Neutrinos: faster than light?

The New Neo Posted on by

Scientists at CERN are astounded to report that they have recorded neutrinos that travel faster than the speed of light, long thought to be a constant that defined the upper limits possible for speed in the universe:

“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” [spokesman Antionio Ereditato said…

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works…

“I just don’t want to think of the implications,” he said. “We are scientists and work with what we know.”

Just a reminder that the science is never settled.

[ADDENDUM: Makes me think of the old limerick:

There was a young lady named Bright,
whose speed was much faster than light.
She set off one day
in a relative way,
and returned on the previous night.]

[ADDENDUM II: This seems both interesting and relevant.]

The case against Troy Davis

The New Neo Posted on by

Troy Davis has been executed by the state of Georgia after 22 years on death row. Before his death he had become a cause célé¨bre, and—unlike some such cases—it was with good reason.

I had never heard of him before a day or two ago, but a quick reading up on the facts of the crime of which he was accused, and his conviction and appeals, has convinced me that, although the truth will probably never be known, there was more than enough doubt about his guilt to warrant a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment, and probably a new trial.

You may disagree with what I say; Ann Coulter certainly does, for example, although Bob Barr and William Sessions (former FBI chief under Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton) think that Davis should not have been executed. The holes in the case against Davis are just too large.

To summarize: there were two shootings in the same evening, perhaps by the same perpetrator. The first was at a party [correction: actually, it was on leaving the party in a car], and the victim lived; the second resulted in the murder of a policeman (Mark MacPhail) who had attempted to intervene in an altercation in the parking lot of a Burger King. It was the latter for which Davis received the death penalty from the jury, at a time (1989) in Georgia when there was no option of sentencing him to life without parole.

The evidence at the trial seemed fairly powerful at the time, although subsequent developments have made it less so. The prosecution produced seven witnesses who fingered Davis as the cop-killer, plus two jailhouse-snitch cellmates who said Davis had confessed to them [correction: one was a jailhouse snitch and one a neighbor; both have since recanted and said Davis never confessed to them] (the latter type of witness is notoriously unreliable, with motivation to implicate a person either as a grudge or to gain favor with the justice system, or both; in the Davis case they have both since recanted and said they heard no such confession from him). The other, seemingly strong, witnesses against Davis either had initially shaky elements in their testimony (one of the strongest, for example, initially said he didn’t see him well enough to identify him, and yet somehow was able to do so at the trial, two years later) and/or have subsequently recanted in various ways, mostly through saying they had been coerced and frightened by the police. Many were young teenagers at the time of the shooting.

One of the few witnesses who has not recanted is the man who was with Davis that night at the killing, Sylvester (“Redd”) Coles. Coles implicated Davis as the shooter in MacPhail’s murder almost immediately, but since there was an absence of forensic evidence (the gun was never found), there is no reason to believe that Coles himself was not actually the killer, which is what Davis alleged. So you have a fact situation that is highly unfortunate: the heinous killing of a policeman, undoubtedly committed by one of two people (Coles or Davis); a crime scene lacking enough evidence to convict either without eyewitness testimony; a death penalty verdict (irrevocable and irreversible once carried out); and witnesses who have mostly since recanted.

My sense is that the police were so outraged by the killing that they wanted to make sure they got someone, and the case against Davis was stronger than that against Coles (at least in part because of Coles coming forward so soon to implicate Davis). Several witnesses have said it was Coles who did it, but this was a case in which both possible perpetrators resembled each other in height and weight and race, and where the scene was dark, the situation chaotic, and identification inherently difficult.

One thing that does not seem to be true—even though it has been widely alleged—is that racism played much of a part here. Yes, the victim was white, and Davis was black. But so is Coles, and so were seven of the jurors and most of the witnesses. It just doesn’t seem to have mattered in this particular instance.

Unfortunately for Davis, despite the multiple recantations the governor of Georgia is not allowed to commute death sentences, and the appeals courts set the standard of proof for overturning the jury verdict very high.

