Oldies but goodies at the Grammys

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you watch the Grammys last night? I did. I happened to tune in after this old guy’s performance was over, but it apparently brought down the house:

Mick Jagger is 67 years old. I would have pegged him for one to burn out a lot earlier than most, but instead he’s still a lean mean machine, thin as a greyhound and just as energetic.

More energetic, I’d say, than when he was a good deal younger. I guess he’s had a lot more satisfaction since then:

I hear tell there was another even older guy there. He’s gonna be seventy in a couple of months, and he’s nowhere near as—ummm—spry as Jagger. But he used to have this to say about aging:

[NOTE: I did catch Barbra Steisand’s performance. She’s not a favorite of mine to begin with, but now she sounds as though she’s lost her voice. I can’t find a photo yet, but her gargantuan dress gave her a certain purple mountain majesty.]

[ADDENDUM: I originally had a YouTube video of Jagger at the Grammys up here. But in the time between my copying the embed code and actually posting the post, YouTube had taken all those videos down for copyright violations.

I love and adore and am practically addicted to YouTube, but it does drive me nuts sometimes.]

Obama’s budget

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure why the big deal about Obama’s submitted budget. After all, no one expected it to have any substantial deficit-cutting teeth in it. And, with Republicans controlling the House, it’s merely the opening gambit in a chess game.

Did anyone really think Obama would make a serious effort to control spending? Did anyone really think he wouldn’t be proposing to raise taxes? Did anyone really think the numbers wouldn’t be fudged in some way or other?

The Republicans have recommended more severe cuts. But understandably, neither party (with the exception of a few individuals on the right) seems willing to touch the third rail of cutting entitlements, and without that the proposed budget reductions are mostly window-dressing.

Of course, that’s because almost everyone will be squawking if entitlements are reduced. There’s a reason both parties have, in recent years, been so keen on distributing federal government money to give people stuff—it’s because we’ve come to expect and demand it. And with certain entitlements such as Social Security, we’ve paid into it over the years and it is our very own money we expect to get out of it if we manage to live long enough. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.

Valentine’s Day: a kiss is still a kiss (and a mate-assessment technique)

The New Neo Posted on by

In 2007, researchers announced the not-so-very-astonishing news that kissing does not mean the same thing to men and to women.

Individuals may differ (and indeed they do). But, as a general rule, kissing is more often a means to an end for men. I’ll leave you to guess what that end might be. For women, kissing is more intrinsically important and even necessary, a sort of measure of the pulse of a romance.

Or, as the researchers rather unromantically put it, women use kissing to “establish and monitor the status of their relationship, and to assess and periodically update the level of commitment on the part of a partner.”

But that’s not all. A psychology professor at Lafayette College reports that kissing has a measurable effect on certain hormones:

[The team] found that kissing reduced the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in both sexes. But levels of oxytocin, a hormone linked to social bonding that they expected to be boosted by kissing, only rose among the men.

For women, a romantic atmosphere (dimmed lights, mood music) helped raised their oxytocin to the level of the men’s.

Ah, women. So very demanding! Especially on Valentines Day—which happens to be today.

And then there’s chocolate:

In 2007 British scientists measured the brain and heart activity sparked by passionate kissing, but found it was less intense that the stimulation produced by eating chocolate.

Speaking of mood music, and kissing:

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up for you

The New Neo Posted on by

Hanson on the next steps in Egypt:

Few will shed tears for the demise of Hosni Mubarak. But his departure was not the result of an overt reform agenda, a new constitution, or even a group of new visionaries. It was ad hoc furor. So the present coup in Egypt is not the beginning of the end of the revolution, but merely the end of the beginning. Shortly we are going to witness a long period of revolutionary fervor, as small numbers of well-organized zealots, including clerical interests, vie for power. The latter’s ascendance will be marked by disavowals of political ambition, constant organizing for that very purpose, embrace of violence while professing renunciation of violence, and courting of Western interests publicly while privately mobilizing against them.

Please read the whole thing.

And I hope James Clapper reads it too.

Just say no to the ubiquitous peppermill

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another of my culinary idiosyncrasies: I am against the invasion of the obligatory peppermill, with all its attendant drama. Why must everything except dessert be covered with extra pepper, offered in a reverential ceremony that makes a person who refuses the ritualistic grinding of the piquant black flecks feel almost rude in doing so?

The Iranian Reichstag fire

The New Neo Posted on by

I was doing some research on the Iranian Revolution last night, and came across this terrible incident, which I’d never heard of before:

On August 19, 1978, in the Cinema Rex fire, the Cinema Rex in Abadan, Iran, was set ablaze, killing over 400 individuals.

The ruling [Shah’s] government of Iran reported that Islamic militants set the fire, while the anti-Shah protesters blamed the intelligence service of the nation, SAVAK for setting the fire. Later it was disclosed that Islamic militants set the Cinema Rex fire.

The Islamists’ motivation seems to have been two-fold: to strike a blow against such modern abominations as the cinema, and to blame the Shah’s forces for the deaths. And it turns out that, although I’d never heard of the event (and my guess would be that most of you have never heard of it either), it was a potent and important motivator in helping to spark the Iranian Revolution of 1979:

The Islamists alleged that SAVAK agents were in pursuit of individuals who ran into the movie theatre locked the doors of the cinema, and a fire was started in the theatre presumably by the fugitives. Unable to escape from the building, everyone inside the cinema died as a result of the conflagration.

However, the truth seems to have been that it was four Islamists who locked the doors and started the fire.

I mention the incident because it illustrates a few things I’ve known for a while but that have become even more apparent lately. One is the depth of misinformation and/or ignorance that we have about so many events, although they could teach us valuable lessons about revolutions and history in general. The details are important, but they are the first to get lost or twisted, if they ever were known at all. Another is the duplicitous extremes to which fanatics will go, and the enormous difficulty of finding the truth.

In the title of this post, I referred to the Reichstag fire of 1933, a seminal event in the history of the Nazi takeover of Germany, exploited by Hitler in order to declare a state of emergency which gave him extraordinary powers. For the almost eighty years since the event, its provenance has been argued almost incessantly:

Historians disagree as to whether Van der Lubbe [a Dutch Communist who was executed for the crime] acted alone or whether the arson was planned and ordered by the Communists or by the Nazis, then dominant in the government themselves, as a false flag operation. The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains an ongoing topic of debate and research.

It’s doubtful that we’ll ever know the truth. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Whatever the truth may be, it is undoubtedly correct that the Nazis were poised to take full advantage of the turmoil that ensued in Germany in the wake of the Reichstag fire, and that they wasted no time in doing so. Unfortunately, tyrannical fanatics are often well-organized, much more so than their righteous opponents, and far more willing to do whatever it takes to ascend to power and make sure they stay there.

[NOTE: Here’s more about SAVAK and truth.]

Obama told him to go?

The New Neo Posted on by

Jake Tapper reports that it was pressure from Obama that caused Mubarak to give up and leave.

I have no idea whether that’s true or not. My guess is that it’s not the real reason, and that the real reason was that the army decided the civil unrest was growing too threatening and told Mubarak to skedaddle or else.

But I can tell you this: if Egypt turns out badly, Obama will deny any role. And if it turns out well, he will take the credit.

Happy Anniversary, says Iran: it’s Islamic Revolution Victory Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey, did you know that today is the 32nd anniversary of the victory of the Khomeini forces in Iran? It is celebrated there as the national holiday “Islamic Revolution Victory Day,” Iran’s un-Fourth-of-July.

If you follow the timeline of the revolution in Iran, you will see the following sequence of cascading events: huge demonstrations in late December of 1978, the Shah appoints Bakhtiar PM on January 3 of 1979, the Shah flees the country on January 16, Khomeini returns February 1 and re-appoints Bakhtiar on February 4, Khomeini tells his followers on February 10 to ignore a Bakhtiar-imposed curfew and pandemonium follows, and on February 11 the regime collapses and Bakhtiar flees.

One very large difference between Egypt and Iran is that Iran had a ready-made charismatic figure in Khomeini, who was ruthless in his drive to power. Egypt seems to lack a similar figure—so far.

[Hat tip: commenter “sergey.”]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s another anniversary from the history of Iran, one that’s not celebrated by anybody: on November 5, 1978, the Shah went on TV and promised “not to repeat past mistakes and to make amends saying, ‘I heard the voice of your revolution… As Shah of Iran as well as an Iranian citizen, I cannot but approve your revolution.'” Something like yesterday’s address by Mubarak, wasn’t it? And just about as effective.]

Mubarak really steps down this time

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems that Mubarak really has stepped down this time.

Suleiman came on TV and made the announcement and the crowd went wild. Now the army is in charge of the transition.

I say “now the army is in charge,” but they have actually been in charge the whole time. IMHO they were allowing Mubarak to try to stay in power and allowed him to make that speech yesterday—but when they saw the results, which seemed potentially incendiary, they insisted he leave.

And so he did, putting them in power officially rather than just behind the scenes. This has happened before, most notably in 1952 in the infancy of the Egyptian republic when a group of officers removed King Farouk, an act that ended with the presidency of Nasser. In order to do that, the fledgling Eygptian constitution was abandoned and a new one written. But there was one huge difference: that was a coup, not a popular uprising.

For now, I think Mubarak’s resignation is the best result possible under the circumstances, as long as the army maintains order. I emphasize the words “for now,” because I continue to be very concerned about what will happen next, and especially the outcome of elections. Even if the people in Tahrir Square actually represent a true democracy movement, five and a half months is not exactly an ideal amount of time to build a democratic political system where none existed before. And will forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood be the beneficiaries?

We’ve heard about the Arab street for years. Who would have thought that its most potentially cataclysmic eruption would be against its own governments? The reverberations are spreading around the entire region, and I am certain that heads of state in places such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan are staying up nights figuring out what to do in their countries to avoid a similar fate.

I asked who would have thought it—but I suppose I could say “neocons,” or perhaps “George Bush, that’s who.” But that does not mean that something good will come from this. We simply do not know the end result, and anyone who says that he or she does is just blowing hot air.

[ADDENDUM: I just watched a clip of Suleiman delivering the announcement. He looked like a person officiating at his own funeral.]

Mubarak’s dialogue

The New Neo Posted on by

Here is the full text of Mubarak’s speech in translation.

There’s a lot in there about “dialogue,” or some Egyptian term that’s translated as dialogue. He sounds like a Democrat already!

And this part seems to be a slap in the face of President Obama:

And I tell you here, as a head of state, I do not find any embarrassment at all in listening to the youth of my country, and to satisfying their demands. But the embarrassment would only lie in the fact — and I would never permit — is that I would listen to any sort of intervention that would come from outside, from the outside world, whatever the source is, whatever the intention behind them are.

[ADDENDUM: John Bradley, who wrote a book predicting the Egyptian revolution, was just interviewed briefly on Fox about Mubarak’s speech and said: “Tomorrow is the first day of the real revolution.”]