Clash of the hyphens

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the vogue for hyphenating last names on marrying? Well, here’s some of the long-delayed aftermath: Brendan Greene-Walsh and Leila Rathert-Knowles, an engaged couple with hyphenated last names and a decision to make.

Note that each members of the engaged couple sports a rather nice-sounding name consisting of the union of two rather short ones. But still, Greene-Walsh-Rathert-Knowles would be a mouthful.

When I married, I didn’t ever consider doing this, but perhaps if my name together with my husband’s had been more euphonious, I would have considered it.

I don’t think so, though. It seemed a complication I didn’t really want to saddle my offspring with, and sounded too much like British aristocracy or a law firm.

The Spanish solved the problem long ago, with a system that is simplicity itself:

My first surname, Pérez is the first surname of my father and my second surname, Quié±ones, is the first surname of my mom (this one is usually called the mother’s maiden name in the U.S.). So, my apellidos are: Pérez Quié±ones because…

My Dad: Pérez Rodré­guez
My Mom: Quié±ones Alamo
Yours truly: Pérez Quié±ones

So, what happens when you get married? Nothing changes on the husband, and the wife usually changes her name as follows. Her first surname remains the same (her father’s first), but her second surname often changes to that of her husband. Sometimes the word ‘de’ is added between the two surnames to indicate that the second surname is her husband’s. To continue the example, my wife’s surnames before we got married:

Her Dad: Padilla Rivera
Her Mom: Falto Pérez (no, she is not related to my father)
My Wife: Padilla Falto

After marriage, my wife’s surnames would have changed to: Padilla de Pérez or just Padilla Pérez.

Me: Pérez Quié±ones
My Wife: Padilla Pérez

Come to think of it, maybe it’s not such a simple solution after all.

[Hat tip Instapundit.]

Outrageous: the 1972 Munich massacre

The New Neo Posted on by

This year will mark the 40th anniversary the Olympics’ darkest day, and one of the darkest in the history of the struggle against terrorism: the massacre of Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists in Munich in 1972. But, true to form, the International Olympic Committe “flatly rejected a minute of silence at today’s opening ceremony in London to mark” the event.

Why?:

According to Ankie Spitzer, the widow of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who was murdered by the Palestinian Black September group in 1972, IOC president Jacques Rogge capitulated to the 46-member bloc of Arab and Muslim countries because of the threat of Arab countries to boycott participation in the Games.

Spitzer, who jumpstarted an international campaign to garner a minute of silence at the London games, reported that Rogge told her that “his hands were tied” by the influence of the 46-member group.

Her rejoinder to Rogge: “No, my husband’s hands were tied, not yours.”

Whatever the reason for his refusal to honor the dead this year, Rogge’s decision is consistent with the IOC’s previous attitude. The group was criticized 40 years ago for its tepid response, including its refusal to cancel the remainder of the games (a decision which, by the way, the Israeli government supported at the time):

In the wake of the hostage-taking, competition was suspended for the first time in modern Olympic history. On 6 September, a memorial service attended by 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes was held in the Olympic Stadium. IOC President Avery Brundage made little reference to the murdered athletes during a speech praising the strength of the Olympic movement and equating the attack on the Israeli sportsmen with the recent arguments about encroaching professionalism and disallowing Rhodesia’s participation in the Games, which outraged many listeners…

Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany’s football match with Hungary carried noisemakers and waved flags, but when several spectators unfurled a banner reading “17 dead, already forgotten?” security officers removed the sign and expelled those responsible from the grounds. During the memorial service, the Olympic Flag was flown at half-staff, along with the flags of most of the other competing nations at the request of Willy Brandt. Ten Arab nations objected to their flags being lowered to honor murdered Israelis; their flags were restored to the tops of their flagpoles almost immediately…

The families of some victims have asked the IOC to establish a permanent memorial to the athletes. The IOC has declined, saying that to introduce a specific reference to the victims could “alienate other members of the Olympic community,” according to the BBC. Alex Gilady, an Israeli IOC official, told the BBC: “We must consider what this could do to other members of the delegations that are hostile to Israel.”

But all of that is secondary to the 1972 event itself. If you’re not familiar with it, a simple way to learn the main facts is to watch the powerful award-winning documentary “One Day in September.” Those of you who were around in 1972 can relive the horror, including some facts you’ve probably forgotten; those who were not can familiarize themselves with a day that put Palestinian terrorism on the Olympic map.

