Al Megrahi update

The New Neo Posted on by

Since I’ve followed this story for quite a while now, I thought I’d let you know it’s reported that convicted-but-released Lockerbie bomber al Megrahi is in a coma and near death.

Truth? Who knows? One thing we can safely say is that he’s either in a coma and near death or he isn’t. And that we’ve heard it all before: there was this report back in December of 2010:

“Freed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al- Megrahi ‘expected to die in days’
Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al- Megrahi is said to be close to death and on a life-support machine.”

He has not been able to speak for several weeks and his family expects him to die within days. He has also slipped in and out of a coma, sources said.

Sounds a great deal like the reports that have hit the news today. The only difference seems to be that CNN’s Nic Robertson was actually ushered into the sickroom this time, where he beheld a man who looked very ill indeed. But let’s read what Nic has to say:

Where the chair might have been, in the corner facing the door, was a metal hospital bed — the type with wheels that can raise and lower a patient’s back. Beneath the blankets was al-Megrahi, eyes shut, inert.

At first I didn’t know what to do. My carefully thought-through questions were useless. I was stunned. Was I being shown him so I would see with my eyes how sick he was? Should I try to talk to him?

I took in all I was seeing. The oxygen mask on his face, the old, sick lady — his mother, I was told — at his bedside, the drip hanging a foot from his head. His skin seemed paper-thin, his face sallow and sunken.

Was this all a drama for me? Was this real, or had they invited me after my 15-minute wait outside after the “stage” was set?

Only al Megrahi’s family knows for sure.

[NOTE: Oh, and if this thread is like a lot of previous ones, we’ll see the obligatory “al Megahi is an innocent man” drive-bys in the comments section.]

Irene, Goodnight

The New Neo Posted on by

The storm hasn’t really been all it was cracked up to be here. But tis enough, twill serve—in other words, there’s a power outage where I live.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now, plugged into one of the last available outlets and guarding it mightily. I hope that by some time tonight my power will be restored, or at the latest by tomorrow, because the weather is supposed to turn rather nice. After all, this ain’t no ice storm: it’s August! Still summer! Miles to go before Labor Day is over!

Till then, let’s everybody sing along with those icons of my liberal/left youth, The Weavers:

[UPDATE: Power on!]

John Maynard Keynes, married man

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things I love about blogging are the discoveries that can result from late-night meandering down paths that lead to the unexpected.

That’s what happened the other evening when, after doing some research on Keynes and Hayek, I went to Keynes’ Wiki entry. There was almost nothing there about his private life except for a few facts about his parents, brother, and nephews, and then under the subheading “death,” the following sentence: “His widow, Lydia Lopokova, lived on until 1981.”

Now, I may not know tons about economics, but I have other fields of expertise, and one of them allowed me to immediately recognize and place that name. Lopokova was a Diaghilev ballerina, one of many who left Russia in the early part of the 20th century. She danced with Nijinsky and Karsavina, and knew Picasso (who drew her several times).

I was astonished. Keynes married Lopokova??

Indeed, he did—and therein lies a tale even more fascinating than that simple fact would indicate. First, though, let’s take a look at the happy couple:

The circumstances of their meeting were not exactly auspicious in terms of a future marriage. For one thing, Lopokova didn’t speak English all that well. For another, Keynes was gay. Not only that, but he was very gay, if we can speak of degrees in these things. But, in the mysterious ways of the human heart (and body), he fell madly—and rather swiftly—for Lydia, in a manner that wasn’t the least bit platonic, and which seems to have riled the literary/artistic Bloomsbury folk with whom he’d previously hung out:

Keynes first saw her perform in 1921. In December of that year they saw each other face to face: “[Maynard] seems to have anticipated no more than a casual date,” Mackrell writes. “Yet desire evidently sparked at that meeting and it flared so fast that within two weeks Maynard had become Lydia’s lover, and within seven weeks had established her in rooms that were just four doors away from his own house.”

The close-knit Bloomsbury Group already had its doubts about Keynes’s less than socially exalted background. Its members openly resented his new, oddball, female lover. But their relationship was both more solid and more playful than any other in the group.

She called him “the big walk” of her life; he had an armoury of affectionate nicknames for her–“Lydochka” and “pupsik” among them–and their sex life was inventive and intense, according to the extracts Mackrell quotes from their letters.

How does anyone attempt to explain this? I won’t even try. This is what Lopokova’s biographer has to say about it:

He never lost his interest in young men,” asserts Mackrell, “and had an active fantasy life, I’m certain. But he stayed faithful. For that and for his brilliance, I came–this you have to do as a biographer–to love him, almost more than Lydia.”

Here’s more about the special flavor of their relationship:

Her English was terrible but beguiling: “To you I send a chirp from under the left breast,” she would write, “I place melodious strokes all over you.”

And this:

…Keynes and his “dearest darling Lydochka” are in the throes of the kind of bonkers badinage that lovers adore, expressed in the “Lydian English” that Keynes found so engaging. “You do develop my cranium miely Maynarochka,” she says, “and I am so glad I…am intimate with your little holes.” She also declared that The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes’s greatest work, was “beautiful like Bach”.

Lopokova may have sounded airheaded, but she ultimately proved her mettle:

After she nursed [Keynes] devotedly in the declining years of his life (he died at 62 from heart disease), Lopokova went into the seclusion for the rest of her life. She refused interviews and never wrote an autobiography, dying 35 years later.

[NOTE: I never thought I’d get a chance to use the tabs “Finance and economics,” “Dance,” and “Men and women; marriage and divorce and sex” all for the same post. Yet here it is.

Oh, and earlier in life, Lopokova was Stravinsky’s mistress. What’s more, in 1915, while in New York, she became engaged to the New York Morning Telegraph sportswriter Heywood Broun, who later became a member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table. She certainly had eclectic tastes in men.]

David Warren on the news from Libya

The New Neo Posted on by

David Warren makes some spot-on observations on why the reporting from Libya has been so unreliable:

The issue is not crude bias. It is, so far as I am able to understand, the compounded effect of two large factors. Journalists fail to self-criticize, because we belong to a particular, now globalized, class, that is self-referential, like all classes. We assume that others either think as we do; or are beyond the pale.

And this is compounded by the nature of our trade. We must seem to know what we are talking about. “The news must always sound important,” as the late Indian national broadcaster Latika Ratnam once told me, while explaining why the late Walter Cronkite could sound most credible, when he was least well informed.

Those hoping to retain authority must avoid contradicting themselves. Once you have said something is so, it must continue to be so, despite evidence to the contrary. You must stick with what you have already reported, for as long as you can, to avoid the naked emperor problem.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Gadhafi regime is extinguished by the time this column appears in print. Or, is still clinging to life, in six months’ time. We simply don’t have enough information; and much of the information we have is wrong.

Come to think of it, these problems aren’t limited to reporting on Libya. But it’s in Libya that they seem especially prominent.

If I go back to the very first post I wrote about the Libyan conflict (in February of 2011), the coverage already puzzled me. It’s not that I knew what was happening there—I certainly did not—but I noticed that journalists seemed to not be asking the most obvious questions about it. Here’s what I wondered:

I have read nothing that indicates any sort of knowledge about who the Libyan protesters are. Patriots eager for liberty? Islamists eager for a theocracy? Enemies of Qaddafi eager for their own leaders to take over, establish their own tyrannical dictatorship, and enjoy its spoils? Young men just tired of being poor, and angry in general? All of the above?

I sounded that note over and over again, in posts with titles like “Does anyone really know what’s going on in Libya?,” “Who are the Libyan rebels?” (and then again, same title, here), and “Libya: in the land of the liars, how to know the truth?” It’s not that I’m so smart, nor am I so well-informed. It’s just that it puzzled me that so many articles I read about Libya tried to sound authoritative although the authors obviously didn’t know the answers and, more surprisingly, weren’t even asking the right questions.

Warren thinks it’s a matter of the journalists involved being fools, not knaves. I’m not so sure.

[NOTE: As for Walter Cronkite, please see this and this.]

Bernanke: Fed will sit tight—for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Bernanke announced no new steps on the economy, although he urged the government to “pursue tax, trade, and regulatory policies that encourage economic health.”

I guess that for Bernanke, though, it’s a case of “first, do no harm.”

Paul Krugman believes that Rick Perry’s threats have cowed Bernanke into inaction; otherwise, of course, Bernanke would be doing whatever Paul the Great dictates. I think Krugman flatters Perry in terms of influence; the evidence is that there’s actually a fair amount of bipartisan support for staying away from QE3.

It’s funny, though—practically everybody in the comments section of every blog and every article in the MSM has got the answer. I certainly don’t. But I don’t think it lies in printing more money.

Hurricane Irene’s ominous approach

The New Neo Posted on by

Hurricane Irene is being hyped as the storm of the century. And perhaps it will be, at least in scope; it is due to hit the entire Eastern seaboard from North Carolina on up. That includes me, of course, although I’m not fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough, in this case?) to live on the shore itself, where the storm surge is expected to be greatest.

I also don’t live in Manhattan, where floods are predicted to inundate the subway system. But floods are not limited to the storm surge area; there should be enough rain that floods could happen elsewhere, too.

I’ve been around long enough to have personally seen a number of the storms that this one is being compared to: Donna, Bob, even Hazel of my extreme youth (whose name I remember but virtually nothing else). For me and my family, they weren’t all that bad. I’m hoping this one won’t live up to the hype, either. Hurricanes often don’t—but of course sometimes they do. Sometimes they even exceed it.

What do you think will happen with this one? Have any of you in low-lying areas evacuated?

[NOTE: I’m using the “nature” tag rather than the “disaster” one for this. Hoping for the best.]

Guess who?

The New Neo Posted on by

Who is this woman? She caught my eye at The Sartorialist, so elegant and beautiful, and yet seemingly accepting of the changes that come with age (I see none of the telltale cosmetic surgery signs):

I was quite surprised to discover it is Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill, who is now 78. Although I think she looks good, I had not recognized her.

I also had not noticed, first time I looked, that at the bottom right of the photo, a cigarette dangles in her left hand. Very non-PC of her. But is it perhaps the way she keeps that elegant figure, since smoking is known to suppress appetite?

Is Gaddafi cornered?

The New Neo Posted on by

I would take this news with a huge block of salt.

Now, this I’m rather inclined to believe:

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited “around 25” men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are “today are on the front lines in Adjabiya”.

Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters “are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists,” but added that the “members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader”.

His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad’s president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, “including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries”.

Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against “the foreign invasion” in Afghanistan, before being “captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan”. He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.

These guys sure do get around.

Candidates and religion

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of us old enough to remember when JFK was running for office (I was just a wee slip of a girl, myself) can recall the furor about his Catholicism. Kennedy’s allegiance was to the Vatican! was the cry. He was going to be run by the Pope! Kennedy was so bombarded with questions and criticisms about his Catholicism that he felt obliged to declare his support for separation of church and state and the fact that his decisions would be his own.

Of course, Kennedy became our first Catholic president. What’s less well-remembered is that, so far, he’s still our last Catholic president.

Except for Mormon Mitt Romney, all the candidates for president this year are Protestants, as well. But religion is an issue, and not just for Romney; there’s a lot of talk about Rick Perry’s religious views, for example, and potential-candidate Sarah Palin’s religion has long been a bone of contention.

In discussions of Romney (or in previous discussions of whether Obama is really a closet Muslim), the controversy is something like the traditional furor over JFK’s Catholicism: how much will their religion (or supposed religion) give them different values from mainstream America, and do they have some sort of dual loyalty? (This latter, by the way, is a commonplace objection to Jews running for high office.)

But in the cases of Perry and Palin, it’s not so much about the denomination to which they each belong as it is about their religiosity in general, and especially how it affects their view of science and/or what it says about their intelligence itself. There are huge numbers of Americans who are mostly secular, and who distrust religious people as a whole, and particularly anything that smacks of evangelicalism. For example, even though it is a relatively mainstream Republican position now to distrust the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and such a stance does not depend on a religious orientation at all, candidates who are religious and who also distrust AGW come in for special scorn.

The equation “religious=stupid” is an all-too-common one, especially among intellectuals today. It’s not especially valid, nor was it always the case. I quote William F. Buckley, a rather formidable conservative intellectual who was also a believing Catholic, from his book Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997):

In my [earlier] book I had quoted a sentence from the inaugural address (1937) of historian Charles Seymour, who served as president throughout my own residence at Yale. “I call on members of the faculty,” he had said, “as members of a thinking body, freely to recognize the tremendous validity and power of the teachings of Christ in our life-and-death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism. If we lose that struggle, judging from present events abroad, scholarship as well as religion will disappear.”

That was a Christian mouthful, and Mr. Marsden is correct in suggesting that such sentiments could not safely be uttered today by an incoming president of a nondenominational university of good standing. In the opinion of Professor Marsden, my book (whose prescriptions he disagrees with), “presented a formidable case…that a Yale education was more likely to shatter a person’s commitment to Christianity than to fortify it.”

The earlier book to which the passage refers is Buckley’s own God and Man at Yale, written in his senior year at the university and published in 1951. The conflicts between intellectualism and religion which he recognized then (and reiterated in his 1997 book) have only become more extreme over the ensuing years.

Looking back at Seymour’s address, it certainly does appear to exclude nonbelievers and non-Christians from its charge, and to assume that all the professors he’s addressing are Christians. Or does it? Might it not just be asking people to understand that this is still a predominantly Christian country, and that the basic principles and values of Christianity (not the dogma, and not the faith) are part of what this country is based on, and that Christianity is not inherently incompatible with learning but often complements and supports it?

[NOTE: During the 2008 campaign, questions about Obama’s longstanding attendance in Wright’s church were not mainly about religion (although those questions did exist, but they were a separate issue and not limited to his attendance at that particular church). The controversy was about Wright’s politics. Wright preached a great deal of anti-American and anti-white rhetoric from his pulpit, and the questions for Obama involved why he stayed in a church in which the preacher espoused such views, and whether Obama was lying about his own lack of exposure to and knowledge of those views.]

Google celebrates

The New Neo Posted on by

I must say I didn’t immediately get what today’s Google graphic was meant to refer to:

I had to cheat by going to “View image info.” Why, it’s the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges! Although he’s a tremendous favorite of mine, I can’t say I knew the date off the top of my head.

But feliz cumpleanos, Jorge! In honor of his birthday, I think it’s fitting to revisit a Borges quote featured in this old post of mine:

Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to the reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for we change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of the rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus.

Borges was director of the National Library of Argentina for many years. He also was one of those “enchanted spirits” whose books now reside in those “magic chambers” known as libraries. Have you ever read his magnificent story, “The Library of Babel”? Here it is, and I offer the first two paragraphs to whet the appetite of those whose taste is so inclined:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite … Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

Thomas Friedman offers one of the worst comparisons ever

The New Neo Posted on by

NY Times columnist and Obama admirer (“Obama is smart, decent and tough, with exactly the right instincts about where the country needs to go”) Thomas Friedman no doubt means well towards Obama. But this analogy is quite unfortunate:

But lately [Obama] is seriously off his game. He’s not Jimmy Carter. He’s Tiger Woods ”” a natural who’s lost his swing.

I think a bit more than that happened to Woods.

I prefer this, from an incomparable lady who never, ever, lost her swing:

And if you’d like another very fine rendition, there’s always this classic: