and are ordinarily relatively unformed at that age. Not so Bommer.

I’ve already said that I don’t much care for the “contemporary” clip. But ballet isn’t really Bommer’s genre either, despite her considerable charm; she lacks the strongly articulated feet and extreme turnout necessary, which usually are well-developed in a female ballet dancer by Bommer’s age. And her body proportions are far from ideal for the longest and most elegant lines.

I was mulling over the question of what genre might best suit Bommer’s gifts and style (not that she’s asking me), and it occurred to me that modern dance (as opposed to “contemporary”) might be her genre. In modern dance her body proportions and feet, and her not-especially-lovely/long legs, really wouldn’t matter—and her style of attack, attack, attack and groundedness could really shine.

And then, as luck would have it, I found a clip of Bommer doing some sort of modern dance, and I think she hits it right on the nose. Hard to believe this laser focus belongs to a 12-year-old—and in fact it doesn’t, because Bommer was only 11 here:

Obama and illegals: is it constitutional?

The New Neo Posted on by

So, who’s right about Obama’s announcement that, at least on his watch, we won’t be deporting any more illegals who came here as children with their illegal-immigrant parents: Utah’s Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who says it’s well within the president’s power to decide not to enforce the law, or lawyer John Yoo, he of the Bush administration, who says Obama overreached in a manner that sets a dangerous precedent?

Shurtleff (who is a Republican, as the MSM makes sure to report, although he’s atypical in that he supports the president’s general policies on immigration, not just this order) says:

Law enforcement makes decisions based on the resources available to them ”” until Congress acts, we’ll be left with too many people to deport,” Shurtleff said. “The administration is saying, `Here’s a group we could be spending our resources going after, but why? They’re Americans, they see themselves as Americans, they love this country.’”

Shurtleff added that the decision, by allowing children brought here illegally to go to school and work, could encourage them to stay out of gangs ”” which he called a “conservative” goal. He dismissed the claim that this would encourage further illegal immigration, noting that the president’s plan has a cutoff ”” you are only eligible if you came here before you turned 16 and are younger than 30, and have been in the country for at least five continuous years.

Shurtleff’s second point is short-sighted, since the encouragement of further illegal immigration could easily occur because people might understandably consider that further down the road this sort of thing could become American policy, or could at least be extended by a friendly liberal president of the future.

As for Shurtleff’s second suggestion—that Obama’s action is a perfectly acceptable discretionary decision about how best to use our law enforcement resources—I’m with Yoo on that [emphasis added]:

The president’s right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional legislation, of course, does not apply here. No one can claim with a straight face that the immigration laws here violate the Constitution.

The second exception [to the rule that presidents must enforce laws passed by the legislature] is prosecutorial discretion, which is the idea that because of limited resources the executive cannot pursue every violation of federal law. The Justice Department must choose priorities and prosecute cases that are the most important, have the greatest impact, deter the most, and so on. But prosecutorial discretion is not being used in good faith here: A president cannot claim discretion honestly to say that he will not enforce an entire law ”” especially where, as here, the executive branch is enforcing the rest of immigration law.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive ”” not to mention the Framers ”” cannot support.

“Cannot support”? Ha! They can, and will, if they like the outcome.

As for Obama—this act of his doesn’t surprise me. It just surprises me that it took him so long.

It sets a very dangerous precedent, as Yoo points out. And get ready for more where that came from, even if Obama is defeated. There’s always that time between the November election and the inauguration in January in which to do some mischief.

Obama: it seemed hot to me

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama’s speech on economics yesterday was remarkable in that it failed to impress even the sycophants at MSNBC:

And Dana Milbank of the WaPo was not the least bit happy with Obama, either:

I had high hopes for President Obama’s speech on the economy. But instead of going to Ohio on Thursday with a compelling plan for the future, the president gave Americans a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy.

The falsehood is that he has been serious about cutting government spending. The fallacy is that this election will be some sort of referendum that will break the logjam in Washington.

Obama’s speeches have been so bad lately that I’d begun to suspect that his old speechwriters had quit and that he was using new ones. But no, the head honcho is still around. Perhaps the problem is just that speeches can’t cut it any more for Obama; even his admirers are tired of his rhetoric and would prefer substance.

People are fond of suggesting that Obama should be more like LBJ, an idea I find absurd; there could hardly be two more different people in temperament and experience. And this quote from LBJ aptly illustrates some of that difference. Can you imagine Obama even thinking anything like this, much less saying it?:

Did you ever think that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

What killed Alexander the Great?