Here’s Barr on the subject, and I am in agreement:

But the federal judge set the bar much higher than the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Finding ”” astonishingly for the first time ”” that executing an innocent man is unconstitutional, the court then required Davis to prove that he was innocent.

Proving one’s innocence is a far more difficult standard than establishing doubts as to one’s guilt. In fact, proving actual innocence has the effect of flipping our system of criminal jurisprudence on its head: Instead of a presumption of innocence and a requirement by the state to prove guilt.

In Davis’ evidentiary hearing the court presumed guilt and required the condemned to prove his innocence. Even the judge deemed the standard “extraordinarily high.” Proving one’s innocence of a crime is a potentially insurmountable task ”” one Davis was unable to meet. But while Davis was unable to “prove” his innocence, he established considerable doubts as to his guilt, prompting the judge to acknowledge that the state’s case against him was “not ironclad.”

…[I]mposing an irreversible sentence of death on the skimpiest of evidence will not serve the interest of justice.

And it has not. Barr is, as he says, a “longtime supporter of the death penalty.” But the death penalty is inappropriate for a fact situation such as Davis’s.

As for Ann Coulter, who has been very much in favor of Davis’s execution, her arguments are misleading. She leaves out some very important facts when she writes:

Among the witnesses who did not recant a word of their testimony against Davis were three members of the Air Force, who saw the shooting from their van in the Burger King drive-in lane. The airman who saw events clearly enough to positively identify Davis as the shooter explained on cross-examination, “You don’t forget someone that stands over and shoots someone.”

Sounds convincing, doesn’t it? And it is, until you read this:

One [witness] who has not recanted his testimony is…Steven Sanders. He was one of a number of members of the US Air Force who were in a van at the drive-in section of the Burger King restaurant at the time of the crime. In a statement given to police shortly after the shooting, Stephen Sanders said that he had seen a “black male wearing a white hat and white shirt, black shorts” shoot the officer and then run off with another person who Sanders thought was wearing a “black outfit”. He said that he “wouldn’t recognize them again except for their clothes”. However, for the first time, two years later, at the trial, Stephen Sanders identified Troy Davis as the gunman…Two of his Air Force colleagues, Daniel Kinsman and Robert Grizzard, who were with Sanders at the time of the crime, have signed affidavits standing by their statements given to the police that they could not identify the gunman. Robert Grizzard has said that, contrary to what he mistakenly testified at the trial, he could not then and still could not recall what the gunman was wearing. For his part, Daniel Kinsman has testified that he remains convinced that the gunman was firing the gun with his left hand. Troy Davis is right-handed.

Doesn’t sound quite as powerful when put that way compared to the way Ann Coulter tells it, does it (including the fact that Sanders disagrees with all the other witnesses about the color of Coles’s clothing that night)?

Coulter manages to write her entire 1000+ word essay without even mentioning Coles and his role as witness, except to say that there were two men at the crime scene, one in a white shirt and one in a yellow shirt. Coulter also writes that “Not one witness said the man in the yellow shirt pistol-whipped the vagrant or shot the cop.” But this is disingenuous of her; after all, why would they? It was Davis who was on trial, not Coles (who had become one of the prosecution’s star witnesses), and it was Davis the police were framing their case against when they interrogated potential witnesses. If police coercion and intimidation were used to shape their testimony, the results certainly wouldn’t have included the idea that it might have been Coles who actually was guilty. And of course we can’t expect Coles to have implicated himself.

Coulter also conveniently omits this sort of thing, which describes some of the testimony at a 2010 hearing where Coles was fingered by some as the guilty party, and why such testimony was excluded:

Anthony Hargrove testified that Redd Coles had admitted the killing to him. The state’s lawyers described Hargrove’s testimony as hearsay evidence; Judge William T. Moore permitted the evidence but stated that unless Coles appeared, he might give the evidence “no weight whatsoever.” Another witness making a similar statement was heard, but a third was rejected by Judge Moore as the claims were inadmissible hearsay because Coles was not called as a witness and given the opportunity for rebuttal. Moore criticized the decision not to call Coles, saying that he was “one of the most critical witnesses to Davis’s defense”. One of Davis’s lawyers stated that the day before they had been unsuccessful in serving a subpoena on Coles; Moore responded that the attempt had been made too late, given that the hearing had been set for months.

