Perry and the performing candidates
Perry’s attempt at damage control was to appear on the Letterman show and joke about his lapse. It may be the best approach at this point; we’ll see whether it actually works:
What strikes me about the whole thing is how the last few decades have featured a slow and steady loss of dignity for presidential candidates. Nixon and Kennedy were the first to appear on the talk show circuit, but unlike Perry I don’t think they were doing standup comedy.
Although later on, Nixon wasn’t above a little TV comedy to help his election cause:
On the other hand, musical interludes from politicians (such as Bill Clinton’s famous sax-playing on Arsenio Hall) have a more lengthy history. Harry Truman, for example, wasn’t half bad:
And here’s Nixon, in one of his non-candidacy years:
And even though she’s not a candidate, I’ll throw in Condoleezza Rice, who’s a very accomplished classical pianist (and a great dresser; nice outfit, Condi!):
A few words about child sexual abuse
In response to some speculation in the comments section of this post, here are a few facts about how the sexual abuse of children usually works, especially when the perp (like Sandusky) is a serial abuser of unrelated children:
(1) The perp is often in a position of authority over the child, which would predispose the child to obey.
(2) The perp is often an experienced and almost uncanny judge of character, and chooses his (or her) prey carefully. The children tend to be insecure and shy, and to come from troubled and/or single parent homes. Therefore an organization such as Second Mile, the one Sandusky founded that served underprivileged children and from which he drew his victims, would be a perfect source.
(3) The victim is usually approached carefully over time in a series of escalating moves in order to test his/her receptivity and passivity in the face of the abuse. If the victim is too resistant or defiant or uncooperative, the perp moves to another victim.
(4) The perp counts on shame and/or fear to keep the child quiet. Sometimes (although I don’t think this was one of the allegations in Sandusky’s case) the perp overtly threatens that something bad will happen to the child or the child’s parents if the secret is found out or told: either the child will be punished or the perp will harm or kill him/her or his/her parents. Or there can even be just the milder threat that of course no one will credit the child’s word against the adult’s. In many cases the child has already had the latter experience—of not being believed or heard in smaller matters—so it is very believable for the child. It is speculated that the entire spectrum of the problem, including the fear, secrecy, shame, and sense of betrayal on the child’s part, can be even more damaging than the act of sex itself, although the latter is certainly damaging as well.
(5) Sometimes the evidence that the child is being abused is very subtle and easy for parents to miss. This is especially true in a home where parents are harried and not paying a lot of attention, but it can be the case even with attentive parents. Sometimes children, in their shame (or fear) at what has happened to them, are quite adept at hiding any evidence, even (or perhaps especially) from parents. Sometimes the changes in the child are limited to increased nonspecific anxiety and/or behavior problems. There is often no physical evidence (although in the case of anal rape, as alleged in the Sandusky case, there tends to be—but again, children can be determined and successful at hiding it).
(6) It is commonly thought that the spouse of the perp ought to suspect, especially if (as in the Sandusky case) some of the abuse occurs in the perp’s home. For example, Sandusky had many of the kids to his house on overnights before outings. They slept in a basement room, and he is alleged to have gone done there to abuse them around their bedtime. Many people in comments sections around the blogosphere have blamed his wife for not noticing this, especially if he was absent around bedtime. But a child’s bedtime is not the same as an adult’s, and if the perp times his approaches well (which Sandusky almost certainly did), he can easily accomplish the abuse fairly quickly, and while his wife is busy cleaning up or on a computer or reading or engaged in any number of solitary evening activities. The perp’s demeanor can otherwise seem rather ordinary and non-suspicious, and the married sex life of perps can actually be quite “normal”-seeming as well.
People who look at the phenomenon of child sexual abuse from the outside often prefer to think that the signs are clear, and that—had it been their spouse—they would have known. But sadly, that is just not the case. Perps can be very sly and able to present a convincing facade of normalcy. In other words, in addition to being sexual predators, they are often excellent con artists.
Guide to living to extreme old age…
…while remaining healthy: have the right genes.
The study in the article was on exceedingly old Ashkenazi Jews. But that particular group is no more likely to live past 100 than other groups. It was just a convenient population for the NY-based scientists to recruit.
And if you don’t know the meaning of the Yiddish phrase in the tag line underneath the headline, “secrets of the alter kockers”—here you go:
An alter kocker is a man who can no longer do something that he once could. He’s an old guy, over the hill, past his prime.
In literal terms, an alter kocker is from German and means “old defecator.” It doesn’t sound very nice in translation, but it’s a common expression, and sounds gentler and more humorous in Yiddish conversation. Its sense is usually of someone who is inept at whatever he is trying to do. It often has to do with forgetfulness. As soon as somebody says hello to a man but he can’t remember his name, the other guy says, “You alter kocker.” The other guy can’t admit to himself that he’s not too well liked, or not worth remembering. So he blames you.
Another thing an alter kocker is famous for is playing golf. There are certain activities that are recognizable for old people that only an alter kocker gets involved in and golf is one. A man wants to go for a walk, but he doesn’t want to feel like he’s just going for a plain walk, so he takes a stick with him. He doesn’t have to do anything, but now he convinces himself that he’s an athlete. He can feel young. If he takes a walk, he holds a stick and he swings it. He doesn’t remember is there was a ball there or not. It’s not that important. He misses the ball by three feet but he’s still happy.
[NOTE: Come to think of it, Perry’s problem last night was that he sounded like an alter kocker.]
Perry: oops?
The blogosphere is agog with talk about how Perry’s gaffe in the debate last night has finished him.
And it did look bad, although it’s the sort of senior moment (or semi-senior moment) many of us of a certain age are quite familiar with, unfortunately.
Now, what was I saying?
Oh yes…
That sort of lapse is just not okay in a presidential candidate, especially one who’s not doing so well in the first place. Just think what the Obama campaign could do with this clip:
Paterno and the duty to report
What did Joe Paterno know and when did he know it?
And what was his duty based on what he knew, and did he shirk it?
I won’t mince words here: what is alleged to have taken place at the hands of Jerry Sandusky in the Penn State locker room in 2002, the anal rape of a child, is a terrible sexual crime of great magnitude. If Paterno knew that had happened and had any part in covering it up, he shirked his duty in a major way and his firing is a mild punishment.
Of course, even Sandusky himself is innocent until proven guilty. But the allegations in the grand jury indictment against him are compelling (and revolting), and seem to point very strongly towards guilt (a witness, many seemingly independent reports of other instances of Sandusky abusing children and using a similar m.o. in some of the cases). But even if Sandusky is innocent—which does not appear to be the case—that would not affect Paterno’s duty to report when he got word of the allegations of child rape.
And therein lies the conundrum: what word of child rape did Paterno get? He says he was told something much more vague—that something untoward and inappropriate but only possibly sexual happened in the shower at Penn State, involving Sandusky and a male child:
…[E]ven if the grad assistant [who reported the offense] in question, Mike McQueary, was too traumatized or intimidated to tell Paterno the unfathomable particulars of what he saw (and we’ll see how that story develops), Paterno knew a naked Sandusky didn’t belong anywhere near a naked grade schooler in the shower.
In his original statement on the case, after denying that McQueary informed him of “the very specific actions contained in the Grand Jury report,” Paterno went on to concede that “it was clear that the witness saw something inappropriate involving Mr. Sandusky.”
The former defensive coordinator stands accused of something that “inappropriate” couldn’t begin to describe. Sandusky was indicted on felony charges of sexually abusing eight boys, and experts believe the damage inflicted on child victims in these cases can be everlasting.
However, no one alleges that Paterno knew about the other victims. But it is indeed the case that, had a proper investigation been launched at Paterno’s request in 2002, at least some of those victims—the ones who came after the incident of which he had been informed—might have been spared their terrible experiences.
What did Paterno do when he was told whatever he was told by McQueary? He launched an internal investigation—within the athletic department—hardly worthy of the name. And that, I think, is where his major wrongdoing lies.
Why not tell the police? Why not tell Child Protective Services? And why such tepid findings resulting from the internal investigation, given the extreme nature of the allegations? One cannot help but think there was a coverup, at least on the part of Tim Curley and Gary Schultz:
Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, the school’s vice president for business and finance, were charged with perjury and failure to report the allegations. Curley and Schultz each face up to seven years in prison if convicted…
Pennsylvania law requires that anyone who comes into contact with children in the course of their employment to report evidence of abuse to “appropriate authorities.” Failure to do so is a third-degree misdemeanor.
The statute specifically lists teachers, nurses, doctors and child-care workers, among others, as those required to notify authorities when they suspect children in their care have been molested.
Paterno apparently followed the letter of the law by telling Curley about what McQueary had witnessed. But if Paterno had notified law-enforcement officials once it became clear university officials had not shared the allegation with police, Sandusky may have been arrested, sparing at least one of the boys whose abuse was detailed in the grand jury report.
Paterno does seem guilty of extremely poor judgment and excessive trust in the internal mechanism of the university, and a simple lack of common sense. He had no legal duty to report to the police, but he should have done so:
Penn State football icon Joe Paterno probably adhered to the letter of the law when he told the school’s athletic director – but not the police – that former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky allegedly sexually abused a boy in the Nittany Lions’ locker room in 2002.
But attorneys familiar with child abuse statutes say that while the venerable college coach may not face criminal charges, he is hardly an innocent bystander…
Paterno issued a statement late Sunday that said he “did what I was supposed to do with the one charge brought to my attention.”
But he also claimed that a graduate assistant who told him he witnessed Sandusky having anal sex with a boy in a locker room on the Penn State campus “at no time related to me the very specific actions contained in the grand jury report.”…
“After learning that school officials were not reporting the matter to police, Joe Paterno should have reported it himself,” [attorney] Garabedian said. “It is simply common – and ethical and moral – sense.
Agreed.
Perhaps Paterno wanted to protect his beloved Penn State and the athletic department there (although Sandusky had stopped working for the university in 1999 and was no longer an employee at the time of the offense). Perhaps Paterno was naive and didn’t believe Sandusky capable of anything so terrible. But there’s no “perhaps” to the fact that Paterno committed a terrible lapse of judgment in not reporting the allegations to the proper authorities—which were most definitely not the athletic department at Penn State.
Yahoo: back to the Classic
Instead of wandering around fruitlessly at the Yahoo site, looking for a way to get back to Yahoo Classic email, it finally dawned on me that I might be able to actually write to the folks at Yahoo and request a return to the tried-and-true.
And so I did—and got the following almost immediate reply:
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.
We have received your request to return to a previous version of Yahoo!Mail, and we will switch the email service of your account to Yahoo! Mail Classic within two business days. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced while using our new Yahoo! Mail, and we hope this change helps.
The speed and the cooperative tone of Yahoo’s reply indicate to me that I’m not the only one who’s been deeply unhappy with the forced change they instituted back in September. Here are some of the problems others have encountered with it. The right click problem mentioned at the end is definitely among the very worst faults of the new, “improved” system:
As the new Yahoo! Mail became mandatory for users, a number of previously satisfied users of Yahoo! Mail started to report slow typing speeds with the new Yahoo! Mail,[citation needed] running contradictory to Yahoo!’s claims that the new Yahoo! Mail would perform “2x” faster. Yahoo! offered no resolution to the problem as of September 12, 2011, and continued to advertise that Yahoo! Mail “provides performance that is 2x faster than the previous versions of Yahoo! Mail” and runs at “lightning speed.” Further slowing down user productivity, users cannot copy and paste email addresses from the sender box but must navigate to the Contacts tab and search for a contact to be able to copy and paste an email address. This is because now recipient email addresses convert to the name of the recipient highlighted inside a box, without an immediate option for accessing the email address to copy and paste like in traditional email clients. Although it is not mentioned, upgrading to the new version disables the use of the secondary addresses provided in the previous version. Thus users will not receive emails sent to a secondary address anymore. The new interface overrides the browser’s right mouse button (e.g., making functions such as opening mails in new tab windows unavailable).
Plus é§a change, plus c’est la méªme chose.
The Kraushaar complaints: what I’d like to know is…
…what’s “a spokeswoman in the office of the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration“?
Because that’s what Karen Kraushaar does these days. Seems a rather odd job description.
But remind me never to send Kraushaar any of those silly email forwards:
[Kraushaar’s] complaint [at the job she held after her NRA position] also cited as objectionable an email that a manager had circulated comparing computers to women and men, a former supervisor said. The complaint claimed that the email, based on humor widely circulated on the Internet, was sexually explicit, according to the supervisor, who did not have a copy of the email. The joke circulated online lists reasons men and women were like computers, including that men were like computers because “in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.” Women were like computers because “even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.”
Can’t imagine why Kraushaar would take offense at that.
And we still don’t know what Kraushaar is alleging Cain did or said to her that she found so offensive.
How do you fight back?
I’ve long had a special interest in the topic of false accusations—or rather, how to tell false from true, when the only evidence is the word of one party against another. Whether the charge be date rape, recovered memories of childhood molestation at the hands of a relative, sexual harassment, or just raunchy behavior of the type some of his accusers have claimed for Cain; if there’s no evidence, what’s a person to do?
It’s one thing to insist that Cain should “confront” the sexual harassment issue and the charges by giving a press conference. It’s another to see how it’s possible to effectively do so.
Cain gave an interview today (not a press conference) that constituted some sort of “confrontation” of the charges: categorical denial of harassing anyone, and calling Bialek a liar. But because of the number of accusers (and the amorphous quality of some of the charges), the situation resembles an almost endless game of whack-a-mole.
In such a situation, how can the accused give a full answer to the charges? What would a full answer be?
If the charges are true, admit it and pull out of the race. But if not, how does a person answer a fabrication, especially if there are no witnesses? What can a person say besides “it didn’t happen” or “it didn’t happen that way” or “she’s a liar?”
One thing to do is smear the women–dig into their pasts and find the flaws. That opens Cain (or anyone in his position) up to headlines like this one in Politico: “Herman Cain campaign launches attack on accuser Sharon Bialek.” It makes him seem like a thug, even though he’s just pointing out facts about her somewhat shady financial past.
This lady, Karen Kraushaar (one of the two woman at the NRA who got a settlement), seems to be a more credible witness than Bialek in terms of her past. But she has yet to describe exactly what Cain is supposed to have done that constituted her cause of action and for which she received a relatively small payment from the NRA. She also says she wants to have a joint conference with other accusers: why? To compound the effect of the accusations?
And therein lies an important point: a great many people say that now that there are many accusers the accusations become more credible. To me, each accusation is only as credible as (a) the person making it, and (b) the charges themselves. The numbers matter a little, but not that much, although there’s probably a tipping point where they would matter to me more.
Another circumstance that would enhance the charges’ believability would be if several woman had come forward independently—each without knowing about the other—alleging similar behavior on Cain’s part. That might be the case with the two accusers from the NRA, if they hadn’t spoken to each other or compared notes before each made her claim, but we don’t yet know.
That’s not the case with Bialek, who only has come forward recently after all the publicity rather than before it. And as far as her having supposedly told a friend or a boyfriend about Cain’s behavior at the time it happened, that’s slightly more convincing but not very. Unfortunately, people will lie to back each other up; I’ve seen it happen way too many times.
Let me repeat: I don’t know whether the women accusing Cain are telling the truth. They very well might be. It’s also possible that some are and some aren’t. But I do know that it is far too easy to lie about these matters if one has a mind to—for money, attention, anger, politics, or self-delusion—and that the more people who do so against a single prominent person, the more likely it is that their false charges will stick.
The National Enquirer would be ashamed…
…to publish this story.
But not Politico.
[ADDENDUM: Actually, it seems the story first appeared in the Washington Examiner, a fairly conservative rag.]
And then there’s Justin Bieber…
…who’s fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough, depending on the results) to have a possibly-exonerating DNA test to fall back on. In the case of a false accusation of fathering a baby, it’s a simple way to prove the truth or falsehood of a claim.
It’s hard for me to understand the motivation of Bieber’s accuser if it is a false claim and the test exonerates Bieber—although, as I wrote earlier today, some people are attracted to notoriety.
Assuming the test shows Bieber to not be the father of Yeater’s baby, he’s got plans:
The pop superstar is also likely to sue Yeater and the people representing her to show there are consequences to making false accusations.
In addition, his accuser could be subject to prosecution for statutory rape if they did have intercourse, because of the age difference.
And speaking of babies—to me, Bieber has always looked so young as to be nearly fetal himself. But he seems to be one of the more extreme examples of a phenomenon I wrote about here, the androgynous male heartthrob.
Featured dancer: Melissa Hough
I’ve just discovered a not-so-well-known dancer named Melissa Hough, who used to dance with the Boston Ballet but is now a member of the Houston Ballet.
Hough reminds me of retired ballerina Cynthia Gregory, who used to dance with American Ballet Theater during the heyday of ballet in the 60s and 70s and through the 80s. They share qualities rare in ballet dancers (who usually tend to be elfin): a plumb line solidity, weightiness, presence, serenity, centered strength, power, and elegance. When she balances, Hough never seems as though she can’t wait to get down, or as if it’s a strain for her to be en pointe. It appears instead that her natural state is up—and that it’s a mere afterthought, and somewhat of an effort (and an unnecessary one at that) for her to come down.
Take a look at Hough in the fiendishly difficult Lilac Fairy variation. She does an especially hard variation on the variation, one that requires Italian fouettes (starting at :58) which very few people can accomplish without looking intensely strained; they demand astounding strength and perfect balance:
Alas, I can’t find a clip of Gregory performing the same variation. But here she is, somewhat blurry, in the same ballet (“Sleeping Beauty”) but in a different role, that of the princess and main character Aurora performing the Rose Adagio (note that this excerpt comes at the end of a long variation, when the dancer is quite tired) Both dancers are tall (I know that about Gregory but I only assume it about Hough) and although slender, not emaciated—which is a great relief and part of the reason their dancing is so satisfyingly sculptural:
While we’re at it, here’s British ballerina Margot Fonteyn in the same Rose Adagio during the 60s when she was already in her forties. Fonteyn was renowned for something altogether different—not technique but charm, and a delicate humanity and refinement. She was never strong and her extensions are low, but here we observe her steeling herself to balance longer by sheer will:
And here’s a more varied clip of Hough excepts, including modern pieces which showcase her speed and versatility as well as her leap:
[NOTE: I find myself so repelled by the news lately that dance seems a refreshing oasis in comparison.]