James Lipton is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…an obnoxious guy whose “Inside the Actors Studio” interviews I can’t abide. But there’s one thing about him you’ve got to admire.

How old to you think he is? Fifties? Sixties? Seventy at the absolute latest?

No. Lipton is 85. And that is one of the most astounding facts I’ve heard in a long time.

Another fountain of youth is Pauley Perrette, the girl with the pigtails on NCIS.

I shouldn’t say “girl,” though. She’s 42, very close to 43:

[NOTE: Both facts were brought to my attention by the helpful folks here.]

Religion and public office: Santorum’s nausea

The New Neo Posted on by

Rick Santorum certainly doesn’t mind saying controversial things. The latest to hit the MSM are these statements, which seem wrong on several levels:

In remarks last year at the College of Saint Mary Magdalen in Warner, N.H., Santorum had told the crowd of J.F.K.’s famous 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, “Earlier in my political career, I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up. You should read the speech.”…

On Sunday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Santorum whether he stood by his statement last year…

Santorum defended his remarks, telling Stephanopoulos that “the first line, first substantive line in the speech, says, ”˜I believe in America where the separation of church and state is absolute.’”

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Santorum said. “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.”…

“Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, ”˜No, faith is not allowed in the public square. I will keep it separate.’ Go on and read the speech. ”˜I will have nothing to do with faith. I won’t consult with people of faith.’ It was an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960.”

Later in the interview, Stephanopoulos asked Santorum, “You think you wanted to throw up?”

“Well, yes, absolutely,” Santorum replied. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up.”

So Santorum not only said it, but he repeated it.

What’s wrong with Santorum’s statement? The “throw-up” part is not only “unpresidential” in tone—making Santorum sound too emotionally fragile and reactive (imagine, for example, if a woman had said it)—but more importantly, Santorum is misstating Kennedy’s position.

I happen to have already read Kennedy’s speech, and I even wrote about it in 2007 at some length. Nowhere in the speech does Kennedy say or even indicate that “people of faith have no role in the public square.” In fact, he says that he himself is a man of faith:

But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith, nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.”

“My church”—it’s pretty explicit, isn’t it?

What Kennedy was saying is something different. He stated that no Church officials would dictate to him how to make decisions. But he never said that his conscience (a word he uses a great deal in the speech, and which has a traditional meaning in Catholicism) is completely devoid of religious sentiment and feeling, or uninformed by his religion in any way.

It’s Santorum’s statement that might make a lot of voters “almost throw up,” especially when he says [emphasis mine]: “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.” If he had replaced the words “the church” with “religion” (or “religious people”) and there would be no problem, except that then he would have been in basic agreement with Kennedy and he wouldn’t have been making the statement in the first place.

[NOTE: But aren’t all Catholics bound by what the Pope says? That’s not only an extraordinarily complex subject, but one outside of my field of expertise. But I refer readers to this:

The doctrine of Papal Infallibility does not mean the Pope is always right in all his personal teachings. Catholics are quite aware that, despite his great learning, the Pope is very much a human being and therefore liable to commit human error. On some subjects, like sports and manufacturing, his judgment is liable to be very faulty. The doctrine simply means that the Pope is divinely protected from error when, acting in his official capacity as chief shepherd of the Catholic fold, he promulgates a decision which is binding on the conscience of all Catholics throughout the world. In other words, his infallibility is limited to his specialty–the Faith of Jesus Christ.

In order for the Pope to be infallible on a particular statement, however, four conditions must apply: 1) he must be speaking ex cathedra . . . that is, “from the Chair” of Peter, or in other words, officially, as head of the entire Church; 2) the decision must be for the whole Church; 3) it must be on a matter of faith or morals; 4) the Pope must have the intention of making a final decision on a teaching of faith or morals, so that it is to be held by all the faithful. It must be interpretive, not originative; the Pope has no authority to originate new doctrine. He is not the author of revelation–only its guardian and expounder. He has no power to distort a single word of Scripture, or change one iota of divine tradition. His infallibility is limited strictly to the province of doctrinal interpretation, and it is used quite rarely. It is used in order to clarify, to “define,” some point of the ancient Christian tradition. It is the infallibility of which Christ spoke when He said to Peter, the first Pope: “I will give (o thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven.” (Matt. 16:19). Certainly Christ would not have admonished His followers to “hear the church” (Matt. 18:17) without somehow making certain that what they heard was the truth–without somehow making the teaching magisterium of His Church infallible.]

Those stupid Oscars

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I won’t talk about last night’s Oscar awards here. We’ve already done that, to the dismay of some.

This post is about Oscars of yore. The other day at PJ, Chris Queen listed the Oscars’ 10 biggest blunders, and I agree with some of the choices.

For instance, I found Queen’s mistake #1, “Forrest Gump,” to be a dreadful film, so boring I walked out after a half hour or so, and I thought Sally Field preposterously young as Gump’s mother. And I agree that Queen’s #2, “Life is Beautiful” was pretty dreadful too, in a completely different way.

But I take issue with #5, Queen’s criticism of Al Pacino’s award for “Scent of a Woman.” Sure, it wasn’t Al Pacino’s finest hour. That may have been “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” or my personal Pacino favorites: “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Panic in Needle Park.”

But just because “Scent of a Woman” isn’t the very best Pacino ever doesn’t mean it’s not awfully good, and quite deserving of the honor. Yes, the movie’s got a schmaltzy plot, and Pacino comes perilously close to hammy in the role. But I think he always stops short of it. The film is really a somewhat unorthodox buddy movie, an acting tour de force between Pacino and another brilliant actor, Chris O’Donnell, whose understated performance makes the perfect foil for Pacino’s over-the-top one. Take a look at this especially dramatic scene (for those who haven’t seen the movie, Pacino’s character is blind):

And then there’s Queen’s #10, Whoopi Goldberg’s Supporting Actress Oscar for the movie “Ghost.” He thinks it “curious” that she won. I think it’s appropriate, because even though I’m not a great Whoopi fan ordinarily, I think she was absolutely brilliant in that role. I could post almost any scene of hers in that film as an example of her comic flair, but many of them are hard to find on YouTube, so I’ll post this one. It’s where Whoopi’s character finds out to her shock that she’s not just a flim-flam con artist, but has the medium’s true “gift,” because she can hear the ghost of Swayze’s character talking to her:

Looking back on former Oscar years, there’s little question in my mind what the best crop of all time was: in 1939, when “Gone With the Wind” won, its worthy competitors were “Dark Victory,” “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Love Affair,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Ninotchka,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Stagecoach,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Wuthering Heights.”

Wow.

Not only that, but the following films were also released in 1939 (a year widely acknowledged as probably the greatest in the history of film), among others:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Babes in Arms
Beau Geste
Drums Along the Mohawk
Golden Boy
Gunga Din
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Intermezzo
The Story of Irene and Vernon Castle
The Three Muskateers
The Women
Young Mr. Lincoln

Not too shabby, eh?

Parents and homework

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[NOTE: Every now and then I re-post a previous essay that you might have missed first time around. This is one of them (slightly edited).]

When I was a child, we were given a fair amount of homework. And although this was in what were then called “gifted” and/or “honors” classes, I wasn’t in some private school, nor even a public school in a ritzy suburb. I attended public schools from kindergarten through high school in a relatively blue collar area of New York, and from about fifth grade on I recall having between three and four hours of take-home assignments a night.

My parents, like most parents of the day, were remarkably unconcerned about this fact. Of course, they were part of a culture in which schools were generally considered to know best, when it took some great and mammoth offense for teachers’ or principals’ judgments to be questioned. I don’t even remember my parents having the habit of asking me whether I’d been assigned homework on any particular night, or whether I’d finished it, either. I suppose they figured they’d know soon enough that there was something wrong if my grades began to slip. Otherwise, my homework was primarily my own work and my own business.

Except, that is, for a particular assignment I had in sixth grade, given by a teacher we’ll call Mrs. McGuire, who had a legendary and well-earned reputation for mental cruelty. The class was doing a topic on that perennial favorite (of teachers, anyway): inventors. Each of us would have to research a famous one, write a report about him (yeah, they were all men), and deliver it to the class.

Mrs. McGuire was not a believer in choice. She selected the inventor for each student, announcing the assignments as she read off our names. Some lucky stiffs got Edison or Samuel F.B. Morse, or even old Cyrus McCormick or Eli Whitney. This meant they could write their reports by looking up the information in that trusty Mother of All References (the only one any of us could easily obtain in those days), the home encyclopedia. If students were feeling really ambitious they could, of course, supplement the encyclopedia’s pedestrian offerings with a library book or two, and take home an A or a B without much further trouble.

But when she came to my assignment, Mrs. McGuire read out the arcane name “Nicolas Francois Appert.” Nowadays, in this glorious era of instantaneous Googling and Wikipedia (of which I’ve just availed myself), one can look him up fairly easily. Even so, the information is sparse (see also this); hardly the stuff of the fifteen-to-twenty-minute oral presentation we were all supposed to deliver back then.

