Twins under the skin

The New Neo Posted on by

James and Daniel Kelly are fraternal twins, two handsome young men who live in England. Unlike identical twins, fraternal twins are genetically no more similar than any two siblings of the same parents; they just happen to be the result of the release of two eggs in one ovulation cycle, both of which manage to win the conception sweepstakes and be fertilized and then born.

James and Daniel Kelly, however, look a bit more different than most fraternal twins of the same sex, because one of the characteristics on which they vary is a trait into which we usually put of lot of meaning, that of skin color:

James and Daniel are different in other ways, as fraternal twins often are. James (the darker twin) is gay, outgoing, and an excellent student. Daniel is heterosexual, shy, and more inclined to non-academic pursuits. Strangely enough, it’s Daniel who’s received more of the racial taunts throughout his school life, mostly from confused fellow-students who learn of his ancestry (white mother, black Jamaican father) and see his brother and get angry at Daniel for trying to “pass.”

But how is it that this could happen, biologically speaking? As the article makes clear, a Jamaican would be very likely to have quite a few genes for white or light skin color, and these could end up being expressed in some of that person’s children. It usually doesn’t happen in as dramatic a way as with the Kelly twins. But it can certainly happen with siblings, and does with a certain amount of regularity.

One of the little-known facts about race and fraternal twins is that there’s another way to get a birth in which one twin appears black and one white: if a woman has sex with two men, one black and one white, in fairly close temporal proximity to each other, and she happens to be releasing more than one egg. In a case such as that, if both eggs are fertilized during the same cycle but there are two different fathers, you can get a situation like this.

This was not the case with the Kellys, where the twins have only one father—nor with the Hodgsons, a couple in which both mother and father are of mixed-race parentage, and who had these adorable female fraternal twins:

And this one may just blow your mind—the Durrant-Spooners.

Yes, you saw that right: two sets of fraternal twins with different racial characteristics. Isn’t nature amazing?

More from the left on why the right should dislike Christie

The New Neo Posted on by

The Atlantic jumps on the same bandwagon as New York magazine. It almost makes me wonder whether there really is some chance that Christie might run, so eager is the opposition to be ever-so-helpful in pointing out to the right why his stances are heresies.

Heresies is an interesting word, is it not? It encapsulates so much: the idea of politics as religion, for example. The left likes to assert it’s the right that thinks that way, and that it’s the left that’s really the fact-based, reality-based community. But it doesn’t take much study of the left to observe its quasi-religious nature, and how it deals with apostates (as I’ve learned from bitter experience as the latter).

Oh, and what are Christie’s heresies anyway, as expressed in last night’s speech at the Reagan library (the mother church, as it were), according to the article’s author Conor Friedersdorf? These four:

(1) Compromise is core to politics, a necessary characteristic of good leadership, and the only way to solve problems…

(2) American exceptionalism isn’t a natural state of being or an inheritance — it is something to which we aspire, and we’re presently falling short…

(3) Americans should care what foreigners think of us…

(4) Americans cannot remake the world in our image through force.

To further eludicate Christie’s “heresies,” Friedersdorf fleshes them out from Christie’s speech in ways that make it clear that they’re mostly well within the mainstream of conservative thought. For example, for number 4, he quotes Christie as saying, “We need to limit ourselves overseas to what is in our national interest so that we can rebuild the foundations of American power here at home – foundations that need to be rebuilt in part so that we can sustain a leadership role in the world for decades to come.” When I last checked, that would be an excellent example of a conservative foreign policy principle, one to which even neocons would heartily subscribe. It just depends on what the definition of “in our national interest” is.

As for American exceptionalism, all you need do is to check out the text of Christie’s speech and you’ll find nothing about exceptionalism that should rile a conservative. Christie makes it clear that American exceptionalism is many things—a tradition and a vision that must continually be demonstrated by deeds. His point is that we can’t rest on our exceptionalist laurels:

That is American exceptionalism. Not a punch line in a political speech, but a vision followed by a set of principled actions that made us the envy of the world. Not a re-election strategy, but an American revitalization strategy.

