Rating the bad fast food restaurants

The New Neo Posted on by

This guy says Subway’s is the worst.

And I’m glad to see my new personal favorite for best, Jack in the Box, doesn’t make the bad restaurant cut. Plus I have to say that I’ve never eaten at most of the restaurants on the list, and of the two I have eaten at (Wendy’s and KFC), it was probably at least twenty years ago.

My personal most-disliked fast food restaurant is the king of them all, McDonald’s. But I’d probably hate the others just as much if I ever went there.

I would love to end this post with a YouTube video of Greg Brown singing “Slow Food.” But there is no YouTube video of Greg Brown singing “Slow Food.” So we’ll have to settle for the lyrics, and you’ll just have to imagine the rest:

People want that slow food
Two minutes and they grouch
But give me ham baked all day long
And help me to the couch
Help me to the sofa
Put the quiet music on
I will lie and think about that ham
Long after it is gone.

I want some slo-o-o-o-ow food.
I don’t want no food with cute names
No neon on a sign
A man can’t live on advertising slogans and conceptual design
Let somebody else go surf and turf
Someone else go carry out Me,
I want my food to know itself
Before it knows my mouth.

I want some slo-o-o-o-ow food
With all the love cooked in.

Why don’t we start it in the mornin’
Leave us plenty of time for lovin’
Weekend homemade hot fresh bread
Make the whole house smell like an oven
And let it all just simmer
Cook in the good juices and the greases
Then we’ll sit down at the table, baby
And slowly tear it into pieces.

I want some slo-o-o-o-ow food
What’s the big rush?….
Don’t want no hard-hearted Hardee’s, no Muck-muck-muck-muck-donald’s….I want a chef, not a clown, to make my food…/it can even be tofu with the right kinda sauce…./blahblahblah—

I want some slo-o-o-o-ow food
With all the love cooked in.

Romney’s the guy for 2012…

The New Neo Posted on by

…says David Frum.

The question is: does anyone care what David Frum thinks at this point?

[ADDENDUM: And the WSJ’s Daniel Henninger asks why not start taking Herman Cain’s candidacy seriously? He’s got private sector experience up the wazoo, and what’s more:

When Mr. Cain talked to the Journal’s editors, the most startling thing he said, and which he’s been repeating lately, was that he could win one-third of the black vote. Seeing Herman Cain make his case to black audiences would be interesting, period. Years ago, describing his chauffeur father’s influence on him in Atlanta, Mr. Cain said: “My father gave me a sense of pride. He was the best damn chauffeur. He knew it, and everybody else knew it.” Here’s guessing he’d get more of this vote than past GOP candidates.

Does a résumé like Herman Cain’s add up to an American presidency? I used to think not. But after watching the American Idol system we’ve fallen into for discovering a president””with opinion polls, tongue slips and media caprice deciding front-runners and even presidents””I’m rewriting my presidential-selection software.

I dunno. There’s something sort of loose-cannon-y about Cain. And besides, as I’ve noticed in many articles (including Henninger’s), when you read the words “Mr. Cain” quickly, they look suspiciously like “McCain”—and we’ve got PTSD for McCain’s candidacy.

And yet, and yet…]

Life in the Maine fast lane

The New Neo Posted on by

The state of Maine has raised its top speed limit to 75, but the new figure only applies to a 110-mile stretch of highway way up north (or downeast, whichever you prefer). That means it will probably affect about three drivers a week, because there are parts of Maine—huge parts of Maine, actually, which is a surprisingly large state—that are as empty as much of Alaska.

And now I’ve learned how we can all get the speed limits raised: just drive faster! Yes, that’s apparently how it works:

Transportation Department spokesman Mark Latti said the department bases its limits on the speed at which 85 percent of motorists travel, and highway surveys showed that percentage were going 74-75 mph along the northern I-95 stretch.

Traffic studies show that people travel the speed they feel most comfortable going, no matter what the posted limit is, Willette noted.

And now I think I’ll present one of my favorite driving/highway songs—not that it has all that much to do with this post, but because I just feel like it:

And in case that wasn’t deep enough for you, listen to Waits live, singing the same song about 25 years later. It’s been a rough 25 (and how does this man continue to have a voice at all, considering the abuse his takes?):

And this description of Waits’s voice, by critic Daniel Durchholz, is pretty funny, if somewhat understated:

[Waits’s voice sounds] like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.

I’d say it actually sounds like it was left hanging in the smokehouse for a decade, and run over by a Mack truck. But that’s just me.

Twins under the skin

The New Neo Posted on by

James and Daniel Kelly are fraternal twins, two handsome young men who live in England. Unlike identical twins, fraternal twins are genetically no more similar than any two siblings of the same parents; they just happen to be the result of the release of two eggs in one ovulation cycle, both of which manage to win the conception sweepstakes and be fertilized and then born.

James and Daniel Kelly, however, look a bit more different than most fraternal twins of the same sex, because one of the characteristics on which they vary is a trait into which we usually put of lot of meaning, that of skin color:

James and Daniel are different in other ways, as fraternal twins often are. James (the darker twin) is gay, outgoing, and an excellent student. Daniel is heterosexual, shy, and more inclined to non-academic pursuits. Strangely enough, it’s Daniel who’s received more of the racial taunts throughout his school life, mostly from confused fellow-students who learn of his ancestry (white mother, black Jamaican father) and see his brother and get angry at Daniel for trying to “pass.”

But how is it that this could happen, biologically speaking? As the article makes clear, a Jamaican would be very likely to have quite a few genes for white or light skin color, and these could end up being expressed in some of that person’s children. It usually doesn’t happen in as dramatic a way as with the Kelly twins. But it can certainly happen with siblings, and does with a certain amount of regularity.

One of the little-known facts about race and fraternal twins is that there’s another way to get a birth in which one twin appears black and one white: if a woman has sex with two men, one black and one white, in fairly close temporal proximity to each other, and she happens to be releasing more than one egg. In a case such as that, if both eggs are fertilized during the same cycle but there are two different fathers, you can get a situation like this.

This was not the case with the Kellys, where the twins have only one father—nor with the Hodgsons, a couple in which both mother and father are of mixed-race parentage, and who had these adorable female fraternal twins:

And this one may just blow your mind—the Durrant-Spooners.

Yes, you saw that right: two sets of fraternal twins with different racial characteristics. Isn’t nature amazing?

More from the left on why the right should dislike Christie

The New Neo Posted on by

The Atlantic jumps on the same bandwagon as New York magazine. It almost makes me wonder whether there really is some chance that Christie might run, so eager is the opposition to be ever-so-helpful in pointing out to the right why his stances are heresies.

Heresies is an interesting word, is it not? It encapsulates so much: the idea of politics as religion, for example. The left likes to assert it’s the right that thinks that way, and that it’s the left that’s really the fact-based, reality-based community. But it doesn’t take much study of the left to observe its quasi-religious nature, and how it deals with apostates (as I’ve learned from bitter experience as the latter).

Oh, and what are Christie’s heresies anyway, as expressed in last night’s speech at the Reagan library (the mother church, as it were), according to the article’s author Conor Friedersdorf? These four:

(1) Compromise is core to politics, a necessary characteristic of good leadership, and the only way to solve problems…

(2) American exceptionalism isn’t a natural state of being or an inheritance — it is something to which we aspire, and we’re presently falling short…

(3) Americans should care what foreigners think of us…

(4) Americans cannot remake the world in our image through force.

To further eludicate Christie’s “heresies,” Friedersdorf fleshes them out from Christie’s speech in ways that make it clear that they’re mostly well within the mainstream of conservative thought. For example, for number 4, he quotes Christie as saying, “We need to limit ourselves overseas to what is in our national interest so that we can rebuild the foundations of American power here at home – foundations that need to be rebuilt in part so that we can sustain a leadership role in the world for decades to come.” When I last checked, that would be an excellent example of a conservative foreign policy principle, one to which even neocons would heartily subscribe. It just depends on what the definition of “in our national interest” is.

As for American exceptionalism, all you need do is to check out the text of Christie’s speech and you’ll find nothing about exceptionalism that should rile a conservative. Christie makes it clear that American exceptionalism is many things—a tradition and a vision that must continually be demonstrated by deeds. His point is that we can’t rest on our exceptionalist laurels:

That is American exceptionalism. Not a punch line in a political speech, but a vision followed by a set of principled actions that made us the envy of the world. Not a re-election strategy, but an American revitalization strategy.

How very controversial.

It’s all moot, anyway, because IMHO Christie’s not running in 2012.

The sound of the 9/11 memorial

The New Neo Posted on by

Around the time of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 I wrote a post about the new 9/11 Memorial at the site. From the photos and the descriptions of the installation, it looked like a moving and profound tribute.

Now I read about an additional quality of the memorial that I hadn’t heard mentioned before—its sound:

As one nears the pools across the light-gray granite paving stones installed by Walker, the murmur of rushing water rises from the cascades that pour Niagara-like down all four sides of the sunken fountains. The sound becomes louder and louder, until it reaches such a steady crescendo that the noise of the surrounding city, even from the construction going on very close by, is drowned out completely…

The propulsive aural and visual excitement of the three-story-deep waterfall and its mysterious disappearance captures and holds your attention in a way most unusual for the static medium of conventional architecture. That distraction makes one’s next perception all the more shocking, as you focus on the names of the victims, incised into the continuous tilted rim of bronze tablets that surround each pool.

The initial perspective provided by the cascades mimics a technique employed in classical Japanese gardens, through which one’s gaze is briefly diverted by a change in paving, screening, or some other element to dramatize a coming transition. Here, after you take in the diaphanous waterfalls, you discover spread out before you at waist level the names, the names, the names. Nearly three thousand victims””not only those lost at the World Trade Center, but also those who died at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania””are memorialized with their names inscribed in Hermann Zapf’s classic Optima typeface of 1952”“1955 (an elegant, slightly flaring sans-serif font), with the letters cut through the bronze so they can be backlit after dark. This is a typographic tour de force.

I am very much looking forward to seeing (and hearing) this and judging for myself.

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.]