But in sixth grade all I could find in the encyclopedia was one terse sentence, declaring Appert to be a Frenchman who’d invented an early method of preserving food, for which he’d been awarded a prize by Napoleon. A trip to the local library revealed not a word more. And so, in a state of upset, I told my mother, and enlisted her help.

My mother was convinced that Mrs. McGuire had given me this assignment in order to humiliate me, knowing that it would be impossible to fulfill. This didn’t activate my mother to complain to the school. She knew that several generations of parents had already done so about Mrs. McGuire’s many excesses—most of them far worse than this one, by the way—to no avail. But my mother was determined to show Mrs. McGuire a thing or two.

So that Saturday we went on an expedition to the 42nd St. branch of the NY Public Library, as impressive a building then as now, perhaps even more so in my eyes.

The journey was long, and I’d never been inside before. I recall that, when we entered the gargantuan research room (“a majestic 78 feet [23.8 m] wide by 297 feet [90.5 m] long, with 52 feet [15.8 m] high ceilings—lined with thousands of reference books on open shelves along the floor level and along the balcony; lit by massive windows and grand chandeliers; furnished with sturdy wood tables, comfortable chairs, and brass lamps”)…

nyclibrary.jpg

…my mother was told children were not allowed. But when she explained to the astonished librarian what my homework assignment was, I was given special permission to stay (I believe even the librarian had a few choice words to say about Mrs. McGuire).

The enormous card catalog yielded only one book on the subject. One should have been enough, but unfortunately, this one was in French, and it was by, not about, Nicolas Appert. My guess is that it was the volume described by Wikipedia as having been entitled “L’Art de conserver les substances animales et végétales” (or “The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years”)—an easy enough guess, since this seems to have been Appert’s only work.

We waited for the book to be delivered from the closed stacks, where its sleep had probably been undisturbed since the library’s opening in 1911. An ancient, slim volume, it turned out it held a mother lode (pun intended) of information, relatively speaking: its introduction (also in French) contained two or three pages describing Appert’s life, times, and mostly his invention.

Of course, we were not allowed to take the fragile (and decidedly rare) book home, but I sat at one of the tables and watched in awe as my mother read and translated the introduction, using whatever she remembered of her high school French, taking quick and dextrous notes (she knew shorthand, too) on a large yellow pad.

And that was it. I returned home with our prize, wrote a report, and delivered it. The kids in my class yawned (another inventor; who cares?), but Mrs. McGuire received my offering with a rather strange look on her face. I don’t know whether it was surprise, disappointment, or perhaps some combination of the two, but I didn’t much care.

What I experienced was mostly relief. My mother, however, owned up to a sense of triumph.

And the message of the whole strange episode? That you shouldn’t abandon a difficult but not impossible task, although sometimes help was needed to tackle it. That my mother could be a hero. That high school French and shorthand (neither of which I ever was to learn) might actually pay off, albeit in a somewhat strange set of circumstances. That the New York Public Library was a vast storehouse of knowledge, its mysterious underground bowels containing wondrous things.

And, I suppose, that research could be a sort of treasure hunt, an exciting adventure to uncover snippets of information heretofore unknown. Come to think of it, that latter lesson is probably responsible for some of my fascination with blogging.

And now, as I’ve completed the research (mercifully, all online) for this post, I discover that Appert’s story is still relatively hard to come by. As this source points out:

Nicholas Appert’s invention was tremendous; however, there is very little documentation on his personal and spiritual life. In this case, the invention appears to be more important than the inventor.

Tell me about it.

Living alone: weirdness unleashed

The New Neo Posted on by

Live alone? Watch out; you may find yourself getting a mite too weird for comfort:

In a sense, living alone represents the self let loose. In the absence of what Mr. Klinenberg calls “surveilling eyes,” the solo dweller is free to indulge his or her odder habits ”” what is sometimes referred to as Secret Single Behavior. Feel like standing naked in your kitchen at 2 a.m., eating peanut butter from the jar? Who’s to know?

Let me state here and now that I never eat peanut butter from the jar—but only because, alas, peanut butter (like chocolate) gives me migraines. But I shamefully confess that I often eat other treats from the jar, at 2 AM, while standing up—although fully clothed in my favorite mismatched-but-no-doubt-adorable sweats.

