The oldest photos

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Althouse.]

Here’s a fascinating look at the world’s oldest photos. They’re probably older than you think:

But they’re not older than I’d think. That’s because my mother has in her possession a bunch of family photos from the 1850s. If we’ve got personal photos that old (mostly tintypes, I believe), it stands to reason that photos themselves (or to be technical, daguerreotypes) came years earlier.

What’s more, I’ve got something even more rare: home movies from the 1920s on both sides of the family. Each is short, but astounding, at least to me. In one, my mother the thirteen-year-old gets out of the family Model T (or something like that; I’m no car expert) along with her parents and grandparents. My mother, a bit awkward but hammy, poses like a model (and looks like one, too, because she was very slender at the time) in her flapper outfit and cloche.

In the other movie, my father is incredibly handsome and eighteen years old. He’s playing some sort of mini-golf, dressed to the nines in a suit. But then the film segues to a shot of his parents (neither of whom I ever met since they died before I was born) in New York on their way to a Mayday parade. The camera later pans up and down that wonder of wonders, the Woolworth building, tallest in the world.

The sages at TNR chime in: again with the “Newt served his wife with divorce papers when she was in the hospital with cancer” yada-yada-yada

The New Neo Posted on by

Surely there’s enough truth with which to attack Gingrich without resorting to lies. But apparently not, just as I predicted (don’t mean to blow my own horn, but…). First on TNR’s list of terrible things Gingrich has done and said is the following [interpolations mine]:

Gingrich divorced his first wife for Marianne Ginther, whom he began courting while he was still married [true]. He informed his first wife of his plans while she was in the hospital receiving treatment for cancer [false].

There’s no question that Gingrich, who has been married a whopping three times, was unfaithful during his marriages and then married his paramours and made each his next wife. That’s certainly behavior that can be attacked and criticized (although those who defended Ted Kennedy’s and Bill Clinton’s affairs might be subject to a charge of hypocrisy for doing so). But the other story makes for a much more juicy tale in these days when ordinary unfaithfulness has become rather ho-hum.

So, this is our choice: is TNR ignorant of the real story? Or is it fully cognizant of the truth and ignoring it for its own purposes, trusting that its readers will not know the difference and that the lie will achieve its purpose?

It almost doesn’t matter which the answer is; this is not responsible journalism either way. But, as I’ve said before under similar circumstances, don’t sit on a hot stove for them to issue a correction.

Speaking of corrections (and in case you haven’t followed the explanatory link), here’s an excerpt from the article by Gingrich’s daughter, who certainly ought to know what happened:

And as long as I can remember, media coverage about [my father] has contained misstatements of facts. The vast majority are simple mistakes that are easily corrected, understood and rewoven into an ongoing storyline.

But one of them seems to have taken on a life of its own, and simple corrections have not sufficed to set the record straight. Why does this happen? I can’t be sure, but I suspect that the narrative created by these untruths proves to be so much more compelling and more dramatic than what actually happened that it proves irresistible.

I’m talking about the story of my father’s visit to my mother while she was in the hospital in 1980.

…[H]ere’s what happened:

My mother and father were already in the process of getting a divorce, which she requested.

Dad took my sister and me to the hospital to see our mother.

She had undergone surgery the day before to remove a tumor.

The tumor was benign.

Ah, says the left, but Gingrich’s wife says otherwise!

Actually, she doesn’t. For the most part, the two accounts agree on the major facts. Here is Gingrich’s wife’s statement, based on a 1985 WaPo interview:

He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery ”¦ To say I gave up a lot for the marriage is the understatement of the year.

So the divorce was already in the works before the surgery: check. Gingrich brought the girls to see their mother: check. Nowhere is cancer mentioned.

Gingrich’s daughter doesn’t say whether the terms of an already-in-the-works divorce were discussed that day. But the main (and seemingly only) point of disagreement between Gingrich and his first wife on what happened is that he denies he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce during the visit, but concedes they did have an argument. Not all that surprising, if you know anything about divorcing couples.

I’ve also seen reports that Gingrich’s wife had already had some form of cancer prior to this surgery, and had recovered. But I can’t find any credible source on this—although at this point, I must say that I’m not sure what a credible source on the subject would be, since so many media outlets have proven themselves willing to lie or to show callous disregard for the truth.

Oh, and as for the TNR article that started this whole rumination? Once you get past terrible thing #1 and on to the other fourteen they list, you’ll find that many of them contain valid bad marks against Newt (no angel, he). But some of them will make you scratch your head and wonder what’s so terrible about them—except for the fact that they speak some un-PC truths, especially about the left and its agenda.

I’m with Ann Coulter on Romney and Romneycare

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m with Ann Coulter on Romney.

Ordinarily Coulter is hardly a favorite columnist of mine, although this isn’t the first time I’ve agreed with her. But it very much surprises me that she’s touting Romney; I would have thought she’d consider his candidacy anathema because of his supposed RINOism.

Although I very much disagree with her assertion that Romney’s nomination is inevitable—and I also very much disagree with Coulter’s first sentence quoted here—I very much agree with the rest of the following [emphasis mine; the highlighted portion is one of the things I discovered when doing research for the post on Romney and Romneycare that I have yet to write]:

No one is worried Romney will double-cross us on repealing Obamacare. We worry that Romneycare will make it harder for him to get elected.

But, again, Romney is the articulate Republican. He’s already explained how mandating health insurance in one particular wealthy, liberal Northeastern state is different from inflicting it on the entire country. Our Constitution establishes a federalist system that allows experimentation with different ideas in the individual states.

As governor, Romney didn’t have the ability to change federal laws requiring hospital emergency rooms to treat every illegal alien, drug dealer and vagrant who walked in the door, then sending the bill to taxpayers…

The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, supported Romneycare at the time. The biggest warning sign should have been that Gingrich supported it, too.

Most important, Romney has said — forcefully and repeatedly — that his first day in office he will issue a 50-state waiver from Obamacare and will then seek a formal repeal.

Romney is not going to get to the White House and announce, “The first thing I’m going to do is implement that fantastic national health care plan signed by my pal, Barack!”

I would imagine that some people who read this blog think that’s exactly what Romney will do; that he’s such a RINO and flip-flopper that at heart he’s really a liberal in disguise. But when I look at his record, I look at the entire thing (including an exemplary private life, by the way) and I just don’t see that.

Is Romney my favored candidate? No, no, a thousand times no. But I think, for example, that he’s a much stronger (and more inherently conservative) candidate than John McCain was. McCain seemed old and worn out by the time the 2008 campaign was half-finished, and McCain had neither the brainpower nor the accomplishments in the private sector and business sense that Romney has.

Sometimes I think the reason so many people dislike Romney so much isn’t just Obamacare, it’s the fact that he looks as though he was sent from central casting to play a president. He doesn’t seem quite real—nor does he seem to be 64, his actual age.

Nevertheless I’m with Coulter (again!) on this:

Instead of sitting on our thumbs, wishing Ronald Reagan were around, or chasing the latest mechanical rabbit flashed by the media, conservatives ought to start rallying around Romney as the only Republican who has a shot at beating Obama.

I think those who think otherwise are dreaming; none of the other candidates can do it, and Romney actually can. The electorate is not a conservative echo chamber, although some blogs are.

I’m not suggesting you vote for him in the primaries if you prefer another candidate. But to refuse to vote for Romney if he’s the nominee against Obama seems very wrong. I think that’s a short-sighted effort to preserve your own purity and that of the Republican Party (even though that purity doesn’t exist, never existed, and never will exist, except if Republicans become a marginal third party someday) at the cost of setting the nation on a better path now—before the changes are irrevocable.

And don’t tell me both parties are interchangeable. They’re both highly flawed, indeed. But there are differences, and I consider that right now the Republican Party represents the lesser of two evils. And right now my plan is to vote for that party’s nominee.

Pilot trapped in bathroom

The New Neo Posted on by

This seems both scary and embarrassing in equal measure:

“The captain has disappeared in the back and, uh, I have someone with a thick foreign accent trying to access the cockpit right now”¦,” the co-pilot reported.

“What I’m being told is he’s stuck in the lav,” the co-pilot continued. “Someone with a thick foreign accent is giving me a password to access the cockpit, and I’m not about to let him in.”

Not willing to take any chances themselves, air controllers on the ground ordered the plane, operated by regional carrier Chautauqua Airlines, to make an emergency landing.

Before the co-pilot was forced to make that emergency landing, however, the pilot was able to open the bathroom door, and calm his anxious colleagues.

But what I do not understand is why the pilot didn’t press that little alarm/call button they have in all the bathrooms on airplanes. Aren’t pilots supposed to be noted for presence of mind in emergencies? The solution this pilot came up with—giving a passenger the code for entering the cockpit—seems an extremely poor one, bound to cause consternation and even panic in the crew.

My guess? Embarrassment won out, and the pilot didn’t want to make a big fuss by sounding the alarm. Of course, he ended up making a much bigger fuss, and the news (and this blog) as well.

Another public service announcement on shingles

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: A while back I wrote this post to warn readers to be on the alert for the rash of shingles, because the illness can be devastating and early detection and treatment can help avoid the worst of the complications. Doctors and sufferers seem to often not recognize the first signs, so I am moved to post a warning again because of the following event.]

A while back I was talking on the phone to a friend of mine and she happened to mention that she had a small rash on her face. It looked like little blisters or pimples, and was really disturbing to her because, after all, wasn’t adolescence supposed to be over now that she was in her 50s? From whence came this foul acne resurgence?

Because of certain previous events in my life, I’ve become shingles-vigilant, and so I asked her whether she’d thought of shingles as a possibility. “It can be on the face, you know,” I said. And since I was at my computer anyway, I sent her some photos of facial shingles for comparison to her affliction.

No, she said, it didn’t really look like what she had. Well, maybe a little. Maybe just one or two of the pictures. And then she read a link I sent her about shingles in general, and she didn’t think it quite fit.

We didn’t see each other for a while (busy, busy, busy!) and I promptly forgot about our exchange. And then a couple of days ago I got a call from that same friend.

She sounded distraught. No, forget distraught: she sounded absolutely dreadful, as though she were being squeezed in a vise.

“For the last four days I’ve had the world’s worst headache,” she said, her voice barely recognizable, so tight with pain it was. “And I’m terribly nauseated and haven’t been able to sleep.”

This was alarming. It sounded to me like status migrainosis, where a migraine gets locked in and just goes on and on and on.

I encouraged her to go to the doctor again (she’d been two days earlier and they’d said she had a sinus headache and had given her antibiotics). It didn’t sound like any sinus headache I’d ever heard of, nor did it sound like she was being a wimp. It sounded dreadful and perhaps even dangerous.

I didn’t hear from her for a couple of days, despite my leaving several messages on her phone with mounting concern. And then I got the news: she’d been in the hospital. She was still there. And they now were saying it was herpes zoster: shingles, with its sequel of neuralgia.

But when I went to visit her I discovered the news was even worse: the diagnosis was actually herpes zoster ophthalmicus. In other words, shingles of the eye.

I’ll skip some of the details except the most salient ones: it can damage vision. It can cause long-lasting, intractable, and extremely severe pain that is very difficult to treat. It can (as you already know from this story) be hard to diagnose at first, and difficult to distinguish from more ordinary rashes.

My friend is still in the hospital. Right now the only thing that seems to control her pain is to knock her out. They’re trying to get the right combination of drugs to help her so that she can be released. I hope that her pain will ultimately resolve and her vision will be unaffected, as is true of most sufferers. But in the meantime her anguish is profound, and this could go on for a long, long time.

So what’s the point of this post? Simply this: please be aware of what shingles looks like [link warning: upsetting photos] and how it works. And even if your rash doesn’t seem to quite match the photos or your symptoms the descriptions, hie yourself to a doctor immediately and let him/her take a look.

And if you’re in your 50s or 60s, consider getting the vaccine.

This is the way…

The New Neo Posted on by

…one wing of the attack on Gingrich will go: he may seem to be an articulate intellectual, but he’s really a stupidhead.

And now that Gingrich is officially the Republican frontrunner du jour, Joan Walsh chimes in right on schedule (and as predicted in the last sentence of this post of mine) with that old canard:

Gingrich is probably best known for serving his wife with divorce papers while she was recovering from cancer surgery, so he could marry his mistress, whom he later divorced to marry a staffer. But he’s also probably the only politician, who when you’re asked “What’s the worst thing he’s done?” has done a lot of things that rival leaving his cancer-stricken wife for his mistress.

Why tell the truth when a lie will do a lot better for your purposes? The correction—which any journalist worth his/her salt ought to know about—can be found here.

And don’t sit on a hot stove till Walsh issues a retraction. Note, also, in the comments section of her article that her readers seem blissfully unaware of her error.

Dance interlude: meet Moses Pendleton

The New Neo Posted on by

The following is a long video. You might want to watch the whole thing, or only a portion. But either way you’ll get an introduction to a gifted and exceedingly quirky individual: dancer Moses Pendleton, New Englander, scion of the Pendleton woolen company, and founding member of the acclaimed and ground-breaking modern dance troupes Pilobolus and Momix (he’s still the artistic director of the latter).

