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.

Age as equalizer

The New Neo Posted on by

I have observed that even the beautiful usually don’t stay so.

Youth is a wonderful thing that enhances the looks of all. But those who were spectacularly beautiful when young don’t necessarily age in a way that keeps them a few steps ahead of people who started out looking much more ordinary. And cosmetic surgery doesn’t necessarily help; sometimes the formerly beautiful are more strongly motivated to have ever-escalating interventions that end up making them look not only like a caricature of their former selves, but like aliens from another planet. So sometimes it’s best to say away from the knife and let nature and time have its way with you.

Case in point, Carol Lynley. You may not remember her, but I do. She was a beautiful blond model-actress:

Today, she’s nearly seventy. She’s still a perfectly fine-looking woman (without cosmetic surgery), as you can see, and is somewhat recognizable as herself:

But now she probably would not be picked out of a crowd of her age-peers as markedly more beautiful than many of them. Age seems to often take away (and not just for Lynley; she’s merely an example) whatever it is that makes the extraordinarily beautiful so very extraordinary.

Not always, though. I think Katharine Hepburn retained her striking quality to the bitter end; perhaps it was the cheekbones, and the fact that she never seemed to gain much weight:

Likewise Audrey Hepburn (hmmm, is it something about that last name?):

And let us not forget the late great Paul Newman:

But they are the exceptions among the already-exceptional. For most of those who gain fame early on because of their astounding physical beauty, age comes as a double shock and a double trial, because they not only lose their youth, they lose what made them distinctive. No wonder so many try to hold on ever more desperately (I’ll skip the images of that; suffice to say they are legion).

Looking back at Obama the con man

The New Neo Posted on by

I was impressed by Richard Fernandez’s recent piece on—what else?—Obama:

Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan are intelligent, well-educated people. Nobody has seriously suggested they are either perverse or evil. Now they see the truth. But once upon a time they didn’t have a clue. So the disturbing question is: how did they get it wrong?…

Given the paucity of investigative information on Obama, given his near absolute lack of a substantial track record, it was natural for Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan to be taken for a ride. Not because they were dumb, but because they were “quality” people.

Now the quality people can see certain kinds of truth, because they are familiar with the sort of data that now alarms them. Now that they can observe the betrayal of Israel, the lunacy of Obamanomics, and the erratic management, the full magnitude of their error becomes apparent. But they didn’t see it at the outset; lurking on the edge of his expression as he campaigned, nor in the little niggling inconsistencies the media was determined to ignore. Now the problems are as big as life: upheaval in the Middle East, the bankruptcy of the country, the scandals of the administration. Now they can use the Bayesian. Perhaps a little late, but better than never. “Welcome back to the fight, Rick. This time we win.”

But there’s one last thing that nice people don’t know. It is that hucksters aren’t confined by the same boundaries they assume everyone else is contained by. They are capable not only of sucker-punching you, but of exceeding limits you never thought could be transgressed. Grifters are in some sense not part of the same civilization that Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan inhabit. Maybe they don’t believe this yet. But they will. They will.

The idea of Obama as huckster who appeals to certain people is one I explored close to two years ago, in this article for PJ. Here are some excerpts from it that I offer as a companion piece to Fernandez’s observations:

The con artist is able to gain trust by using the right vocal inflections to fit the mark (or, in Obama’s case, the audience), changing accents and speech patterns to match. In addition, a con doesn’t usually stay in one place very long (it has been remarked how often Obama changed jobs) because, although people may not catch on to his game all that quickly, he is afraid that if he sticks around they eventually will.

Even though most of us would like to think we couldn’t get taken in by a con””we would know better””the truth is that many people are vulnerable. It’s not a question of intelligence, because some marks are otherwise quite smart. What distinguishes them, however, is that they’ve been disarmed. For one reason or another, they happen to be susceptible to a particular con artist’s brand of charm:

The core ”¦ however, was that the mark desperately wanted to believe in the dangling get-rich-quick scheme. ..That is how the classic con is distinct from straightforward fraud: in the con, the victim is actively complicit in his undoing.

Both the con and Obama offer something the mark fiercely desires and show characteristics s/he desperately wants to see. For many wordsmiths (even Republicans such as Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley) that would be their perception of Obama as an intelligent, articulate, and especially a literary spokesman. For others ”” especially the young ”” the hook is Obama’s perceived coolness. For others it might be his race and his promise of healing the racial divide (in fact, he embodies this quite literally in his very own bi-racial person). For some, it was and is enough that he be the antithesis of whatever it was they’d hated about Bush.

For so many, it was the rhetoric of hope and change, which tapped into their earnest desire that ”” just this once ”” it would be different, and that this politician wouldn’t be crooked or in the thrall of special interest groups. And if the hope is that strong to begin with, the need to believe that great, then all the more reason to deny evidence to the contrary that comes in later. Who among us wants to admit to having been a patsy?

It’s no accident that we call the first 100 days of a presidency the honeymoon period. Obama’s honeymoon is over now, and reality is just beginning for many who fell in love with him. But don’t expect much change of heart soon. A cautionary tale is that of the famous British con artist Ronnie Cornwall, many of whose victims remained true to him:

[S]uch was [Cornwall’s] charm that none of the people he ruined went to the police: one even confessed to missing Cornwell’s intoxicating company.

As time goes on and disillusionment grows, people may come to miss the intoxicating company of the Obama to whom they originally felt so strongly attracted, and some will always remain in thrall to that powerful magnetism.

The process of learning about the con (or the grifter, as Fernandez puts it) is a sobering and disillusioning one. A lot of people have been getting an education in how it works.

Last night’s debate: yikes!

The New Neo Posted on by

Bill Kristol writes that the Weekly Standard’s reaction to last night’s Republican debate, and the mail he’s received about it, is “Yikes!”

And that’s not a good “yikes,” it’s a dismayed “yikes”. As a commenter on another blog wrote, Sarah Palin won last night’s debate. It would be almost funny if it weren’t so sad.

I didn’t watch the debate. I’ve gone on record before as saying I think debates are a bad way to evaluate candidates, and what’s more I think that debates with so many candidates are absurd and do nothing more than provide an opportunity for the candidates to look foolish.

But so far I also have been underwhelmed by these candidates themselves. The people I would like to see there—Ryan and Christie and Rubio—all have their own (probably good) reasons for not having thrown hats into the ring this time. But Kristol is right: this field is weak.