However, I hasten to add that I am so unapologetically weird that I do all of that even when living with someone. I don’t let those “surveilling eyes” stop me from almost any eccentricity I care to display—perhaps because my various roomies/mates/boyfriends have all been pretty darn eccentric themselves.

Heartlandgate, memos, and writing styles

The New Neo Posted on by

What does Heartlandgate prove about AGW? Absolutely nothing.

But it does say something about what AGW’s more fanatical proponents are prepared to do in furthering the cause—at least, what one of them, Dr. Peter Gleick, a noted freshwater scientist and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award in 2003, was prepared to do.

First, a summary:

In an obvious attempt to inflict a symmetrical Climategate-style scandal on the skeptic community, someone representing himself as a Heartland Institute insider “leaked” internal documents for Heartland’s most recent board of directors meeting to a fringe environmental blog, along with a photocopy of a supposed Heartland “strategy memo” outlining a plan to disseminate a public school curriculum aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

It was the latter document, the “strategy memo,” that contained the controversial remarks that supposedly showed how the science-Neanderthals at right-leaning Heartland think and act. But, after several AGW “skeptics” found anomalies in the provenance of the memo and accused Gleick of having something to do with the document dump, it turns out that Gleick has now confessed that he obtained them under false pretenses, although he says it all started when the “strategy memo” was sent to him by an anonymous source. What’s more, although Heartland has acknowledged that the more benign documents are indeed theirs, the Institute has denied authorship of the only incriminating one, that strategy memo, claiming that it’s a forgery.

There is some rather intense irony in this:

Even before his mea culpa, Gleick…had resigned last Thursday as chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics.

Here’s Gleick’s explanation for his motivation in obtaining the documents:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists … and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved…

One of these efforts that so riled Gleick was probably Climategate. Many AGW proponents and their political supporters in the press and elsewhere have alleged that the Climategate emails were hacked, although there’s no evidence of this and most on the right believe that dump was an inside job. But in Gleick’s mind, all was probably fair in love and war—and climate science, which appears to contain elements of both.

People can become fanatical when they believe in a cause and are thwarted in some way. But scientists are supposed to be above all that, as Gleick no doubt knows. There’s reason to believe he’s still lying, and that he forged the strategy memo as well (see this, for example), although it’s possible it came from another source, just as he says. But since Gleick has undermined his credibility in general, there’s really no reason to believe him on this or any other matter.

It’s also ironic that much of the fallout of Climategate was not about whether the science was right or wrong (although there certainly was discussion of this), but the lengths to which AGW proponents would go to harm their opponents, those “skeptics.” If Gleick was trying to reverse this perception by creating the idea that skeptics do the same, and worse, his plan backfired entirely.

This sort of activity is so completely antithetical to the purposes of science that it destroys—or should destroy, anyway—Gleick’s career. And if I were an AGW-supporting climate scientist, I’d be hopping mad at him for actions which have the possibility of casting doubt on the integrity of scientists in the entire field—or even on science as a whole, which rests on truth-telling.

Another aspect of Heartlandgate is the question of the memo itself. The mystery is not just who forged it, but how the person could do such a poor job. It reminds me to write a memo to myself about writing memos: if you’re going to forge one, make sure you take into account a few technicalities like using the right font (see Rathergate), the right language (part of the problem with the Heartland memo is that it was written in an idiosyncratic style that seems to match Gleick’s own), and timing (techies could tell that the new memo was scanned at a different time and date than the other materials).

Now, I don’t know much about the computer tech stuff, but I do know something about writing style. It’s almost like a fingerprint. For example, after writing this blog almost every day for all these years, I know many of my little stylistic quirks, whether you do or not. I won’t mention what they are, but believe me, I’m aware of them.

And that’s how a mathematician-turned-environmental-fanatic, the Unabomber, got caught, if you recall (I am not equating Gleick with Kaczynski, by the way; just pointing out the fact that writing styles can do seemingly smart people in—as Jack Cashill would like to prove re Obama and Bill Ayers). Kaczynski wanted very badly for his magnum opus, the 50-page Manifesto, to be disseminated to the public [emphasis mine]:

There was a great deal of controversy as to whether the document should be published. A further letter threatening to kill more people was sent, and the United States Department of Justice, along with FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, recommended publication out of concern for public safety and in hopes that a reader could identify the author.

You can rag on the Justice Department, the FBI, and Janet Reno all you want, but in this case they were brilliantly prescient, because that’s exactly what broke the case:

Before the publication of the manifesto, Theodore Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, was encouraged by his wife Linda to follow up on suspicions that Ted was the Unabomber. David Kaczynski was at first dismissive, but progressively began to take the likelihood more seriously after reading the manifesto a week after it was published in September 1995. David Kaczynski browsed through old family papers and found letters dating back to the 1970s written by Ted and sent to newspapers protesting the abuses of technology and which contained phrasing similar to what was found in the Unabomber Manifesto…

In early 1996, former FBI hostage negotiator and criminal profiler Clinton R. Van Zandt was contacted by an investigator working with Tony Bisceglie [an investigator hired by Kaczyniski’s brother David]. Bisceglie asked Van Zandt to compare the manifesto to typewritten copies of handwritten letters David had received from his brother. Van Zandt’s initial analysis determined that there was better than a 60 percent chance that the same person had written the letters as well as the manifesto, which had been in public circulation for half a year. Van Zandt’s second analytical team determined an even higher likelihood that the letters and the manifesto were the product of the same author. He recommended that Bisceglie’s client immediately contact the FBI.

In February 1996, Bisceglie provided a copy of the 1971 essay written by Ted Kaczynski to the FBI. At the UNABOM Task Force headquarters in San Francisco, Supervisory Special Agent Joel Moss immediately recognized similarities in the writings. Linguistic analysis determined that the author of the essay papers and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski’s life, that analysis provided the basis for a search warrant.

In an ironic addendum, David Kaczynski wished to remain anonymous so that his brother would never learn he was the one who’d turned him in. But that didn’t last very long. His identity was leaked to—guess who?:

…[David Kaczynski’s] identity was leaked to CBS News in early April 1996. CBS anchorman Dan Rather called FBI director Louis Freeh, who requested 24 hours before CBS broke the story on the evening news.

Yes: Dan Rather, who gave his name to the Rathergate forged-memos scandal, was instrumental in outing David Kaczynski. And the moral of the story is: beware those writing quirks, and pay attention to the font, too.

Primary 2012: observation du jour

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Perusing the headlines about the Republican primary featured at RealClearPolitics or memeorandum, I feel an immense weariness come over me.

It’s not just that I’ve been writing about this stuff now for months and months and months. It’s that for quite a while nearly everything I read has seemed like spin—that is, pundits writing about the campaign not to describe things clearly, but in order to cause a certain result to occur, sometimes a covert one (just to take one small example, there’s Paul Krugman writing today about how Romney is a hidden Keynesian, which I’m fairly certain is intended to make Republicans hate Romney even more than they already do).

And lest you say that’s the way it always is, let me just state that I agree with you but I think this season is worse than usual. I’m not exactly sure why, although I’ve been mulling it over. But it seems as though a lot of people have finally snapped; years of frustration with government doing either too much (the conservative view) or the wrong things (the bipartisan view, although which things are wrong are defined differently by each side) or too little to “help” (the liberal view). Years of a Congress that nobody likes. Economic hardship. Lowered standards for public and private life.

There’s also the sense on the Republican side that all of the candidates are no good. Nobody’s quite satisfied, either because these candidates really are inferior as a group, or because we’re expecting too much of mere mortals, or because we’re just feeling pissy after the strain of the contentious Bush years and the tension-ridden Obama years. So the Republican electorate is cooperating in the liberal MSM’s task, which is to encourage disillusionment and/or apathy in voters on the right. And the candidates are doing their level best to help, as well.

I dunno. Maybe it’s just that it’s a gloomy day here. And maybe once the primary season is over (can’t wait!), the right will settle down to become more unified, and gather some positive energy for the November showdown. Because if that doesn’t happen, Obama will indeed be re-elected, and then the even more bitter finger-pointing on the right will start.

A tall story: surgical leg lengthening

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I wasn’t able to embed this video on my blog, but perhaps it’s just as well, because some of the footage is rather disturbing, especially if you’re a mite squeamish, like me. It shows the lengths (literally) to which some people will go to become taller, utilizing a procedure by which the leg bones are broken and rods placed in them that are then periodically manipulated so that new bone will grow in the break and cause an increase in height that can amount to several inches.

The surgery is both disturbing and ethically interesting. It was originally developed to help people with dwarfism and other serious height issues, and even in that arena it is controversial because it runs counter to the idea of acceptance and celebration of the condition, as well as causing some potential health problems:

The 7,400-member Little People of America says the risk of nerve and vascular damage in the years after the surgery is great. Besides, they say, a short stature makes them unique, and limb lengthening implies there’s something wrong with being “a little person.”