I enjoyed the following documentary about Pendleton when I saw it on television in 1982, and tried to record it on an old and scratchy Beta videorecorder (yes, Beta). That tape is all but irretrievable and unwatchable, so imagine my delight when I round it online recently.

Be patient; I think this video will reward you if you watch it. Pendleton is that rarity, a dancer who is intentionally and successfully comic, and yet also at times quite reflective. His life has not been altogether easy, as you will see, and he’s been blessed (or cursed) with a unique sensibility that I would imagine can at times be trying, both to himself and those who might have the guts to live with him.

So here he is, the man from Momix, Moses Pendleton, about thirty years ago:

MOSES PENDLETON PRESENTS MOSES PENDLETON from J. Mitchell Johnson on Vimeo.

Is the milk of human kindness genetic? (plus: update on the Sandusky case)

The New Neo Posted on by

Research indicates that some people seem to naturally have more empathy than others, and onlookers can tell the difference by watching them listen to people relating tales about sad events in their lives.

That would explain a lot, but perhaps not as much as one might think. The somewhat less empathic people aren’t sociopaths; they just lack as much natural ability in this arena. Nurture can change things. And of course it remains to be seen whether this research will be validated and repeated over time.

I’ve long puzzled over a phenomenon I’ve noticed: that some people who have been abused (either sexually or emotionally or physically or some combination of the three) will vow never to do that to another human being, and in some cases choose to enter professions where they try to prevent further abuse and/or heal others who have suffered in the same way. But a not insignificant percentage of abuse victims will take a very different path, going on to re-enact their own abuse by inflicting it on others. It’s as though they lack empathy, not just towards others but towards their former selves, and instead identify with and take on the mantle of the aggressor.

What accounts for the different choices between these two groups? A moralist would say the first chooses good and the second evil. But when we ask “why” in psychological terms, the answer is that we don’t know, although perhaps this kindness gene may come into play in some fashion.

Speaking of abuse, there are some new developments in the Sandusky cse. He has denied being an abuser, which should come as no surprise whatsoever. But even the mere fact that the guy has repeatedly showered with young boys (to which he’s admitted) makes him exceedingly suspect.

In general, I try to preserve the presumption of innocence, and were I one of Sandusky’s jurors I would certainly do so. But I’m not, and there’s so much smoke there (and of a certain type: eyewitnesses for several incidents, and many children coming forward separately with reports of abuse that resemble each other in approach and venue) that one is almost forced to assume a rather large and nasty fire.

Nevertheless, we’ve also got the fact that Sandusky’s lawyer (who has his own somewhat troubled past) reports that the child in the 2002 shower rape incident (or someone the lawyer has supposedly identified as having been that child) says it never happened and that there was no rape. That could mean either that (a) it’s not the same person; or (b) the lawyer is lying and the alleged victim is not saying that; or (c) the alleged victim is frightened of the publicity or was paid off to be quiet; or (d) the alleged victim has repressed the memory; or (e) the rape actually did not occur and it was McQueary who was lying or mistaken when he reported that he witnessed it.

Hard to believe, though, that McQueary would have any motivation to lie in order to implicate Sandusky as a rapist—and, by implication, himself, for not doing enough to stop him.

And now, just to make things even more complex, there are reports that McQueary has changed his story to make himself out to be more of a hero than before [hat tip: commenter “Wolla Dalbo”]. He’s purportedly been sending out emails to friends saying that, rather than walking away, he intervened to stop the rape before reporting it.

So now it’s McQueary who appears to have changed his story, at least part of it. Do this impeach him as a witness? Remember that, according to the grand jury, the report of the incident with Victim 2 (the anal rape in the shower) rests entirely on McQueary’s say-so, because the child (who would now be grown up, like all the other victims) never testified and never was interviewed. Also, it was McQueary’s word against that of Paterno, Curley, and Schultz, who all said that McQueary had not reported a crime such as anal rape to them, but rather some vague suspicious behavior in the shower.

Of course, Victim 2’s testimony is not needed in order for us to believe Sandusky guilty. The entire body of evidence is quite convincing: many victims, now in their early twenties, have testified to a wide range of sexually abusive behavior on his part—from inappropriate and suspicious touching all the way to oral sex and one attempt (rebuffed) at anal sex. Most of this behavior occurred in the shower, as with alleged Victim 2. But in order to understand exactly what happened at Penn State—what McQueary saw and especially what he told Paterno and the others about what he saw—his own veracity is important. And it just may have become more questionable.