And not just the Olympic map, either; despite initial outrage, the world seemed to sympathize with the terrorists much more than the victims:

…Munich was one of the most successful attacks in terrorist history. As Bruce Hoffman, a leading authority on terrorism points out, “The premier example of terrorism’s power to rocket a cause from obscurity to renown…was without doubt the murder of eleven Israeli athletes seized by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games…

Most of the world had forgotten the Palestinians existed before the attack at Munich. Within two years of the massacre…Yassar Arafat was being feted by world leaders and invited to address the General Assembly of the United Nations…

“One Day in September” is available at YouTube in its entirety. It is a very disturbing film. Its subject matter is, of course, a vile and audacious act of murderous terrorism by a group that’s since become the darling of the Western world. But it’s also difficult and immensely frustrating to relive the incident step by step as an observer; one wants to reach out and change history. The film also (in my opinion) is too graphic in some of its photos of the victims; we don’t need those to understand the heinousness of the perpetrators’ acts. But I recommend that you watch it. You will be outraged all over again, not only at the perpetrators themselves, but at the mind-bogglingly inept bungling of the German authorities—and then at how history and public opinion has played out.

The recovery…

The New Neo Posted on by

…remains anemic:

So the recession was deeper, and the recovery has been slower, than previously believed. That really isn’t news to those of us out here in the real world where economic statistics only tell part of the story, but it’s worth keeping in mind. As far as the future goes, it seems rather obvious that the economy is going to remain weak for the remainder of 2012 at the very least.

And now for something completely different

The New Neo Posted on by

In a conversation the other day, I brought up this memorably creepy episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which featured the great Peter Lorre and the great Steve McQueen in a Roald Dahl story.

No one there remembered it, although they were of an age to have watched it and had been big fans of the program. So go figure.

And sure enough, just as I suspected, the whole thing’s on YouTube:

[NOTE: The woman in the opening scene is Neile Adams, McQueen’s wife at the time.]

Remembering United Flight 232

The New Neo Posted on by

Last week was the 23rd anniversary of the United Flight 232 air disaster that occurred in Sioux City, Iowa, on July 19 1989. I happened to come across this piece written by Captain Al Haynes, a bona fide hero of the incident. It’s a remarkable personal and emotional document as well as a historical one, and fascinating in its ability to shed light on the decision-making process a crew goes through in order that passengers can have a chance of surviving in such a grave situation.

Here’s Haynes’ description of how the crisis began:

The rest of the flight crew members were sitting there, on this beautiful day after lunch, having a cup of coffee, watching the world go by, when without any warning whatsoever there was a very loud explosion. At first, I thought it was a decompression. It was that loud and that sudden. But there was no rush of air, no change of pressure and no condensation of the air in the aircraft. So I had to figure it was something else. I saw Bill immediately grab the control yoke and the red warning lights illuminate for the autopilot. He had cut the autopilot off, I thought, and I assumed that he was taking over manual control of the aircraft. Now, I thought, we have taken care of step one in any emergency and that is that someone flies the aircraft. We have had a number of accidents in commercial aviation because everybody was working on the problem which sometimes is not a big problem in the first place, and no one is flying the aircraft. So step one, in any training centre, is that somebody flies the aircraft. That is a little difficult if you are going to be by yourself. But that is still the first thing you have to do: fly the aircraft.

It turns out that the situation was one previously thought to be impossible. Despite all the built-in protection of the aircraft’s design, the breakage of an engine fan disc took out all the airliner’s controls at once, leading to a situation that seems to have been truly unprecedented for a plane of this size:

The manner in which the engine failed resulted in high-speed shrapnel being hurled from the engine; this shrapnel penetrated the hydraulic lines of all three independent hydraulic systems on board the aircraft, which rapidly lost their hydraulic fluid. As the flight controls on the DC-10 are hydraulically powered, the flight crew lost their ability to operate nearly all of them. Despite these losses, the crew were able to attain and then maintain limited control by using the only systems still workable: the two remaining engines. By utilizing each engine independently, the crew made rough steering adjustments, and by using the engines together they were able to roughly adjust altitude.

Haynes reports:

With all those pilots on board, I then said the dumbest thing I ever said in my life: “I’ve got it”. Well, I took control of the aircraft, but I surely did not know what I was going to do with it. Bill was absolutely right – the aircraft was not responding to the control inputs. As the aircraft reached about 38 degrees of bank on its way toward rolling over on its back, we slammed the number one (left) throttle closed and firewalled the number three throttle – and the right wing slowly came back up. I have been asked how we thought to do that; I do not have the foggiest idea. There was nothing left to do, I guess, but it worked. There is another instance where I talk about luck; we tried something that we did not know what to expect from and we discovered that it worked.

For the next few minutes we were trying to fly the aircraft with the yoke and it took both pilots to do it. One person could not handle the yoke by himself because the pressures on it were too great. We both had to do it.