“Do you just go along with the crowd or teach people difference is OK?” said LPA activist Colleen Gioffreda. She, her husband, Jim, and their 2-year-old son, Connor, all were born with achondroplasia. “It scares me to think people want to become more and more the same,” she said.

Michael Ain, an orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, says premature arthritis is just one possible complication. “There’s an enormous amount of risk,” said Ain, himself a dwarf who decided against the surgery. “Nobody really knows what’s going to happen to them.”

Paley’s patients believe they know. One of them is Gillian Mueller, 26, of Columbia, Md., who has been living with longer limbs for 13 years.

“It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” Mueller said.

The procedure was developed in Russia about 50 years ago, and in dwarfs of the type with extremely short limbs it also makes the body proportions seem more normal. It can be started in childhood, when the results tend to be better, and the height gained can be profound: for example, from 4′ to 5′ 3″, if begun early enough. In dwarfs the procedure is covered by insurance, and it runs around $150,000 for multiple surgeries, which are only done in a few places in the world.

So, is this a cosmetic procedure or not, if done in childhood to a person born with this condition? It can change the person’s entire life, including the chances for a good job and the choices for a spouse. Typically the decision would be made by the child and/or his/her parents, and paid for by insurance. Should this be allowed? And would the answer be different if it were paid for out-of-pocket? Those who lack compassion for the situation might want to watch this slideshow. However, I’m not so sure a whole lot of families will want to avail themselves of a surgery that involves so much suffering and risk.

Then there are the non-dwarf but short adults with whom I began this post, who are now undergoing the surgery, too. In a way their decision should be even easier to support because they are grownups and they are all paying out-of-pocket (although of course their condition is less extreme). So the libertarian stance would be that they should be allowed to do whatever they wish, and that’s pretty much my point of view. But what of the surgeons? If you were an orthopedist specializing in this procedure for children born as dwarfs, what would you think if a man of 5’6″—the height of the guy featured in that first video—came to you and asked for help? He is getting a second procedure, as well, and believes his final height will be 6′ or above.

The article doesn’t say, but my guess is that among the adult candidates there would be more men than women, because men tend to find low stature more of a drawback than women do, and there is a lot of research to show they’re correct. But it’s a slippery slope, and no doubt many women would want it too, although they can avail themselves of 6-inch heels instead if they can manage to walk in them.

Here, for example, is the diminutive (5’1″) Lady Gaga with an extreme example:

And lest you think this is merely a modern-day Western obsession, take a look at the oiran geta, footwear traditionally worn in ancient Japan by women trained as a high-class prostitutes/entertainers:

Obligatory post-debate political post

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night was the last debate of this Republican primary season, which I did not watch. But I read about it, and the consensus is that Newt did fairly well but it won’t matter, Santorum did rather poorly (especially on his defense of earmarks), Ron Paul did the way he always does (foreign policy madman), and Mitt did quite well but it won’t convince those who don’t like him and who distrust him to feel any differently.

So there we have it. In the next two weeks or so, after Super Tuesday (March 6 this year), things will almost certainly become clearer and perhaps we’ll have a real frontrunner.

I’ve written so much about this primary race that most of you know that I favor Romney, and why. So I won’t belabor the point any more, except to add a few observations:

Here’s one of the reasons it’s important to defeat Obama in his bid for a second term.

Sometimes I wonder about this sort of thing, too, at least on the part of some. It seems to me that there’s a significant minority of conservatives who don’t want to win the election if it means someone they consider less than a very strong conservative will be in charge. And they don’t even mind losing Congress in the process, because they think the whole thing will constitute a sort of purging fire for the country. Needless to say, I disagree strongly.

Romney mentioned a bunch of stuff he did as governor that was conservative. But again, I don’t think it will convince the unconvinced. Just the fact that he was governor of a very liberal state, and had to compromise in order to get things done, is considered evidence that in your heart, you know he’s not a conservative, and everything he says to the contrary is considered evidence that he’s a liar as well.

This new “Rubio-was-a-Mormon-from-age-8-to-age-13″ story makes me remember how disinterested the MSM was in Obama’s similar story about being a Muslim in Indonesia as a child. It also reminds me of the peculiar fact that, except for JFK, all our presidents have been Protestants. We elected a black president before we elected a second Catholic. Of the major GOP candidates this year, one’s a Mormon and two are Catholics, although Gingrich is a convert. Ron Paul’s the only Protestant in the bunch, but he’s not really a major candidate, IMHO.