Obama’s second term: fill in the blanks

The New Neo Posted on by

If re-elected, what would Obama do?

The left thinks he’ll finally be able to fulfill their dreams. The right thinks the same: that Obama, freed of the need to be re-elected, will make a hard turn to the left whether the populace wants or expects him to or not. Whether he would succeed in such an endeavor if he tried it would depend at least in part on how many members of the new Congress would co-operate with him, and/or how far he’d be willing to go in bypassing Congress and doing it by executive order.

As for me, I make no firm predictions but one: Obama’s campaign promises will remain quite vague and general right up until Election Day, the better to keep people guessing. That blank slate thing seems to work for him.

Old friends: how terribly strange to be seventy

The New Neo Posted on by

Simon and Garfunkel have had their share of ups and downs.

They met as 6th graders at PS 164 in Queens (oh, those ever-so-creatively-named New York City public schools! I went to one of them myself.) They teamed up as Tom and Jerry in 1957 (no, not these guys), became mega-famous in the mid-60s, broke up in 1970, but have performed together off and on in the decades since.

Here they are close to the beginning, practically babies. They seem a little subdued, don’t they? And so does the audience:

The following video was mislabeled “2011,” but it’s really a concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden in 2009. Older, and wiser? The purity of the Garfunkel voice is somewhat diminished, but what’s lost in clarity may be made up for in extra layers of meaning. And the audience seems a good deal more into it:

Well, the leaves that are green turn to brown, and Paul Simon turned 70 last October, Art Garfunkel a couple of weeks later.

Here they are around the age of forty, imagining what it might be like to be seventy. How terribly strange:

And here they are again, with little left to the imagination anymore (this was in 2009, so they were both probably 68 years old):

Memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears.

Time it was, oh what a time it was, it was,
A time of innocence, a time of confidences.
Long ago, it must be…I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.

Thanks to YouTube, we’ve got a lot more than memories.

(Hat tip: commenter “davisbr.”)

[ADDENDUM: For those of you not inclined to follow the link above on the words “leaves that are green turn to brown,” I couldn’t resist posting that video here as well:

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song,
I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for long.
Time hurries on…]

Leaving the circle and entering the circle

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace writes about his own process of political conversion:

If you’ve always been conservative, then you can tell me a great many things about doctrine and such, but one place I will always have more experience than you is in terms of conversion and persuasion.

Because I went through a conversion myself. I was persuaded myself. I have only anecdotal experience; but I do have that anecdotal experience.

Anyone who’s always been Solid Red doesn’t have that experience.

So you can tell me you know more about conservative doctrine (this concession is easily made– I am not a deep thinker on conservative doctrine at all) but unless you’ve actually changed your stripes, you cannot tell me what arguments work on persuading someone to move from liberal-ish to moderate to conservative/moderate to finally conservative.

And I will tell you this: The giddy thing about a conversion is the liberation from complete and utter bullshit — accreted dogma, groupthink, it is so because we have said it is so.

Anyone who moves from liberal to conservative will always describe it as liberating epiphany, of breathing free air.

So please listen to me, if on nothing else at all, when I tell you that this dopey attempt to pound people into accepting the groupthink by appeals to solidarity and appeals to authority (authority which is not universally conceded, even on the right) is a loser.

Only a few people who are truly unhinged find they can no longer live under one set of dogmas and then fly to embrace, passionately, a whole ‘nother set of dogmas…

For most people, they convert when they want to escape a set of dogmas and then live under fewer dogmas, or even none at all.

They do not wish to jump willy-nilly and embrace a whole new set of dogmas.

Please read the whole thing.

Ace is expressing a thought I share: I didn’t jump off the liberal bandwagon to jump onto a conservative one. I try to think for myself as much as possible, and sometimes it leads me in directions that are quite different from the conservative position. I often try not to even read others’ opinions before I write on a topic, to remove their possible influence on me.

Some people don’t like what I have to say, such as my support of Romney in this election. That’s fine. I don’t really care, as long as you disagree civilly.

Limbaugh and the “slut” remark

The New Neo Posted on by

You may notice I haven’t yet written anything about Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke’s sex life and the issue of compensation to pay for contraception, and the furor they’ve caused.