What follows is an amazing and inspiring description of how they flew the plane without controls. Haynes once said, of his emotional state at that time:

We were too busy [to be scared]. You must maintain your composure in the airplane or you will die. You learn that from your first day flying.

Some people are cut out for that line of work; most of us are not. And then training increases their abilities to maintain calm in the face of danger. Although, tragically, 111 people died on Flight 232, 185 lived, thanks in no small part to the incredible calm and quick action of the crew.

But it was not immediately apparent that they had survived:

Rescuers initially ignored the cockpit, as it had been compressed in the crash to approximately waist high and was completely unrecognizable. It was not until 35 minutes after the crash that rescuers discovered that the debris was the cockpit and that the four pilots were still alive inside. All four would recover from their injuries and return to work: Haynes, Records and Dvorak would return in three months, while Fitch, more seriously injured than the others, would return in 11 months

Dennis Fitch, who died nearly three months ago at the age of 69 of a brain tumor, was in the cockpit during the landing and was highly instrumental in helping bring the plane down in relative safety. But he was not part of the original crew—although he was a DC-10 instructor, fate had placed him on board the plane as a passenger, and he was called into the cockpit to help.

What did he have to say about his experience on Flight 232? This:

“For the 30 minutes I was up there,” Fitch said, “I was the most alive I’ve ever been. That is the only way I can describe it to you.”

RIP Dennis Fitch, and all who died on board Flight 232.

Amazon thanks from neo

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed that there were some big ticket items ordered this month through my blog portal to Amazon. Because I have no way to know who orders what, I have no way to know who to thank, so I’ll just solve the problem by thanking everybody.

Thanks!! Although when you order from Amazon through neo-neocon you pay exactly what you would ordinarily pay, I receive between 4% and even sometimes up to 8% of the total. It adds up after a while, because every little bit helps.

Obama’s looking more and more like…

The New Neo Posted on by

…a deer in the headlights.

But a very smooth and audacious deer in the headlights who tells us “who are you going to believe, me and my shills in the MSM or your lying ears?”

The problem is, of course, that this sort of thing might work, because most people just don’t pay close enough attention.

Here’s the video of one of his latest ads:

All Romney need do is make a new ad, showing the part of this ad where Obama is saying his words were taken out of context, and then a clip of what Obama actually said—complete with some of Obama’s words both before and after to provide that context, and to demonstrate that the context was worse than the quote.

But Obama’s counting on the fact that people are already sick of the whole thing, and since the MSM is saying that the quote was taken out of context, they’ll just buy it when he repeats that charge.

Note also that in this ad, Obama claims that in his original speech on small business, “What I said was that we need to stand behind them, as American always has.” Note also that he doesn’t show a clip of himself saying that, and that’s because there isn’t one; he never said those words.

He’s also setting up a false dichotomy, because there would have been no contradiction between him saying “you didn’t build that” to small business owners and also saying, “so we need to stand behind you and help you”—if indeed that had been what he was saying. But it’s not what he was saying, at least according to every ounce of evidence we have about what he did say.

The actual context was very clear: he was exhorting the “successful” to pay more money in taxes. He was saying that the “successful” (and that would have to include successful small businesses with incomes over $250,000) should realize they’re no smarter or hardworking than others who are not successful. But don’t take my word for it; let’s watch the fullest excerpt from the speech that I could find online. It lasts three minutes:

Here’s Obama in full outraged innocence mode about it all:

“I have to tell you, I generally have patience with what the other side says about me, that’s a requirement of this job,” Obama said during a $5,000-per-plate fundraiser here, according to the pool report.

“And if you don’t like folks talking about you, you probably shouldn’t run for president. The one thing I do have no patience for is this argument that somehow what I’m criticizing is success”¦ I want to promote success,” Obama said.

Hey, the best defense is always a good offense, right?

Time (and the Olympics) marches on: Comaneci is 50

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s Olympics time again. I used to be a big fan, but in recent decades I’ve hardly paid attention. The hype is too big, the athletes too interchangeable.

But I came across this clip of Nadia Comaneci, the star of the 1976 Olympics. She’s 50 now, which stunned me, although it shouldn’t have—surely I know that the fierce little girl who wowed the crowd back then would now be all grown up and then some.

I liked her in ’76 not just because of her formidable skills, but because of her stern, tough, no-nonsense demeanor, which I found somehow refreshing compared to the syrupy-sweet cuteness of so many gymnasts.

Here she is:

Nadia grew up to defect and then to marry fellow-gymnast Bart Conner, and to have a baby at the age of 44. Here’s a photo that’s a portent of things to come. It was taken in 1976, when she was a soon-to-be-famous 14-year old and he a well-known 18-year-old.