The New Neo Posted on by

What I take from this article is that we still don’t know what killed Alexander the Great, whose death puzzled me so much in the Richard Burton film I saw as a child. And I doubt we will ever know.

But one surprising thing (to me, anyway) I did learn from the article was that there actually is a river Styx:

Now called Mavroneri, “Black Water,” the Styx originates in the high mountains of Achaia, Greece. Its cold waters cascade over a limestone crag to form the second highest waterfall in Greece.

“Unfortunately, the geochemistry of the river has not yet been studied by modern scientists; therefore, there is no scientific data to support the plausible and interesting calicheamicin [toxic poison] theory [of Alexander’s death],” Walter D’Alessandro, hydro-geochemist at the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Palermo, told Discovery News…

Alexander fell ill at one of many all-night drinking parties in Babylon, in modern Iraq, crying out from a “sudden, sword-stabbing agony in the liver.” The overlord of an empire stretching from Greece to India, was taken to bed with abdominal pain and a very high fever.

Over the next 12 days, he worsened. Alexander could only move his eyes and hands and was unable to speak. He later fell into a coma.

So I guess that the Richard Burton film version was an example of poetic license, because he utters some dying words in it—after all, if you’ve got an actor with a voice like Burton, you want to make the most of it. But looking back on the scene now, I’d say that the script comes down rather heavily on the idea that it was hubris that did Alexander the Great in:

[NOTE: And then there’s the mystery of another demise: that of the Library of Alexandria, in Alexander’s namesake Egyptian city. It was another event that troubled me when I was young—all those books (actually, scrolls) lost! The answer is similar: we don’t know, but we’ve got theories.]

Obama: still pissed about the dinner tab

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama offered quite the witticism at a fundraiser on Wednesday:

“I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit!” he said. Obama compared Republicans to a person who orders a steak dinner and martini and then, “just as you’re sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab.”

So, is Obama “just sitting down”? I was under the impression he’d been dining in that establishment for well over three years now, and had run up quite a tab himself without paying anything off.

But let’s put metaphors aside. I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again, but I’ve never in my lifetime heard any president of either party—good or bad or indifferent—blame his predecessors 1/1000th of the amount that Obama does. He is a petulant, buck-passing lightweight. To hear him tell it, nothing is his fault, and nothing is his responsibility—except, of course, those things he feels he can take credit for. But they’re few and far between these days.

It’s a perfect game

The New Neo Posted on by

Pitcher Matt Cain of the San Francisco Giants pitched a perfect game yesterday, only the 22nd in baseball history. And baseball’s got a lot of history.

A perfect game is mostly the pitcher’s doing, but still he needs a lot of help. Yesterday Cain got that help from his fielders, particularly in two spectacular plays in the outfield that saved the game for him.

Despite the fact that perfect games are so very rare, we’ve seen two this season already. And no-hitters are running way ahead of average so far as well. Why? Has the prowess of the hitters declined, or the strength of the pitchers increased, or is it all just a statistical fluke? Another thing baseball’s got a lot of is statistics.

I was a rabid baseball fan during the 90s and early 2000s, until the Red Sox finally won the whole thing after the protracted drought. Then I figured I could relax. But I still think that baseball is the perfect spectator sport, although I know many people consider it slow. I see it as suspenseful, a game of building tension punctuated by flashes of drama, where every kinetic moment is highlighted, crystal clear and individual, graceful and powerful.

And you don’t need a perfect game to see that.

Egypt: Court dissolves Parliament

The New Neo Posted on by

Barry Rubin offers a look at recent events in an Egypt filled with turmoil:

The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court has just invalidated the parliamentary election there. The parliament, 75 percent of whose members were Islamists, is being dissolved. The military junta has taken over total authority. The presidential election is still scheduled for a few dozen hours from now.

In short, everything is confused and everything is a mess. All calculations are thrown to the wind. What this appears to be is a new military coup.

And some people thought our Supreme Court overreached in 2000!

The military has long been the power behind the proverbial throne (the presidency, that is) in Egypt, and the military has never been keen on Islamist rule. Rubin points out that this type of court decision has a precedent, in Algeria:

In 1991 the Islamic Salvation Front was on the verge of gaining victory. Before the second round of voting could be held, the army staged a coup to stop the election. The resulting war lasted more than a decade ”” in some respects, it’s still continuing today. Cost in lives? About 150,000 ”” 200,000 in a country whose population was about one-third that of contemporary Egypt. You do the math.