Why? Because I don’t write much about Rush Limbaugh, ever. Why not? Well, he’s a talk show host, and I rarely listen to talk shows; I don’t much like them. But it is my firm belief that Limbaugh—like most such hosts—is first and foremost an entertainer who’s in the business to make money. Duh! As such, he likes to say controversial things that stir people up and increase his traffic. This is no different.

Rush said, “Well, what would you call someone who wants us to pay for her to have sex? What would you call that woman? You’d call ’em a slut, a prostitute or whatever.” But when last I checked, prostitutes were paid by their clients to have sex, not by the general public to use contraception. What’s more, birth control pills have no connection with frequency of sex, because they must be taken regularly and are not act-dependent, whereas act-dependent condoms and diaphragms/cream cost the same whether the sexual acts are with one partner many times or different partners many times (the latter being the definition of “slut”).

This time, Limbaugh certainly got the attention he craves, and then some. But he doesn’t speak for me, nor for all conservatives—any more than Keith Olbermann speaks for all liberals.

But now every candidate has to weigh in on the hugely important subject of what Limbaugh said and what it means and all the rest. And the MSM gets to opine on what a big doodoo-head Rush Limbaugh is.

Tornado: the best-laid schemes

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a poignant photo of a man named Greg Cook hugging his dog Coco after his East Limestone, Alabama home was destroyed by a recent tornado and Coco was found inside the ruins:

It’s one of many photos in this slideshow that are emblematic of what it’s like to lose so much and yet salvage something of intense value: life.

We like to think of our homes as oases, islands of safety in a world that can sometimes be harsh. Homes are not only where we conduct the most intimate parts of our lives, they’re also where we store our goods—including items of memory, such as precious old photos—and where we give full vent to our aesthetic sense. That little knickknack we picked up when we went to Italy (or Niagara Falls, or the corner store), that painting or that framed poster or that vase or those books or the curtains with the pretty fabric that went so well with the couch, all go to create an environment that expresses the unique us-ness of us.

All gone when the great winds come. And there’s nothing we can do about it except hug the dog, or cry, or do both together, comfort the living and mourn the dead.

Some musicians understand the phenomenon:

As do many poets (excerpt from “To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November 1785,” by Robert Burns. Foggage=coarse grass; snell=bitter; coulter=part of a plough; cranreuch=frost; gang aft agley=oft go astray):

…Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
Gang aft agley,
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Predicting Obama victory?

The New Neo Posted on by

Robert Samuelson of Newsweek looks at the current perception that Obama’s got it all wrapped up. Not so fast, he says.

My personal opinion? Too early to tell a thing. Not only are the points Samuelson made decent ones, but the election results also could (and almost certainly will) be powerfully affected by the state of the economy close to November, the actual identity of the Republican nominee and how he performs in one-on-one debates with Obama, and myriad other as-yet-unknown events that will be occurring between now and the election.

Which is still eight months away, if you can believe that.

Yoga and sex

The New Neo Posted on by

Do I have your attention? Good.

Most people have a squeaky-clean idea of yoga, but apparently it has more risque origins:

The wholesome image of yoga took a hit in the past few weeks as a rising star of the discipline came tumbling back to earth. After accusations of sexual impropriety with female students, John Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles, told followers that he was stepping down for an indefinite period of “self-reflection, therapy and personal retreat.” …

But this is hardly the first time that yoga’s enlightened facade has been cracked by sexual scandal. Why does yoga produce so many philanderers? And why do the resulting uproars leave so many people shocked and distraught?

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult ”” an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.

Hatha yoga ”” the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe ”” began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.

The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex.

It goes on, but I’ll stop with the quotes at this point. Suffice to say that, if you read the entire article, you may just want to take a yoga class.

But the author fails to mention a very odd fact about yoga and sex that I read at least forty years ago, when I first perused Arthur Koestler’s book The Lotus and the Robot. In it, he describes an arcane traditional yoga practice performed by those who’ve reached the highest levels of the discipline (children, please leave the room now). I don’t know whether yoga still includes this rather unusual stunt (or whether it ever really did; perhaps it’s an apocryphal story). But it certainly made on impression on me when I first learned of it.