I don’t know about you, but I am extremely uncomfortable with executing a man based on this sort of record. I also believe that requiring a person to prove his or her innocence is an unconscionably high standard. That doesn’t mean that Davis wasn’t guilty; I have no idea whether he was or wasn’t. But he does not have to be have been innocent to convince me that his execution was wrong (even if legal), and that it will serve to set back the cause of those who believe in the death penalty, as well as the cause of justice.

[ADDENDUM: And here John Hawkins rails against bleeding-heart liberals who love cop-killers such as Davis. Of course, it serves Hawkins’s purpose to ignore the fact that a lot of people who argued that Davis should not be put to death are not liberals and do not oppose the death penalty. What’s more, Hawkins disingenuously repeats Coulter’s sophistic argument about the number of witnesses in the Davis trial [emphasis mine]:

Of course, despite the incredibly slanted accounts you may have read, Troy Davis is not one of these mistakes. More than a dozen courts looked at the trial and came to that conclusion — and no wonder. Davis shot a cop to death in public. There were 34 witnesses at the trial. Some of them were strangers. Some of them were friends of Davis. To this day, there are several people, some strangers and some former friends, who said they saw Davis shoot Officer Mark MacPhail and haven’t recanted.

Talk about “incredibly slanted!” The appeals courts did not rule on Davis’s guilt or innocence in the same way the trial had. They required that Davis prove his innocence, an almost impossibly high standard, especially because of lack of forensic evidence. Then there’s the statement about “34 witnesses.” Does Hawkins not imply here that there were 34 eyewitnesses who identified Davis at trial? There were not (the research I’ve done has indicated that 34 is the number of witnesses of all sorts whom the prosecution called at the trial), and almost all the eyewitnesses who fingered Davis have recanted. Plus, the main “friend of Davis” who fingered Davis was possible-murderer Coles, whom Hawkins, like Coulter, does not mention was a witness. And I’ve already described some of the flaws in the testimony of those few other witnesses like Sanders, who have not recanted.)

If Hawkins and Coulter and others think Davis is guilty and that his execution was just, fine. But don’t distort the record or omit obvious and important facts in order to make your argument, which is what I have seen from every article I’ve read so far from the pro-Davis-execution camp. I don’t like this sort of sophistry when it’s done on the left, and I don’t like it any better when it’s done on the right. Mistakes are one thing, but this looks like purposeful shaping of the record to make a polemic argument.]

[ADDENDUM II: Ace weighs in on the matter of the shirts.]

[ADDENDUM III] Several commenters have put forth the idea that Davis was guilty because blood was found on the shorts he wore that night; some bloggers have alleged it was Officer MacPhail’s blood. Since this is one of those lies that get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on, I thought I’d set the record straight by quoting Judge Moore, a district judge who ruled on Davis’s case in 2010:

The State introduced evidence regarding Mr. Davis’s “bloody” shorts. (See Resp. Ex. 67.) However, even the State conceded that this evidence lacked any probative value of guilt, submitting it only to show what the Board of Pardons and Parole had before it. (Evidentiary Hearing Transcript at 468-69.) Indeed, there was insufficient DNA to determine who the blood belonged to, so the shorts in no way linked Mr. Davis to the murder of Officer MacPhail. The blood could have belonged to Mr. Davis, Mr. Larry Young, Officer MacPhail, or even have gotten onto the shorts entirely apart from the events of that night. Moreover, it is not even clear that the substance was blood. (See Pet. Ex. 46.)]

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

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Anti-semitism on the rise?

The New Neo Posted on by

This article at PJ by Abraham H. Miller concludes that not only is anti-Semitism on the rise, but that it is pushing US Jews to the political right.