How very controversial.

It’s all moot, anyway, because IMHO Christie’s not running in 2012.

The sound of the 9/11 memorial

The New Neo Posted on by

Around the time of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 I wrote a post about the new 9/11 Memorial at the site. From the photos and the descriptions of the installation, it looked like a moving and profound tribute.

Now I read about an additional quality of the memorial that I hadn’t heard mentioned before—its sound:

As one nears the pools across the light-gray granite paving stones installed by Walker, the murmur of rushing water rises from the cascades that pour Niagara-like down all four sides of the sunken fountains. The sound becomes louder and louder, until it reaches such a steady crescendo that the noise of the surrounding city, even from the construction going on very close by, is drowned out completely…

The propulsive aural and visual excitement of the three-story-deep waterfall and its mysterious disappearance captures and holds your attention in a way most unusual for the static medium of conventional architecture. That distraction makes one’s next perception all the more shocking, as you focus on the names of the victims, incised into the continuous tilted rim of bronze tablets that surround each pool.

The initial perspective provided by the cascades mimics a technique employed in classical Japanese gardens, through which one’s gaze is briefly diverted by a change in paving, screening, or some other element to dramatize a coming transition. Here, after you take in the diaphanous waterfalls, you discover spread out before you at waist level the names, the names, the names. Nearly three thousand victims””not only those lost at the World Trade Center, but also those who died at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania””are memorialized with their names inscribed in Hermann Zapf’s classic Optima typeface of 1952”“1955 (an elegant, slightly flaring sans-serif font), with the letters cut through the bronze so they can be backlit after dark. This is a typographic tour de force.

I am very much looking forward to seeing (and hearing) this and judging for myself.

Libya’s missiles have gone missing

The New Neo Posted on by

This should come as absolutely no surprise. And yet it seems to have done so, for a bunch of nameless “U.S. officials”:

U.S. officials had once thought there was little chance that terrorists could get their hands on many of the portable surface-to-air missiles that can bring down a commercial jet liner.

But now that calculation is out the window, with officials at a recent secret White House meeting reporting that thousands of them have gone missing in Libya.

“Matching up a terrorist with a shoulder-fired missile, that’s our worst nightmare,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D.-California, a member of the Senate’s Commerce, Energy and Transportation Committee.

The nightmare has been made real with the discovery in Libya that an estimated 20,000 portable, heat-seeking missiles have gone missing from unguarded Army weapons warehouses.

The missiles, four to six-feet long and Russian-made, can weigh just 55 pounds with launcher. They lock on to the heat generated by the engines of aircraft, can be fired from a vehicle or from a combatant’s shoulder, and are accurate and deadly at a range of more than two miles.

Earth to U.S. officials: when you’ve got a revolt in a country like Libya with some fairly high-tech munitions, and the autocratic government there falls, a lot of stuff becomes ripe for the picking. And a lot of it will be just the kind of stuff that terrorists love.

Not that there’s anything the U.S. really could have done about it. Our presence in Libya helped topple Gaddafi and has helped those still-mysterious rebels, but our footprint in that country has been very light.

But now that the horse is out of the barn, we’re trying:

…[A] State Department expert “is on the ground in Libya working with the [Transitional National Council],” the rebels’ interim government, to develop a “control and destruction program” for the missiles. Vietor also said the administration has sent five specialists to help the TNC “secure, recover and destroy” weapons, including surface-to-air missiles.

Good luck. Here’s a possible, but very costly, remedy:

Now there are calls in Congress to give jets that fly overseas the same protection military aircraft have.

“I think we should ensure that the wide-bodied planes all have this protection,” said Sen. Boxer, who first spoke to ABC News about the surface-to-air security threat in 2006. “And that’s a little more than 500 of these planes.”

According to Boxer, it would cost about a million dollars a plane for a system that has been installed and successfully tested over the last few years, directing a laser beam into the incoming missile.

Christie hasn’t even entered the race—but just in case he does…

The New Neo Posted on by

…well then, New York magazine has provided this helpful guide for Republicans as to why they’d hate Christie if they really knew him. And you can be sure that, if Christie ever did officially announce, we’d immediately come to “know” him even better (courtesy of the MSM), in ways that we still don’t know Obama.

Oh, and the article also repeats the incorrect-but-popular meme about Perry, “Rick Perry claims that climate change is a hoax that scientists have concocted as a way to get more funding. ” Hey, why get it right when you can be a lot more damaging by exaggerating and misrepresenting what Perry really said? And what’s more, in doing the latter, you’ll be following in the august footsteps of Tom Friedman, whom I criticized a while back this way:

Friedman is so busy laughing at Perry that he doesn’t even bother to distinguish between global warming and anthropogenic global warming, although it’s the latter about which Perry made his skeptical remarks.

[NOTE: As for what Perry actually said, if anyone missed it, here’s Perry at a recent Republican debate [emphasis mine]:

Q:… Just recently in New Hampshire, you said that weekly and even daily scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?

PERRY: Well, I do agree that there is — the science is — is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at — at — at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just — is nonsense. I mean, it — I mean — and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

And later in the debate, when asked again, Perry answered [emphasis mine]:

The fact of the matter is, the science is not settled on whether or not the climate change is being impacted by man to the point where we’re going to put America’s economics in jeopardy.

And here’s Perry in another speech [emphasis mine]:

I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into, that a group of scientists, who in some cases were found to be manipulating this data.

From what I’ve been able to find, in discussing these issues Perry has been a lot more careful than his critics to make it clear that what he’s questioning is AGW, not global warming itself. Now, you may question both—and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, so does Perry. But my point is that he has shown a fair of amount of care in making the distinction between the two in his public remarks, and in saying that it’s AGW he’s questioning. But the press has—either purposely or carelessly or through some combination of the two—gotten it wrong fairly consistently.

Speaking of which—here’s the Times in “The Caucus” mischaracterizing those last remarks of Perry’s I quoted. The Times leaves out that little word “anthropogenic”:

Mr. Perry acknowledged that “yes, our climate has changed,” but said he was skeptical that global warming was the cause.

Why do I continue to hammer away at this, at the risk of being a bloody bore? It still fascinates me how incredibly sloppy and/or mendacious the highly-respected holier-than-thou MSM regularly is, and to see how these memes spread like wildfire (to coin a phrase).]

Getting the milk for free

The New Neo Posted on by

Sex comes cheap these days. Literally.

I don’t know about you, but I feel sad when I read things like this. And it’s not a women vs. men thing for me; I think both sexes are losing a lot in terms of love, joy, and commitment in these transactions:

Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the “price” of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists.

More than 25% of young women report giving it up within the first week of dating. While researchers don’t have a baseline to compare it to, interviews they have conducted lead them to believe this is higher than before, which increases the pressure on other women and changes the expectations of men.

…Sex is so cheap that researchers found a full 30% of young men’s sexual relationships involve no romance at all — no wooing, dating, goofy text messaging. Nothing. Just sex.

Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same — one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered.

Obama and the Jewish janitors

The New Neo Posted on by

Was Obama really saying “Jew” rather than “janitor” here? You be the judge:

I think it’s clear that he actually was going to say not Jew but “judicial activist.”

No, it really was “junior high school teacher.” Or maybe “jewelry repairman.”

Do I hear “judo instructor?”

Now that we’ve had our fun, I have to say that these sort of gaffes don’t interest me much. All politicians are subject to some tongue-slippage. Obama’s however, can be very odd indeed.

Obama, Perry, science, and the Texas wildfires

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess (sniffle; sigh) neither Rick Perry nor Barack Obama read neo-neocon at PJ, although Obama may be a secret Thomas Friedman fan.

Here’s an excerpt from my PJ article of 9/18 [emphasis mine]:

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times jokingly calls Perry crazy for alleging that “climate change is some fraud perpetrated by scientists trying to gin up money for research.” But Friedman is so busy laughing at Perry that he doesn’t even bother to distinguish between global warming and anthropogenic global warming, although it’s the latter about which Perry made his skeptical remarks. What’s more, in citing record-setting Texas drought and wildfires in order to mock Perry for doubting the obvious reality of global warming, Friedman makes one of the most basic errors of all in the global warming debate: confusing weather with climate.

So now Obama—at the type of venue where he tends to be most hard-hitting and most controversial, a fundraiser—took a leaf from Friedman’s tired old book:

At a fundraiser in San Jose, Calif., Obama said that some in the audience might be former Republicans “but are puzzled by what’s happening to that party,” and voters should back him if they believe in a “fact-based” America.

I mean has anybody been watching the debates lately?” Obama said. “You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.

It would be almost amusing, if it weren’t so sad, that Obama makes the same basic error* as Friedman and yet mocks Perry for not getting the science right. And from a quick perusal of the comments to the linked article at The Hill, it seems that readers there haven’t noticed the contradiction, either (in comments such as, for example, at 3:38, “Republicans don’t like facts. They reject science and anything that comes in the way of their backwards ideas”).

I’m not sure anyone’s calling Obama on this stuff. If so I haven’t seen it so far, so I guess it’s up to me. The Perry camp has responded in a different manner, saying, ” It’s outrageous President Obama would use the burning of 1,500 homes, the worst fires in state history, as a political attack.”

But I think it’s more outrageous to confuse weather with climate, and at the same time imply that it’s your opponent who’s scientifically ignorant.

(And yes, I know Obama was making a joke. But it was a stupid and self-contradictory one, not to mention being unfunny.)

[*NOTE: Actually, there are two rather basic errors that both Friedman and Obama make. The first is the one I’ve emphasized, using localized weather (Texas drought and wildfires) as an indication of the truth of climate change. The second is their failure to distinguish between global warming and anthropogenic global warming in their descriptions of Perry’s position. For what it’s worth, he has stated in the debates and elsewhere that he believes global warming is occurring. His doubt involves the “human-caused” aspect of it.]

A dance to take your mind off whatever ails you

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a video of a dancer whose skills are stunning. I’m not at all sure I like this type of dance (some sort of modernized combination of Michael Jackson squared and Marcel Marceau, with a bit of Martha Graham thrown in). But I am quite sure that I am in awe of the dancer’s formidable skills.

He has complete control of every muscle and joint in the human body and then some—an almost superhuman ability to isolate each small muscle and fire it or relax it at will, particularly in his hyper-articulated torso (the music, on the other hand, is boring, repetitive, and offputting):

Here is a post about the dancer’s identity: 29-year-old Marquese Scott, who calls himself NONSTOP and lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia. From observation only, my guess is that he’s one of many dancers and entertainers (and ordinary people as well) who have hypermotility. But hypermotility alone won’t do the trick; this stuff takes an amount of practice that must amount to an obsession.

[Hat tip: Ann Althouse.]

On justice and the law

The New Neo Posted on by

Towards the end of the Troy Davis thread there was an interesting discussion in the comments section that I thought would be worth giving a post of its own.

The topic? Justice and the law. The two, unforunately, are not exactly the same.

First up, commenter Wolla Dalbo:

I might note that the majority of the professors that taught me at the mid-tier Eastern seaboard law school I attended in the mid 1970s made it quite explicitly clear that “the Law” had nothing to do with either Truth, Justice, Morality or even very much to do with the Constitution, and that, apparently, they were just there to teach me the mentality, the rules and tricks of the Trade or “Game” so that I, as a hired gun, could win for my clients, and earn a good living…

Obviously, I was far more naive and far less cynical than I should have been, but for the first time in my life and academic career I heard professors espousing things that I considered to be evil, ideas and values that I wanted to have nothing to do with. Such a proud, “in your face,” grasping, cynical, and amoral Luciferian attitude on the part of my “professors” was one of the main reasons I left law school after I passed my finals and won my moot court case at the end of my first year, and never looked back.

