New England’s best ice cream

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before about New England’s love affair with ice cream. And now that the weather here is unseasonably but wonderfully warm—summer seems to have arrived, and it’s only May!—the Boston Globe has published this guide to New England’s best.

Supposedly, anyway. What’s Ben and Jerry’s doing there? It’s okay, but you can get it almost anywhere, in a supermarket. Maybe the Globe felt it had to be included because it’s so PC.

I like the flavor variety at Christina’s of Cambridge. Feast your eyes, and then feast your mouth and stomach if you ever happen to be in the neighborhood.

Friendly’s originated in New England. Now that it’s a chain, it doesn’t taste like much. But when I was a child going to camp in the Berkshires, Friendly’s was a wonderful and special treat.

Same for HoJo’s, another New England innovation (see this for my reminiscence). Brigham’s has more or less bitten the dust, but it was the first place I ever heard the New England term “jimmies” used instead of New York’s “sprinkles.” Herrell’s invented (or at the very least, popularized) the mix-in. So noble New England has done its bit for the development and advancement of ice cream.

And I’ve done my time at New England’s ice cream stands over the years. I’m proud to report that I’ve sampled a great many—perhaps more than my share—of the Globe’s recommendations, and can attest to the fact that for the most part they offer a fine selection. Those of you who have been around the New England ice cream circuit might want to vote for your favorite in the Globe’s poll.

The continuing saga of Al Megrahi

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember our friend the Lockerbie bomber, Al Megrahi? The one who got a “get out of jail free” card back in August of 2009 because he only had three months to live, max?

Well, it’s nine months later and Al Megrahi is still among us. Although he’s mostly dropped off the radar screen in the West (a wise decision, given the circumstances), he had a birthday bash back in April.

It seems his return to freedom, friends, and family in Libya has given Al Megrahi a new lease on life. Then again, perhaps his dire prognosis in Scotland was just a reflection of the perils of the UK’s medical system versus the wonderful care he got in the progressive hospitals of Tripoli.

Whatever. We’ll never know, because he’s refusing to release his medical records.

And hey—he’s lived the longest of any prisoner released on compassionate grounds because of terminal illness! Break out the Guinness Book, and break out the Guinness (or should it be the Scotch?)! What’s more, the report claims that, far from being on his deathbed, Al Megrahi’s been working on a documentary TV show.

Will SCOTUS overturn HCR?

The New Neo Posted on by

If Meghan McArdle’s projections are correct, you better hope not.

Maybe it would be better to defund it if possible in 2011, get some intelligent stopgap (is that an oxymoron?) measure in there, and then repeal the earlier bill in 2013 and replace it with one that emphasizes realistic private sector solutions that make sense, knowing that a perfect system can never be designed.

Good luck. What a mess, with no end in sight.

But I think we’re helped in our endeavor by seeing what’s happening to welfare states in Europe right now. The health care solutions offered by the left seem more fiscally dangerous than ever. Will the right step up to the plate? And will the voters give up pie in the sky?

Is the Gulf oil slick seeping towards the White House?

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the question. And the answer given here is “Maybe. A little bit, anyway:”

…[Coast Guard commander] Allen has repeatedly pointed out that it is BP, not the federal government, that has all the equipment and expertise to deal with the spill. “They’re exhausting every technical means possible to deal with that leak,” he said Monday.

But in the wake of BP’s continued inability to shut down the enormous leak at the deep water well, the Obama administration is getting slammed by those who would normally be seen as allies of the president.

“They’re not tough enough,” Democratic operative and Louisiana native Donna Brazile said Sunday on “This Week.” On the same show, Cokie Roberts, another daughter of the Pelican State, agreed, mocking Obama for naming an investigatory commission: “That is what you do when you really don’t have anything else to do.”…

I’m not at all certain it will end up mattering. Voters who still approve of Obama are so deeply compromised already that they may be unable to change their minds no matter how much he disappoints them. But perhaps the accretion of offenses will add up in the end.

Meanwhile, Obama (whom Rep. Steve Scalise calls “the finger-pointer-in-chief”) blames, blames, blames. In this case, of course, much of the blame of BP appears justified. But some of the blame is Obama’s own. He has refused to open up the alternative of land drilling in places such as ANWR. And his administration failed to properly implement recommendations that would almost certainly have contained the problem. In this last, his presidency is not alone, however; the program was designed in 1994, but has never been put in place.

Once upon a time presidents used to take responsibility for what happened under their watch. The idea was that, even if they weren’t directly responsible, whining and blaming served no purpose and was unpresidential.

That’s the way grownups in charge behaved. And that’s what the public demanded.

Here’s a little nostalgia for you:

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The welfare state’s dirty little secret is out

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s simple: with low birth rates, the young end up working to support the old, and then the state is likely to run out of money before their time comes to benefit.

It’s starting to happen all over the Western world, as inevitably as taxes and death (yes, I reversed the order for a reason). And the young who voted for Obama—or his equivalents in Europe—are beginning to realize they’re the ones left holding the (empty) bag:

In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70.”

The math doesn’t lie:

According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.

It’s everywhere in Europe, the weaker economies having piggy-banked on the stronger and created an even greater mess. And don’t think we’re immune, either; although so far we’ve been less of a welfare state than the nations of Western Europe, Obama and the Democrats are working overtime to remedy that oversight before America catches on to the unraveling of Europe and prevents its own.

But don’t blame the leaders alone. The sad fact is that such policies were only able to be implemented because people like them. In the short run they lead to popularity, re-election, and the good life—until the bills come due. And by then the populace has become accustomed to (and demanding of) a level of benefits, leisure, and protection from the vicissitudes of life that our forefathers would have considered an unrealizable dream.

If so, that’s because ultimately it is an unrealizable dream. Now that people are catching on, they’re hopping mad. Several generations raised with expectations of cradle to grave security find it hard to accept the idea that it was all a sort of Ponzi scheme, and that they’re on the payer side of the pyramid.

But where there is realization, there might be opportunity:

In Athens, Mr. Iordanidis, the graduate who makes 800 euros a month in a bookstore, said he saw one possible upside. “It could be a chance to overhaul the whole rancid system,” he said, “and create a state that actually works.”

It could be a chance—but to succeed, politicians will have to tell some harsh truths, and people will have to accept them. So far, except for a few pockets of beginning sanity (such as, strangely enough, New Jersey) there’s been a lot of resistance and denial.

In France, for example [emphasis mine]:

President Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to pass major pension reform this year. There have been two contentious overhauls, in 2003 and 2008; the government, afraid to lower pensions, wants to increase taxes on high salaries and increase the years of work.

But the unions are unhappy, and the Socialist Party opposes raising the retirement age. Polls show that while most French see a pension overhaul as necessary, up to 60 percent say working past 60 is not the answer.

It all reminds me a bit of St. Augustine’s plea to the deity: “make me chaste, but not yet.”

The White House stonewalls on Sestak…

The New Neo Posted on by

…because it knows it can.

I don’t know if there might be any fire behind the mild amount of smoke generated so far by Sestak’s allegations that he was offered a job by the Obama administration in exchange for not running for the Senate. But even Congressman Weiner, Democrat from New York, is begging the White House to say something—anything—to silence the talk and damp down the accusations. The administration could certainly do that; the information they give wouldn’t even have to be correct, because there’s zero chance that Attorney General Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.

But the White House continues a disturbing pattern of arrogantly (I’m so tired of typing those words “disturbing” and “arrogantly” in relation to Obama and his aides) refusing to answer and explain. Press Secretary Gibbs has responded by saying ““I’m not going to get into it, but people who have looked into it assure me the conversations were not inappropriate in any way.” This sort of laughable answer is possible because this group learned early on—during the 2008 campaign, and perhaps even earlier—that they simply do not have to answer because no one of any consequence will hold their feet to the fire.

Members of the press are their toadies. Reporters will take the abuse and like it, or pretend to. Obama and company took their measure long ago, and found them to be toothless and spineless. Those who accuse Obama of wrongdoing will be labeled cranks or targeted or marginalized or ignored. The story will fade as more come to take its place. Most of the American public will neither know nor care.

And Chicago-on-the-Potomac will continue on its merry way, covered with a thin veneer of sanctimonious claptrap about morality and transparency and/or whatever the rhetoric du jour might be.

I put the blame for the creation of this monster squarely on the shoulders of the press. Obama and his group are merely doing what amoral politicians will do if they are given the chance. It’s the press’s duty to make sure they are not given the chance.

But the press abdicated this role re Obama long, long ago. Whatever the reason—his race, his smoothness, his leftism, their own culpability and inability to admit they were wrong about him—the results have been pernicious. And it’s not over yet.

I’m saying no to natto

The New Neo Posted on by

I like food, and I like foreign food especially. But I must confess (shhh!) that Japanese food is not one of my favorite cuisines.

Don’t get me wrong: I eat it and enjoy it. But it’s way down on my list, after Middle Eastern and Greek and Italian and French and Chinese, maybe just a bit above German and Russian (which I really don’t like—sorry, Sergey and Tatyana).

So, because of my lukewarm attitude towards Japanese food, perhaps I’m not being objective when I predict that this effort will not catch on here. At the risk of sounding juvenile, I will add that fermented soy products such as natto are yucky. And I think most of America will agree.

Even a great many Japanese are not keen:

Many Japanese shy away from natto, the slimy fermented soybean found in Japanese cuisine. Yet Minami Satoh is on a mission to get Americans to embrace the smelly food…

Mr. Satoh’s long odds are evident at Ame. The Michelin-starred Japanese-inspired restaurant in San Francisco has offered Mr. Satoh’s natto for the past year as a $2 option to add to a dish with cuttlefish, sea urchin and salmon roe.

“I’ve asked our wait staff to encourage customers to try it out because even if they don’t like it, it’s only $2 extra,” says chef Hiro Sone. But even after the encouragement, only about 60% of the customers request it and most of them are people who were previously familiar with natto, he says.

And remember, these naysayers are folks who are already ordering a dish with cuttlefish, sea urchin, and salmon roe. Not the culinarily provincial, I’d wager.

I’ve never eaten natto, although I’m quite familiar with its cousin tempeh, which I absolutely detest. The difference between the two foods is subtle, but it sounds as though natto is even worse than tempeh—and that’s saying quite a bit:

Natto is soybeans fermented by bacteria, tempeh is fermented by fungus.

I’ve never eaten natto. If the descriptions I’ve read are accurate, it is disgusting; one of the more difficult to acquire tastes you’ll ever find.

And that quote is from an article in a newsletter put out by a naturopathic clinic trying to push natto as healthful, which no doubt it is. Must be really nasty stuff.

Obama, Daniel Pearl, and freedom of the press

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems like a long, long, time ago that Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, held hostage, and then beheaded by jihadists in early 2002. At the time, it was a profoundly shocking event, and part of the horror was the fact that it was recorded on video and posted online (a sight I did not choose to watch and never will).

Despite 9/11, many of us were still comparatively naive back then about what the radical jihadists wanted and what outrages they were prepared to perpetrate to get there. The murder of Daniel Pearl was another wake-up call, and it was followed by many others. For a while, many Americans seemed to understand the nature of the enemy.

President Obama, however, has dedicated himself to undoing that knowledge and replacing it with PC pap. He used the occasion of the signing of the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act to continue that mission, as Mark Steyn describes in his piece excoriating Obama for his remarks at the ceremony.

Here’s the full text of what Obama said. Missing, of course, is what he didn’t say. Nothing about who murdered Pearl; just that his “loss” was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.”

Obama managed to get through the entire occasion without saying that Pearl was killed, much less that he was murdered. He labeled Pearl as a target of “silencing” because he was a generic journalist rather than a specifically Jewish one.

Obama allows “those” who “silenced” Pearl to remain nameless and featureless. But one of them, of course, was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, radical Muslim (are you listening, Eric Holder?) jihadist and mass murderer on whose behalf the Obama administration has been working overtime to secure his day in a NY civilian court rather than a military tribunal.

Obama may be keeping relatively mum. But KSM himself had a bit more to say, and he apparently was a mite more clear on the subject [emphasis mine]:

On March 15, 2007, the Pentagon released a statement that Mohammed had confessed to [Pearl’s] murder. The statement quoted Mohammed as saying, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.

What happened to Pearl was vile and sickening. But it is also outrageous (although in a completely different way) that our current president cannot manage to describe it properly: name the perpetrators and their ideology, say why the victim was actually targeted, and summon up the requisite intensity and moral outrage in response.

Other people will have to do it for him. As Steyn says:

Daniel Pearl was the prototype for a new kind of terror. In his wake came other victims…But Daniel Pearl was the first, and in his calm, coherent final words understood why he was there:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA …”

He didn’t have a prompter. But he spoke the truth. That’s all President Obama owed him ”“ to do the same.

President Obama will not pay that debt, and it is no coincidence. It is a conscious decision on his part.

But there was still another Obamic peculiarity about that signing ceremony the other day. The bill that was named after Daniel Pearl was designed to, as the president said:

…[S]end…a strong message from the United States government and from the State Department that we are paying attention to how other governments are operating when it comes to the press. It has the State Department each year chronicling how press freedom is operating as one component of our human rights assessment, but it also looks at countries that are — governments that are specifically condoning or facilitating this kind of press repression, singles them out and subjects them to the gaze of world opinion in ways that I think are extraordinarily important.

And yet, at the end of the ceremony, the following exchange occurred between the president and the US press:

Q Speaking of press freedom, could you answer a couple of questions on BP?

THE PRESIDENT: You’re certainly free to ask them, Chip.

Q Will you answer them? How about a question on Iran?

THE PRESIDENT: We won’t be answering — I’m not doing a press conference today, but we’ll be seeing you guys during the course of this week. Okay?

By the standards of the world, this hardly qualifies as press repression or intimidation. But it’s a continuation of Obama’s contempt for and lack of cooperation with a press that remains for the most part his admiring, excuse-making lapdog. What’s more, Obama has singled out Fox News for special snubbing and criticism (see this, for example)—which is not exactly intimidation or repression, either, but is antithetical to the functioning of a free press.

And remember this incident during the 2008 campaign, when Obama’s lawyers threatened FCC license challenges to stations that aired campaign ads he didn’t like? Seems a bit intimidating to me.

The Orwellian ironies abound.

[ADDENDUM: At his blog “Had Enough Therapy?” Stuart Schneiderman sums it up well, I think:

A president who has expressed outrage against the indignity of asking an illegal immigrant to show his papers when caught speeding has nothing to say about the decapitation of an American Jew.]

Survival and chance: Air India IX-812

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you have probably heard the news of the crash of Air India Flight IX-812. The plane overshot the runaway and broke into pieces, bursting into flames. Fire seems to have claimed the lives of most of the passengers who died.

Horrible, horrible.

Since the plane was on the ground when the accident occurred (it tumbled down a wooded hill), there was a chance of survival for some people. The common denominator for the eight who lived to tell the tale appears to have been a combination of two things: being in the right location, and quick action. The survivors all were situated by chance near the breaks—they saw a hole or crack, made an almost instantaneous decision, and jumped out.

We like to think that we control our destinies. And to a certain extent we do—but not to as large an extent as one might think or wish. Those of you who are religiously inclined might want to say a prayer for the victims and their families, and likewise for the survivors, who have a long road ahead of them.

That ball gown: does Michelle Obama read neo-neocon?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yeah, yeah, I know she doesn’t. But a while back I recommended a better look for Michelle Obama at state functions—something like the Oleg Cassini ball gown once worn by Jackie Kennedy at a 1962 White House dinner honoring Nobel laureates.

Here’s the Kennedy dress again; I suggested a different color for Michelle, but a similar cut:

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And here’s what Michelle Obama wore at a dinner honoring Mexican president Felipe Calderon and his wife. It certainly not up there with Jackie’s Cassini (what is?)—the lines are not nearly as elegant, and the material has a tacky metallic thing going. But its not bad—although reminiscent of Whitney Houston in happier days. All in all, I think it’s uncharacteristically flattering. But what’s up with that rag on Calderon’s wife Margarita Zavala?:

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