I’m not at all sure about the second, but I have observed the first. It’s been a long slow Gramscian march through our institutions for anti-Semitism: in academia, art, literature, the left, the press, and certain churches. It is now commonplace to assert the racism of Israel and to use the language of apartheid to describe it, to rail at the Jewish (or “Likud”) lobby, and to assert dual loyalties for Jews. The defense that being against Israel is not a form of anti-Semitism would be a more powerful one if not for the extreme double-standard to which Israel is held, and the magnitude of the lies that are told about it and that persist in the minds of so many (Jenin! Jenin!).

At some point these lies reached critical mass, and now it would take such a massive re-education project to reverse them that the task seems impossible.

Miller, however, seems to believe that at some point the majority of Jews will react to the rising tide of anti-Semitism and abandon leftist politics. And this despite the fact that he describes a phenomenon that I have noticed as well, and one that does not indicate that there is much hope:

I have an acquaintance who mouths almost every tired cliché created by George Soros’ J-Street. She belongs to a synagogue where the J-Street message is embraced. She mouths these talking points with a smug pseudo-sophistication as if they were the product of an erudite belief system, but she is incapable of understanding in any detail much of what she says. She never voted Republican. And even if the Almighty himself were placed on the ballot with an “R” before his name, she wouldn’t vote for him. She talks endlessly about Israel taking risks for peace, but would cringe with fear if she knew her grandchildren got on the Chicago L and went to the south side after dark. She raged against the invasion of Gaza and lamented each Palestinian casualty. I never once heard her show an ounce of compassion or concern for a Jewish victim of either a suicide attack or rocket launched from Gaza. They were beyond her realm of concern or the ability to get status affirmation from her liberal friends.

The paradoxes are powerful; the ironies abound.

Bad news for dieters

The New Neo Posted on by

Not that we needed more evidence, but new research is explaining just why it’s so hard for most people to lose weight and maintain the loss.

I already knew about this from personal experience and observation. And don’t get me wrong—I’ve never been fat, but I’m one of those people who is always trying to lose ten to twenty pounds to look and feel what I’d consider my best. Trouble is, this comes at the price of a sort of mild but steady starvation, an experience I’m not willing to voluntarily endure for more than a few weeks or months at the most. Plus, my weight loss is agonizingly slow (and this despite the fact that my nutrition is good, and I already exercise virtually every day) and my rebound weight gain is astoundingly fast.

In other words, I can diet for months and lose about five pounds total, and I can regain that five in just a couple of days of eating what most people would call normally. Although the tendency has gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, twas ever thus. Even when I was young I had to severely limit my calories in order to maintain my dance weight (very slender), despite the fact that I was highly active on a daily basis.

Your mileage—and poundage, and diet experience—may differ, especially if you happen to be a man. Men are generally bigger, less affected by weight-clingy hormones such as estrogen, and with bodies that have a higher proportion of metabolically active muscle.

In Lancet, Dr. Kevin D. Hall and his colleagues at the the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases have described “a more realistic model of how the body responds to changes in caloric intake and expenditure, basing their calculations on how people of different weights responded to caloric changes in a controlled setting like a metabolic unit.” So this study is not relying on such inherently suspect measures as people’s reports of what they’re eating and how much they’re exercising; it rests on more exact measurements than that.

The news isn’t pretty, but it reinforces what I’ve long suspected and also observed among my heavier friends, most of whom don’t seem to eat all that much:

According to the researchers, it is easy to gain weight unwittingly from a very small imbalance in the number of calories consumed over calories used. Just 10 extra calories a day is all it takes to raise the body weight of the average person by 20 pounds in 30 years, the authors wrote.

Furthermore, the same increase in calories will result in more pounds gained by a heavier person than by a lean one ”” and a greater proportion of the weight gained by the heavier person will be body fat. This happens because lean tissue (muscles, bones and organs) uses more calories than the same weight of fat.

In an interview, Dr. Hall said the longstanding assumption that cutting 3,500 calories will produce a one-pound weight loss indefinitely is inaccurate and can produce discouraging results both for dieters and for policy changes like the proposed tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.

If the 3,500-calorie rule applied consistently in real life, it would result in twice the weight loss that the new model predicts, the authors wrote. This helps to explain why even the most diligent dieters often fail to reach weight loss goals that were based on the old rule.