Let’s see; how can I put this delicately? Traditional Indian culture apparently featured a notion that the loss of seminal fluid would lead to a loss of strength in the man. So yoga practitioners supposedly developed a way to skillfully reverse this process at will, a kind of reclamation/recycling program that was way ahead of its time. Or any other time.

No, I’m not making this up, although perhaps Koestler was. Neither is it April Fools Day. But will you ever think of yoga in quite the same way again?

Here’s the very best…

The New Neo Posted on by

…reminiscence about that unique, funny, effervescent wild man Andrew Breitbart. It’s written by Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard, who does a good job of showing why so very many people couldn’t help but like Breitbart—including Bill Ayers.

Yep, that Bill Ayers. Just read the piece.

[ADDENDUM: And for those of you who wondered what will happen to Breitbart’s plan to reveal some supposedly incriminating tapes from Obama’s past, it seems to still be on.

Here’s another tribute on Red Eye (hat tip: rdbrewer at Ace’s):

Devastating news: Andrew Breitbart dead at 43

The New Neo Posted on by

No one can be replaced, but some people seem more irreplaceable than others, and Andrew Breitbart was one of them.

He was also one of the last people whose death announcement I expected to read today.

He was young. He was irrepressible. He was fearless, unique, playful, bold, funny, determined, and smart. He was a family man and a public figure. And his death serves to remind us that none of us knows when we our time is up.

The cause? Fate, I suppose. But he is reported to have collapsed while walking near his home and collapsed “of natural causes” and could not be revived:

Breitbart was walking near his house in the Brentwood neighborhood shortly after midnight Thursday when he collapsed, his father-in-law Orson Bean said.

Someone saw him fall and called paramedics, who tried to revive him. They rushed him to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, Bean said. Breitbart had suffered heart problems a year earlier, but Bean said he could not pinpoint what happened.

Breitbart was an author, TV personality, once of the Drudge Report but then of his own websites Big Government, Big Hollywood, and Breitbart.tv. I could call him “conservative”—but only politically, because he was innovative and on the cutting edge in terms of the use of media. I will also add that I briefly met Breitbart at one of those blogger conferences PJ ran in the early, heady days of the blogosphere, before Andrew became quite as famous as he later was. He had a way about him that seemed fun and yet down-to-earth, effervescent and yet not too full of himself.

It goes without saying—but I will say it anyway—that he will be tremendously missed: by his family, by his political allies (I count myself among them), and by all who value the dissemination of truth.

RIP, Andrew Breitbart.

[NOTE: It should come as no surprise that Breitbart was a political changer. I wrote the following about him in July of 2010:

Breitbart’s hard-hitting theatricality would not be nearly as unique if he resided on the left, but as a man of the right he is very unusual. It is therefore not at all surprising to learn that Breitbart is a political changer. He grew up in Los Angeles, and dates his political transformation from the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings:

“He was, he said, a typical West Coast liberal ”” until the Clarence Thomas hearings lit him up with the fires of conservative resentment against the liberal establishment”¦’It was the moment that I saw a glimpse of the matrix,’ Breitbart said. ‘And I started to ask some very tough questions of myself, and my peer group, and my parents and their friends.'”

I sometimes think of Breitbart as the modern-day, conservative (or libertarian?) version of fellow-provocateurs Hoffman and Rubin of Sixties Yippie fame. He shares with them a streak of wildness and a knack for publicity, and the ability to use the media to get a message across in creative and somewhat novel ways, as a well as an irreverence and a sense of humor””although just about everything else about Breitbart and the Yippies (political aims, specific methods, and substance) is very different.]

[ADDENDUM: Michelle Malkin has a tribute, and a roundup of nasty tweets on Breitbart’s death from the left.

Roger L. Simon remembers Breitbart. He calls him “a whirlwind,” which seems apt.

Stephen Green’s first thought on hearing the news was that it was a hoax. I can see why. Breitbart was a prankish sort. But unfortunately, this is not one of his jokes.

Greg Gutfield remembers his friend.]