The kiss was hardly spontaneous; it was orchestrated by a prescient photographer, as this article written in 1995 (when they were engaged) makes clear:

Before the revolution in Romania, before the political defections, before the Olympics, before the perfect 10, before anything was possible. Madison Square Garden. March 28, 1976. The American Cup Gymnastics Competition.

The little girl from Romania is hoping to do well in the Olympics later that year. She wins the women’s trophy in the New York competition. She is 14. The towheaded boy from Chicago, on his way to the University of Oklahoma, wins the men’s trophy. It is his 18th birthday. The photographers pose the winners together.

“Give her a little kiss,” one of the photographers calls out, and the boy leans over, dutifully, and kisses the little girl on the cheek.

Years later, Conner will remind her about that moment. He remembers it all. But for Comaneci, it is part of a youth that was lost in training and competition and the painful search for a perfect score in an imperfect life.

“I just remember it was some little blond guy,” she teases.

Here’s another little blond boy:

Romney: the authentically nice politician?

The New Neo Posted on by

“Authentically nice politician”—is that a double oxymoron?

Not according to Sven Wilson, whose article on the subject was brought to my attention by a reader. I’m in nearly complete agreement with what he says here:

Romney has, as we all know, an “authenticity problem.”…I think most of it is personal and visceral, the way people react to his demeanor, the pitch and texture of his voice, the smile that looks like it was painted on his rugged, handsome face as the finishing touch by a make-up artist. He is always trying to please, to make people like him, to tell people what they want to hear. Of course that is the nature of electioneering. The trick in politics is to craft a finely-tuned, polished message that pushes as many positive buttons as possible and, at the same time, seems genuine and heart-felt. What people see with Mitt is the craft, which makes him seem, well, crafty.

But to me, Mitt’s supposed inauthenticity can be interpreted as a deeply genuine, deeply held aspect of who he is as person…Romney’s attempt to please, to iron out wrinkles, or to give ground is not a faé§ade covering a bitter, nasty ambition. It is his ambition. He is a fixer, a problem solver, a negotiator, a worker, a pragmatist…

…Romney went on to be a Stake President in the [Mormon] church (which is roughly equivalent to the Bishop of a Catholic diocese), where he oversaw a number of Boston-area congregations. This involves…trying to lift people’s burdens, ministering to their needs and, again, dealing with all their crap. A typical stake president is a successful professional…who volunteers countless hours to church administration and ministry. If you were to meet one, you would likely find him an accomplished person, a dedicated family man, and one who might strike you as overly-nice or friendly to a fault. Someone a lot like Mitt Romney, in fact.

But my message is that the niceness is almost always genuine. It is authentic. It has been groomed and refined through years of personal, intimate interactions with people from all walks of life. These include many happy, pleasant, inspiring interactions but also many efforts to help people who are burdened by sin, who are struggling financially, who are spiritually unsettled, who are pathetic in myriad ways. The goal is treat all of these people the same way, with the same warm heart and good will.

In the brutal world of presidential politics, nice usually comes in last. The Romney campaign knows this and has been as negative and brutal as anyone else. And he will take his licks, too. He will be hated and reviled””sometimes for his politics, but often just for who he is and what he stands for.

Sven Wilson is a Mormon; I’m not. But for whatever reason, I’ve known quite a few Mormons very well, and I can say this about all of the ones I’ve known: they are extraordinary people, smart as well as “nice,” without being the least bit phony or inauthentic. One of them was either a Bishop in the Mormon Church or a Stake President (I never paid attention to his exact title), and although he had a certain cornball too-good-to-be-true quality, as far as I can tell he was authenticallly nice.

Of course, he wasn’t a politician. It’s dangerous to consider a politician to be sincere, or a good person. After all, politicians tend to be people who’ve developed dissemblance and lying in the service of persuasion to a fine art—something like the proverbial used car salesman, or con artist. Obama attracted a lot of voters in 2008 because he didn’t seem to be a phony to many people (although I have to say he seemed that way to me pretty early on); they thought he was authentically authentic. Romney repels many voters because he does seem to be a phony (who looks like that and sounds like that any more, golly gee whiz?). And yet paradoxically he most likely isn’t.

So their cynicism makes some voters dislike Romney. Others just don’t like his politics. And some wouldn’t like him even if he were being sincere—maybe especially if he were being sincere. They don’t like his style.

In his post, Wilson reproduced the following picture of the Romneys on vacation. It’s a great example of the sort of Up With People wholesomeness that turns so many off. How can any family look like this? And what’s with the blue outfits—don’t they know Republicans wear red?

[NOTE: I decided to keep the photo a bit too large, the better to see the detail.]