A more realistic result, he said, is that cutting out 250 calories a day ”” the amount in a small bar or chocolate or half a cup of premium ice cream ”” would lead to a weight loss of about 25 pounds over three years, with half that loss occurring the first year.

Why is this bad news? Well, for starters, people like me are not eating small chocolate bars or half a cup of premium ice cream on a daily basis. Some of us have already pared our daily calorie consumption done to the bone.

Do the math: if a person is losing 25 pounds over three years, that’s approximately 8 pounds a year or about 2/3 a pound a month. Hardly enough to provide the motivation to keep the struggling dieter going. Plus, how many people have such an exact idea of their daily caloric consumption that they can consistently cut back that much, not to mention doing it for that long? If the weight loss rate is so slow, just a couple of days a month of special treats (on special occasions, for example) can undo all the good of the far more numerous days of deprivation, just as I’ve observed. The requisite consistency of denial is more than most mortals can manage, especially with the constant temptation of wonderful food at the grocery store, in advertisements, and at social events.

It’s not surprising that most people have trouble keeping the weight off. The wonder is that anyone ever succeeds, considering what’s required.

On the EU folly

The New Neo Posted on by

Shorter Daley on the EU: good fences make good neighbors.

“Consensus” has become coercion. The imperatives of federalism and ever closer union have come bang up against the basic principle of democracy: that elected governments should be answerable to their own electorates, particularly on matters that affect the lives of ordinary citizens, such as taxation and public spending. Federalism cannot allow democracy to disrupt its objectives, and democracy will not permit federalism to ignore its anger and frustration. Angela Merkel cannot do what her critics are insisting that she must do ”“ as George Osborne put it, show that she recognises “the gravity of the situation” and is “dealing with it” ”“ because her electorate will not wear it. She cannot commit herself to endless bail-outs and the under-writing of infinite Mediterranean debt, just as the Greek government cannot deliver the EU’s austerity measures ”“ because the people of both these countries do not wish it. The irresistible force has met the immovable object.

What’s going on in Europe is extremely worrisome. One thing I have never understood is how people ever believed that yoking the economically weaker nations of Europe to the stronger ones would benefit the whole. Isn’t a chain only as strong as its weakest link?

But then I remember that federalism is not always a bad thing. Witness the US: e pluribus unum.

[NOTE: Here’s the text of the Frost poem:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”]

Fact-checking Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

This AP article fact-checks Obama on the topic of millionaires paying at a lower tax rate than their secretaries:

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government…

There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. But that’s less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

But that’s not really news, is it? It’s probably not even news to Obama, although it’s hard to say just how ignorant he might be about economic matters. Plus, of course, that’s only federal taxes; states can add a lot to that.

So what is news? Well, I’ve noticed in the last few months that the AP and other MSM outlets have become somewhat more interested in fact-checking Obama than they used to be. They may not be fact-checking his ass, but they’re fact-checking at least some small portion of his anatomy.

And then there are pundits such as David Brooks, who today has declared himself a sap (actually, he calls himself an “Obama sap”) for believing Obama was serious about deficit reduction:

In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives…

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

Brooks is a bit late to the party, and his mea culpas ring hollow. Anyone who almost immediately becomes entranced with a candidate’s perfectly creased pants leg, or even his ability to quote the intellectual’s intellectual Niebuhr, has got a problem. Here’s Brooks on that pants crease, to refresh your memory:

I remember distinctly an image of””we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

And here’s what I wrote a while back about that [emphasis mine]:

The whole thing reminds me of Daisy’s veneration for Jay Gatsby’s beautiful shirts””although even Daisy wasn’t silly enough to think that his lovely shirts qualified Gatsby to be president, much less a “very good” one. But this is the sort of thing that passes for thought in the MSM these days.

So now—or should I say, at least for now—the scales have dropped from Brooks’s eyes, the antidote to the love potion has been applied, and Brooks, like many others, is wondering what he ever saw in Obama.

I wonder what took so long.

[NOTE: On the substantive issue of raising taxes on the very rich, the Wall Street Journal has much more to say:

If Mr. Obama really wants all of these people to pay even more in taxes, there are only two ways to do so. One is to raise tax rates on capital gains, dividends and other investment income that is taxed at 15% and represents a great deal of income for the wealthy. This is probably Mr. Buffett’s tax secret, though to our knowledge he hasn’t released his returns to the public.

The problem is that this is a tax increase on capital investment, which the U.S. already taxes at prohibitive rates thanks to our high corporate tax rate of 35%. Capital gains and dividends are taxed twice, first as corporate profits and then as payouts to individuals. Their real capital gains tax rate is closer to 45% than 15%, which is why politicians of both parties have long supported a capital-gains rate differential.

The other way to raise taxes on the rare Buffett is with a new Minimum Tax, a la Joe Barr. But as we’ve seen with the AMT, while the politicians may start by chasing “millionaires and billionaires,” over time they always end up taxing the middle class because that’s where the real money is. Mr. Obama could tax every billionaire in America at a 100% rate and still wouldn’t make a dent in the federal deficit. He would, however, succeed in making those taxpayers invest less and search for tax shelters, assuming they didn’t move offshore.

We rehearse all of this because it shows that the real point of Mr. Obama’s Buffett Rule and his latest deficit proposal isn’t tax justice or good tax policy. It is all about re-election politics.

This is not only correct, it’s also not unusual. As no less an observer than former mentor Rev. Wright once said about Obama, “He’s a politician…And he says what he has to say as a politician.”

Well, yes. And Obama’s not the only one; most politicians do the same. And no one should be surprised—least of all David Brooks.]

[ADDENDUM: I’ve decided to republish my previous post on falling out of love with Obama. It continues to seem timely to me. You’ll find it below.]

[ADDENDUM II: Marty Peretz is so far out of love with Obama that it looks like hate. But check out the comments to his piece; TNR readers are still very much in love with Obama, or at least they’re in so much hate with Israel that the enemy of their enemy is their friend.]

Falling out of love with Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

[The following is a reprint of a post I first wrote about a year ago. It still seems timely, so I thought I’d post it again.]

Even the left appears to have fallen out of love with Obama, and wonders how and why it all went wrong. Read as Tom Junod tries to puzzle it out in Esquire:

Though many Americans didn’t know very much about him, there was one thing that was never in doubt when we saw and heard Obama on the stump: his ownership of his gift. By the way he carried himself, we could tell that he had always had it, and because he always had it, we could be sure that he always would have it. How could we resist a man who simply by opening his mouth could move mountains ”” and who had ascended all the way to the presidency by staking his political life on his own eloquence? How could we resist a man who seemed so sure that we could not resist him?

Now his gift has all but deserted him, and all that prevents the story from becoming tragic is his own apparent refusal to be affected by it…In less than two years he had gone from sounding like a man who could always count on his ability to strum the mystic chords of memory to a man who, no matter what he said, sounded like a politician, and one in over his head at that. Now he sounded like a man who had already realized that he had lost more than he imagined he could but was just starting to understand that he was never going to get it back.

Junod is right, and he’s also wrong. He’s describing what he perceives to have changed about Obama, and it’s true. Rather like Dumbo when he lost his magic feather, Obama has lost some of the belief in his own invincibility that carried him along, and it shows.

But Junod thinks he is describing something that mainly has its locus in Obama himself, and that it is Obama who has changed. Not really, except for a slightly lower confidence level. Junod is actually describing the process of falling in and then out of love on the part of the viewer.

Obama never was a great communicator. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating now: he rode on a stump speech and a vague promise, and the fervent hope in people’s minds that he would be whatever they happened to want him to be. He was never articulate off the cuff. He was always condescending and cold once he left the confines of that set speech. He had a terrible and/or nonexistent political record. He had never run anything except the Annenberg Challenge (and that was done poorly) or the Harvard Law Review. He had no sense of humor.

They fell in love nevertheless. Love is great. It feels good, but it tends to be blind. And when you fall out of it, you wonder what happened. You can explain it by saying that it’s the love object who has changed. Or you can wonder whatever you were thinking of in the first place.

Junod and many Obamaphiles (is it premature to call them ex-Obamaphiles?) are doing the former. In one of my favorite Shakespearean plays, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Titania does the latter:

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Shakespeare’s play is an exploration of love and its mysterious qualities. When Shakespeare has the character Puck observe to the Fairy King Oberon, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” he’s talking at least in part of their propensity to be fooled—in the case of the play, by his own magic machinations, among other things. The play has the lovers manipulated in a curious way: Puck puts some drops in their eyes that alter their perceptions and make them fall in love with the first being who comes their way.

Thus, the locus of the change is placed in the beholder, where it often belongs. The object of love remains the same person, whether adored or despised. When Puck places the drops in her eyes, Fairy Queen Titania falls in love with an ass (that is, a rude laborer, Bottom, who has been transformed by magic into a man with a donkey’s head, but let’s not get too technical). When Puck later applies the antidote and she falls out of love, she can’t believe she ever liked Bottom in the first place.

Junod, on the other hand, doesn’t doubt that Obama originally possessed the sterling characteristics his admirers perceived in him. Junod sees the main locus of change as being in Obama, not in himself as Obama-watcher. When Junod writes, “How could we resist a man who simply by opening his mouth could move mountains?” he’s being hyperbolic (at least I hope he is). But Obamalove came close to being just that irrational and just that emotional.

In the play, everything comes out all right in the end (although, as the character Lysander says, “The course of true love never did run smooth”). In politics, not so much. Of course, 2012 is a long way away…and there’s a lot of room for reconciliation. But can one ever recapture that initial glow?

Model faces

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed, on looking at photos of models and some starlets (is that still an acceptable word?), that you need to have a rather broad and almost triangular face to continue to be pretty while at the same time sporting a body that is close to being emaciated. That’s where someone like Sarah Jessica Parker breaks down—her face is as thin as her body, which is painfully scrawny. Her face doesn’t hide her state of starvation behind a facade of prettiness.

For many models, though, their faces do. It’s an interesting combo. See, for example, this photo taken during fashion week:

It’s not a combination that exists all that often in nature. But then, most of the attributes of models don’t exist all that often in nature. That’s what makes them models.

Raising taxes on the rich

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s not get too taken with the minutiae of the Obama deficit-reduction proposal, which are a bit difficult to discern at this point anyway. This is merely Obama’s latest move in a chess game that will have many more moves and countermoves before it is finished.

It certainly was inevitable that Obama’s deficit-reduction proposal would include raising taxes on “the rich,” however that is defined at the moment. Is this a good idea? This video of Obama from two years ago has gotten a bit of traction; he says that raising taxes in the middle of a recession is not a good idea:

But before we criticize Obama for hypocrisy or changing his mind, reflect on the question of whether we are still technically in the middle of a recession. And reflect on the fact that the tools for fighting a recession are not necessarily the same tools that tackle deficit reduction.

That’s the dilemma as I see it. Democrats and Republicans differ greatly on how to fight both. Democrats lean heavily on the side of more taxes, especially for those shape-shifters “the rich,” and on the notion of income redistribution to make things more “fair.” Republicans believe that “the rich” includes small businesses that cannot be bled too much or they will cease to drive the engine of our economy, and that it only “fair” that people should be allowed to keep their earnings as much as possible.

We can argue till the cows come home on whether higher taxes on the rich will depress the economy. I happen to think it will have a chilling effect on an economy that is already cold enough. But I really have no idea (I’m being honest here) whether we’ve reached that point already, or whether some slight increases would be okay (I also don’t think that couples making $250,000—especially if they run a small business—are particularly rich, although I’ve never seen anywhere near that income in my lifetime.)

What’s more, in my opinion Obama’s proposed cuts in Medicare don’t go quite far enough, despite the fact that any cuts in entitlements feel noxious. But we’re going to have to get used to more of that feeling.

But I’m waiting to see what the gang of 12 is going to come up with. And then, to see who will win the battle. None of this continuing uncertainty can possibly be good for the economy, however.