Next we have commenter Don Carlos:

Neo rebuts, “the other point is that the 22+ years of appeals required Davis to prove he was innocent, which is not an acceptable standard.”

Well, that’s how it worked, and works. There were evidently no other grounds for mandating a new trial, no procedural errors. It was 22+ years of due process. Due process. That you don’t approve of the result, and thus the process”¦.Well, it is acceptable to me…

As Wolla pointed out, the Law often has not as much to do with Justice as it does with debate, a human exercise with winners and losers where no one bats 1000.

And here’s my response to Don Carlos, in which I reference Wolla Dalbo’s observations:

Wolla Dalbo described a cynicism at the law school he attended, a cynicism about justice that offended him and was probably at least part of the reason he quit law school. That does not mean that all law schools are like that (they are not, although cynicism is indeed rife in the law, at law schools, and among lawyers). However, this cynicism is irrelevant to what we as citizens should desire from the law, or even what the law aspires to itself””which is justice.

The entire adversary system of law in this country, which relies on what you call debate (although of course it is a very stylized debate, with many rules, and a debate mainly through the proxy of interrogating witnesses and cross-examining them), has as an ideal the closest approximation of justice possible. The thought is that, through evenly matched adversaries presenting the case for each side, justice is obtained.

Yes, it very often””all too often””is not obtained. But we need to strive for it as much as possible, and that is what my post is trying to do. The cynicism you display when you write that the law is not about justice but is “a human exercise with winners and losers where no one bats 1000”³ is dismaying and offputting. You may just shrug at the injustice done to the “losers,” as though this is a baseball game, but I do not.

Now it’s your turn. Argue on!

Christie: the great fat hope

The New Neo Posted on by

Chris Christie—or people in his retinue, or reporters in the MSM—are like Lucy and the football to the Republican electorate’s Charlie Brown: tempting, teasing, and ultimately (at least so far) not delivering.

Now come new rumors, much like the old rumors, that the reluctant Christie is considering giving in to entreaties and running for president in 2012.

I’m going to go on record here and make a prediction, something I don’t do too often: Christie won’t run. But I would like it if he did— despite his relative inexperience and the fact that as soon as he announced the press would dig up all the dirt on him—because he’s got some assests the other candidates don’t have, mostly a straight-shooting hard-hitting persona that is nevertheless full of humor, wit, intelligence, cojones, common sense, and the ability to speak extemporaneously with flair and brilliance. I also like most of the policies he’s instituted in New Jersey during his (admittedly brief) tenure as governor.

And I like the fact that he’s fat.

Yes, you heard that right: I like the fact that he’s fat. I’m sick and tired of Ken-doll candidates and their slickness. If that’s shallow (or reverse-shallow?) of me, so be it.

It’s said that fat candidates don’t have a chance. I think it’s quite different where Christie’s concerned, as NJ Democratic ex-governor and Christie opponent in 2010 Corzine discovered during the 2010 election. When Corzine tried to use Christie’s adipose in a campaign ad against him, he found Christie throwing his considerable weight against Corzine in a jujitsu move that ended up decking the slimmer Democrat.

Watch out for the fat guy; he’s a fighter. But I still don’t think he’ll run this time.

A Texan looks at Rick Perry…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and says he’s a bad debater, but should that matter all that much?:

A primary fight is: Who could win? Who should win?

Two different questions.

I think he could win. Should win is up to him…Perry apologists do him no favor by excusing poor performance, or muddled responses, he needs a wake up call…

I’m confident that he can govern as President the way I’d want a President to govern. He’ll go after the EPA, Obamacare, taxes, drilling in the Gulf, over-regulation, intrusive Federal government. All that stuff I care about a lot.

He still has to make the case that he should be leading the charge. Because there are an awful lot of conservatives out there, who he needs to convince. He hasn’t done that.

I do think he could. But it’s on him to do it.

Which is more important, talk or action? I say action. But talk goes to the issue of electability. In his first intense public scrutiny, Perry’s talk is threatening to do him in.