That doesn’t mean Egypt will be the same, but this is something to be taken seriously.

The “Egyptian spring” was always going to come down to a showdown between the Islamists and the military. It didn’t take a giant amount of insight to know that, although Rubin believes this caught the Obama administration by surprise. Obama will have to make a decision, though, and the choices all seem bad. Rubin writes:

…[W]e are likely to have the strange situation of an American president fighting to put into power an anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic political force that is opposed to all U.S. interests, because ”” after all ”” they did win the election.

That would be strange, that is, with any other president but Obama. With Obama, supporting “an anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic political forces that is opposed to all U.S. interests” would be business as usual.

The Pentagon Papers and the press

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday was the 41st anniversary of the Pentagon Papers’ publication. A year ago on the 40th anniversary, Daniel Ellsberg took a moment to air a few regrets that he didn’t release the Papers sooner, and to encourage the current possessors of information on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to similarly spill whatever beans they possess, in order to do to those countries what he helped do in Vietnam:

Putting the policy-making and the field realities together, we see [in Iraq and Afghanistan] the same prospect of endless, bloody stalemate ”“ unless and until, under public pressure, Congress threatens to cut off the money (as in 1972-73), forcing the executive into a negotiated withdrawal.

To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now. Not 40 years in the future. Not after even two or three more years of further commitment to stalemated and unjustifiable wars.

Ellsberg wants it to happen sooner rather than later:

Don’t make my mistake. Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until a new war has started in Iran, until more bombs have fallen in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq or Yemen. Don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you go to the press and to Congress to tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. Don’t wait 40 years for it to be declassified, or seven years as I did for you or someone else to leak it.

I’ve written about the war in Vietnam ad nauseum, so I’m not going to fight that battle here. Let’s just stick to the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg’s finest hour.

Or was it? Fortunately, I’ve written about the Pentagon Papers before, too, and so now I’ll quote liberally from myself:

Take the Pentagon Papers. We all know the drill: fearless Daniel Ellsberg, at the risk of prosecution, spirits away classified information…and gives it to the press, who publish it in brave defiance of government efforts and a Supreme Court case trying to enjoin them from doing so. But Ellsberg’s–and the Times and Post‘s–devotion to truth won out, the American people were informed of the government’s deceptions, and we finally disengaged from an unwinnable battle.

We can forever debate the Vietnam war itself–its morality, justification, execution, and results; I’m trying not to do that in this post. This is about the sorting through of information.

So, what about the press lies about the government lies? Who will tell that story, and who has the patience to listen? It’s a marathon, not a sprint; to tell it requires a laborious wade through a mind-numbing number of documents, and to even read about it requires a bit of work, as well, and a troubling rethinking of old perceptions.

For example, just for the Pentagon Papers alone, the task of evaluation would require actually reading the original Papers, and then reading all the major press stories about them, sorting through the excerpts from the Papers that were published in newspapers at the time, and seeing how they compare to the Papers as a whole. It’s something I must confess I’ve never done, and probably never will do. But others have, and they report some curious goings-on.

A fascinating piece on the subject of war coverage by the MSM–both then and now–was written by James Q. Wilson and appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. Take a look at this, on the Papers:

Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.

In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.

I’m not trying to absolve Johnson of all wrongdoing; there’s enough blame to go around. And some of it most definitely goes to our old friends, those dragon slayers in the MSM.

Speaking of dragon slayers, in the Atlantic, Peter Osnos writes about the Pentagon Papers and mourns the passing of journalism’s “glory days.” He writes about the Supreme Court decision in favor of the publication of the papers and against Nixon’s attempt to block them:

The outcome was a glorious victory for a robust press and launched an era of aggressive reporting about Washington. What a time it was…Ultimately, the contents of the Pentagon Papers mattered less to events than the great confrontation over whether the press could override government’s objections to their release.

It’s hard to escape the notion that Osnos sees the entire conflict as press-centric: was it good for the MSM and its journalists? His answer is a resounding “yes.”

Dogs. Food. Counters. Chairs.

The New Neo Posted on by

Dogs can be very clever when they’re motivated enough:And lest you think that particular dog is an isolated genius of the canine world, check this out. In several ways, I think this dog faced an even greater challenge, but the will was equal to the task: