Car colors redux

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: And just when I thought I’d lost it forever, one of the missing posts turned up again. Mysteries abound. Here it is.]

Yes, I knew it. It turns out that (hat tip: commenter “Mr. Frank”) silver is the most popular car color, with black next, and white quite popular too. All of them neutrals.

And gray is third, so my observation the other day about gray being such a common car color (including silver as a subset of gray) turns out to have been correct.

By the way, remember when I was looking for a car a while back? Well, I got a used Ford Fusion a couple of months ago. My new/used car’s color is dark green metallic, so dark it’s almost black. Very spiffy, IMHO.

Here’s a photo (not of my actual car, but of one that’s the same color), which doesn’t really show the color to advantage. It has to be seen sparkling in the sunlight to properly appreciate all its finer nuances and subtleties:

fusiongreenii.jpg

Of course, the dark green color does get dusty rather easily. And of course, it isn’t made any more; it was phased out for 2011, along with the highly adjustable passenger seat option that was the main reason I bought the car in the first place. Progress.

Note the colors of the 2011 Fusion: red, white, black, silver, gray, light blue, and something called “steel blue,” which is a grayish blue. In other words, out of seven available colors listed at the site, three of them are more or less gray. I rest my case.

Ah, for the car colors of yesteryear:

carturqiisized.jpg

Lost in cyberspace

The New Neo Posted on by

Something that hasn’t happened to me in a long time just occurred: I lost a post I’d worked on for quite a while.

And then I lost a second one. Argghhh!

I have no idea why it happened. But I do know that it used to be an unfortunately frequent occurrence, back in the quaint days of dial-up. Also, I seem to recall that the old Blogger site, where neo-neocon first resided, would go down quite a bit, and auto-save was barely a gleam in some programmer’s eye.

Who would have thought—in the days when you could brew a cup of coffee and start sipping it while you waited for a webpage to load—that some day we would be able to connect to the internet from virtually anywhere, to upload our home movies for all the world to see (if the world knew or cared), and to do much of this from our cell phones?

[NOTE: Now I’ve got to go—sorry for the light posting. Talk amongst yourselves for a while.]

The making of a SEAL

The New Neo Posted on by

SEAL reservist Eric Greitens on SEAL training:

What kind of man makes it through Hell Week?…

Some men who seemed impossibly weak at the beginning of SEAL training””men who puked on runs and had trouble with pull-ups””made it. Some men who were skinny and short and whose teeth chattered just looking at the ocean also made it. Some men who were visibly afraid, sometimes to the point of shaking, made it too.

Almost all the men who survived possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the “fist” of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose.

Physical and mental endurance are hardly mutually exclusive. As Greitens makes clear, prospective SEALS must have both in extremely generous proportions. The physical is a given, and without it the mental would not even matter. But in the end, the mental seems to be the deciding factor that gives the winners the edge.

Just as it seems to be in so many other aspects of life.

What’s up with car colors?

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever happened to car colors?

It seems these days that gray’s the thing, in every possible shade and tone: silver, metallic, charcoal, light, dark, middling, and every type of gray in between. Much more gray than I care to look at.

I ask you: whose decree is this, and why?

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s some spambot wit:

This site is so cool even ice cubes would be jealous.

Don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think the bot actually means “envious.” Those two words are all-too-often mixed up, a pet peeve of mine.

The distinction is explained here:

Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person’s real locus of concern is the beloved””the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing””not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person’s affections); and the envious person’s locus of concern is the rival. Hence, even if the good that the rival has is the affection of another person, there is a difference between envy and jealousy. Roughly, for the jealous person the rival is fungible and the beloved is not fungible. So he would be equally bothered if the beloved were consorting with someone else, and would not be bothered if the rival were. Whereas in envy it is the other way around. Because envy is centrally focused on competition with the rival, the subject might well be equally bothered if the rival were consorting with a different (appealing) person, but would not be bothered if the ”˜good’ had gone to someone else (with whom the subject was not in competition).

Getting Osama: how much do we need to know?

The New Neo Posted on by

The killing of Osama may have been almost perfectly executed, but the aftermath has certainly been a mess.

One of the many puzzling aspects of the whole thing has been the multiple sources of highly conflicting information. Was Osama defending himself? Was there a firefight? How did his wife get wounded? Why is there a 25-minute gap in the tape? And, of course, from those now known as “deathers,” was he killed at all?

Perhaps—and this is putting the kindest spin on it—the information was meant to be confusing and contradictory, even to mislead us. Because how much do we really need to know, and how much is too dangerous for the world to know?

That’s one of the problems with covert operations. In a country that has generally believed in the public’s need to be informed, the secrecy that is necessarily involved in clandestine murders of bad guys goes against that policy.

For example, even divulging that a cell phone call from a courier may have led to the Bin Laden hideout location could be counterproductive. The terrorists will be even more careful next time, and they have already been quite careful. And did the world need to know the exact body of water in which Osama’s body was buried (see this for possible consequences)? And then there are all of these new details that have been leaked (the CIA is officially mum on the subject) about the safe house from which Osama was surveilled.

It was in the neighborhood. It was occupied by “case officers and recruited informants.” This may indicate that—at least for this operation—the CIA used some Abbottabad locals or at least Pakistanis. Could the dissemination of this information compromise their cover? After all, it’s not an especially densely-occupied area. Is it necessary for us—and the rest of the world, including the terrorists—to learn that much, curious though we may be?

And how much do we really know? How much of what we think we know is false?

Holder and terrorism interrogations: a few more details…

The New Neo Posted on by

…you may not have been aware of before. I certainly wasn’t.

Writing in today’s WSJ, former US Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey says:

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.

Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say “reopening” advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.

It’s one thing to oppose waterboarding as an interrogation technique. It’s another to do this sort of thing.