Chrysler and Fiat: can this marriage be stayed?

The New Neo Posted on by

Justice Ginsberg has ordered a temporary stay of the Chrysler-Fiat sale.

This doesn’t mean a whole lot as yet. The decision can be easily reversed at any time and the deal allowed to go ahead. That may indeed be what will happen.

But the mere fact that the temporary stay has been issued is considered unusual, and an indication that the court is not simply going to be a rubber stamp for this particular act of presidential overreach.

A while back, Obama and his administration spoke of the displaced first-lien creditors in highly pejorative terms in their attempt to demonize them to the American people:

Last week Mr. Obama lambasted them as “a small group of speculators” who “endanger Chrysler’s future by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else.”

Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, sent reporters a statement calling the creditors “vultures” and “rouge hedge funds.” Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm piled on, taking aim during her radio address at a “few greedy hedge funds that didn’t care how much pain the company’s failure would have inflicted on families and communities everywhere.”

Ah, those nasty “speculators.” Never mind that our entire capitalist system is dependent on the existence of people who will take on added risk for added gain, that the risk assumed by these creditors was supposedly limited by the laws of bankruptcy, and that Obama is attempting to override them in the Chrysler deal to the benefit of his political supporters in the unions.

And never mind that the plaintiffs who are asking for the stay of Obama’s hand happen to be “families and communities”—in this case, Indiana teachers’ pension funds and people who may have been injured by Chrysler products. Little people of the kind Obama pretends to champion.

This lawsuit has the benefit of bringing these facts to the fore despite the Obama/Democratic rhetoric to the contrary—that is, if anyone except conservatives is listening. It would be an even bigger bonus if the stay were to be extended and the rights of these creditors protected, because it would end up protecting us all by safeguarding the sanctity of the contract system and protecting it from future power grabs such as Obama’s.

Here’s a sample of what the plaintiffs’ briefs had to say:

“The public is watching and needs to see that, particularly, when the system is under stress, the law will be honored and an independent judiciary will properly scrutinize the actions of the massively powerful executive branch,” wrote Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, who sought a stay on behalf of three state funds that will lose out if the sale goes through. He said the deal could constitute a “sub rosa Chapter 11 reorganization plan” that violates the priority status of first-lien creditors in bankruptcy, and a misuse of so-called TARP funds.

Hear, hear.

Labor’s labours lost

The New Neo Posted on by

Is this news from Britain a portent of things to come here?:

Deputy Labor leader Harriet Harman conceded the European election results were a “very, very bad defeat” for Labor but said Brown, 58, was “resilient” and would fight on.

Opposition center-right Conservative leader David Cameron challenged the prime minister to call an election.

“It would give the country a fresh start where we so badly need one, with an economy that is in difficulty, with a political system that is in a mess and with a government that is so weak it is just extraordinary,” he said.

Of course, the situation here is different in a host of ways, not the least of which is the Parliamentary system vs. ours. Another difference is that Labor has been in control in Britain for twelve years, so the “throw the bums out” feeling is focused strongly on that party. In the US, the Democrats have just come to power in the legislature in 2006, matched by the executive branch in 2008.

What’s more, Obama is very skilled at blaming his predecessors for everything that is going wrong—and most likely, everything that will go wrong for his entire administration and beyond. Another difference is that Obama is a very charismatic politician (even though I seem to be immune from whatever it is that draws people to him so strongly). Gordon Brown most definitely is not.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on Shakespeare’s play. But could some hyper-grammarian among you explain to me why the play’s title contains an apostrophe in the second word: “Love’s Labour’s Lost?” Is it the possessive, or a contraction for “labour is?”]

Does government know how to end health care waste?

The New Neo Posted on by

This editorial in today’s WSJ points out that Obamacare rests on a number of unproven assumptions:

The main White House argument for health-care reform goes something like this: If we spend now on a hugely expensive new insurance program for the middle class, we can save later by reducing overall U.S. health spending…

The magic key is the dramatic variations in per patient health spending among U.S. regions. Often there is no relationship between spending and the quality of care, according to a vast body of academic research, most of it coming out of Dartmouth College. If the highest spending areas could be sanded down to the lowest spending areas, about 30% in “waste,” or $700 billion each year, would be saved. More than enough to pay for ObamaCare. Or so the theory goes.

The rest of the article (entitled “Obama’s health cost illusions”) is devoted to showing how stunningly little is actually known about what causes these variations in health care costs, how little evidence there is that the 30% actually represents waste, and how correspondingly difficult it will be for government planners to control costs—something they have little track record of doing even in simpler arenas than health care.

I wonder whether Obama actually believes in these illusions, or whether he’s just counting on the American public to believe them—which would be just as good for his purposes, if his goal is to get his health care reform plan passed on the basis of them.

The WSJ article is complex and somewhat boring. That’s true of all such matters, and I believe Obama is counting on this as well: the fact that most of the American public will not or cannot or haven’t the time to follow the arguments involved, or evaluate them objectively.

In addition, most newspapers aren’t making the case against Obama’s proposals, either because their journalists are so firmly in his pocket or because they themselves don’t understand the issues involved. Or perhaps both; the two are certainly not mutually exclusive. It’s no accident that this piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal, a paper specializing in financial matters, with writers who therefore have a certain amount of expertise in the field, as well as a readership interested in following such matters more closely than average.

I speak of the Obama administration as though it were a unitary thing. But, as this piece in today’s NY Times points out, there are disagreements and tensions in the group of economic advisers at the White House.

This is to be expected. There are a host of big personalities there—in particular, Larry Summers has a reputation for abrasiveness—and they each bring a different economic perspective and preference to the mix. But the results are also reflective of the lack of a coherent vision and organization, so that the different parts of the program sometimes seem to be at war with each other.

As Stephen Green puts it:

Let’s pretend for a moment that, god forbid, you break your arm. And somehow you end up with a team of doctors all trained at Obama University. As you lie there on the table in the ER, one doctor treats your arm by banging on the unbroken one with a ball-peen hammer. The second doctor takes the unusual course of setting your hair on fire. And the third one uses leeches.

Undeterred by your arm’s stubborn refusal to set, soon the doctors start blaming one another. And even though all of them are doing nothing but compounding your injury, none will take any blame. In fact, the louder you scream, the harder they go to work on you.

That, apparently, is what’s going on in the West Wing these days.

Green’s satire is, like all satire, exaggerated. But it underscores the point made by the Journal article, which is that—organized or disorganized—the President’s advisers seem to have no good idea of the actual (versus the intended) consequences of their actions in the real world.

A related point was made yesterday in a very different article on a different subject. Entitled “Think twice about ‘green’ transport, say scientists,” it points out that it is nowhere near as easy as people think to figure out the environmental cost of various forms of transportation. Those greenies who are so earnestly trying to reduce their carbon footprints may be inadvertently enlarging them instead:

Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study.

Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public.

These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple “tailpipe” tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.

Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.

It goes on, but you get the picture. These systems in general are far more “complex and challenging” than the simplistic propaganda uses made of them for political purposes would suggest.

What’s a person to do? Well, the old saying that applies to doctors might be a good guide for government policy as well: “First, do no harm.” This means that intervention in complex systems should be done with extraordinary care and only rarely. If that happens to coincide with the more conservative view of things, so be it.

Obama has made a very weak case that his health care reforms will actually save any money at all. I’m far from certain that he believes they will do so; he may just be using the best argument he can find to soothe the American people into going along. Once this is passed I cannot imagine that there will be any turning back.

As the WSJ says:

None of the complexities surrounding regional health spending variation would matter as much if the Obama Administration were merely trying to defossilize Medicare and save the federal fisc. But instead it is exploiting the looming bankruptcy of our current entitlements as a pretext to pass the largest entitlement expansion since 1965. And it is selling this agenda with a phony cost-control “plan” that doesn’t even exist.

My inescapable conclusion is that Obama knows this, and that he is using the financial crisis, and the overwhelming Democrat majority in Congress right now, to ram it home while he can.

And yes, he can.

D-Day: the way it was, and is

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII. Here’s a video with a few grainy clips of the Allies wading ashore:

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on, and all that.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And I have little doubt that our armed forces would be up to the task; the question is whether our government would.

But back to the D-day landings. About thirty years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

omahacemetery.jpg

But the scene was quite different in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion..

This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (particularly if under the aegis of the Bush administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read: Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred—fortunately for all of us.

The Cuban spies…

The New Neo Posted on by

…have come in from the cold.

What I find particularly interesting are the blue-blood origins of Kendall Myers and his wife, and the cozy little place he’d made for himself in elite academia all these years.

There’s also this tidbit from Myers’s recent past:

In November 2006, Myers created controversy by describing the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom a “one sided” “myth”. He said that he was “ashamed” of the treatment by US President George W. Bush toward Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In response, UK MP Denis MacShane said, “After the Republican defeat in the midterm election, every little rat who feasted during the Bush years is now leaving the ship. I would respect this gentleman, who I have never heard of, if he had had the guts to make any of these points two or five years ago.”

The US State Department distanced itself from Myers comments, stating, “He was speaking as an academic, not as a representative of the State Department.”

Such a statement on the part of Myers was nowhere near enough to get him fired from the State Department at the time. Now the revelation that he was a Cuban spy all these years might have finally accomplished that—if he hadn’t already retired in 2007. But fittingly, Myers was arrested outside of his alma mater Johns Hopkins, where he was a professor for many years and is still listed as adjunct faculty.

A little rat, indeed. The Honorable MP Denis MacShane had no idea how very correct he was. And this blogger must be feeling pretty justified, as well.

Allan Bloom and the struggle for the soul of the university

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been slowly plowing through Allan Bloom‘s dense but nevertheless wonderful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. It’s an indictment of alarming trends in higher education that took hold in the 60s and have only accelerated since.

I plan on another post—maybe even a few more posts—on themes sparked by this book. It’s not that I agree with everything in Bloom’s work. But the good in it is so very good, and still so remarkably timely some twenty-odd years after its publication, that I highly recommend reading it if so far it has passed you by, or even re-reading it if you haven’t taken a look lately.

Bloom is at his best in a chapter entitled “The Sixties,” which I’m reading especially slowly and savoring greatly. The subject matter and his conclusions are disturbing. Bloom writes about the student uprisings of that time, and how so may of the university administrators—and especially the craven professors—responded to the pressure of a violent mob of students by dealing what turned out to be the beginning of the death blows for true academic freedom and devotion to the classical canon of Western thought in American universities. Let me warn you, it’s not a pretty story.

Bloom himself was a professor at Cornell at the time, one of the centers for a student uprising in the spring of 1969. The Cornell demonstrations highlighted and also helped set the stage for so many issues we confront today, including that of affirmative action.

Cornell was only one venue of many—Columbia and Berkeley most famously come to mind—featuring demonstrations that occurred during that tumultuous decade, accompanied by varying degrees of violence. I am not referring to the widespread Vietnam protests which also took place at so many universities of the time; the uprisings of which Bloom wrote, such as the one at Cornell, centered on additional issues directly connected with university curricula, teaching, and student life.

As I said, I plan to write more on this subject in a future post. But right now I’ll just offer the following, from Bloom’s many observations about the student leaders of the demonstrations. When you read it, think about the 60s radicals in general, including for example Bill Ayres [emphasis mine]:

There they were in those few elite universities, which were being rapidly democratized. And their political futures were bleak…providing only the prospect of having to work their way up in the dreary fashion of such contemptible persons as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But these universities were respected, looked to by the democratic press and were the alma maters of much of the powerful elite. These little places could be seized, just as a polis could be seized. Using them as a stage, students instantly achieved notoriety. Young black students I knew at Cornell appeared on the covers of the national news magazines. How irresistible it all was, an elite shortcut to political influence. In the ordinary world, outside the universities, such youngsters would have had no way of gaining attention. They took as their models Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, promoters of equality, if you please, but surely not themselves equal to anyone. They themselves wanted to be the leaders of a revolution of compassion. The great objects of their contempt and fury were the members of the American middle class, professionals, workers, white collar and blue, farmers—all of those vulgarians who made up the American majority and who did not need or want either the compassion or the leadership of the students. They dared to think themselves equal to the students and to resist having their consciousness raised by them. It is very difficult to distinguish oneself in America, and in order to do so the student substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents’ conspicuous consumption.

I could almost have excerpted any passage from the chapter; the entire piece is of merit. But this particular passage caused me to think of (among many other things) the extremity of the contempt of these radicals and their modern-day descendants for a non-intellectual and uncommon “woman of the people” such as Sarah Palin, and their denigration of her bona fide political achievements.

[ADDENDUM: In a different context, commenter “huxley” notes a quote from Jonah Goldberg, about Obama during the 2008 campaign. I think a fuller version of the quote is quite pertinent here as well:

[Obama is] a very left-wing politician with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: “People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I’m Here To Help.”

Perhaps therein lies the answer to this supposed mystery. Indeed, perhaps there’s no mystery at all, and Obama’s problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He’s an elitist.

Oh, I know. Upon reading that, some liberal spluttered herbal chai tea from her nose at the injustice of this whole elitist canard, and the earnest Ivy League interns at some liberal magazine have burst into laughter, offering the appropriate bons mots from Balzac at the preposterousness of such a suggestion, saying: “Don’t you conservatives understand? Democrats care about the little guy. They’re on the side of the proletariat ”” I mean workers ”” and as Obama has so eloquently put it, if the workers would only stop clinging to their silly sky god and guns, they’d understand that.”]

Air France crash clues; disaster survivor guilt

The New Neo Posted on by

This is not good news: Brazil and France disagree over whether any of the debris claimed to have been spotted by Brazil is really from the missing flight.

France is saying that the debris located so far is not necessarily from the plane at all. The only material that has actually been hauled up and viewed up close, a cargo pallet, is not of the type that was on the airplane, and the rest of the debris was sighted from the air but bad weather has made it impossible to recover it yet. In addition, the reported oil slick is not from Flight 447 either, although they’ve spotted another oil slick that might be from the downed plane.

In other words, confusion and mystery abound.

Other information indicates a mechanical problem of some sort (including the possibility of a Hal-like computer malfunction), probably compounded by bad weather. In other words, if the cause of the crash was in fact a bomb (something that cannot yet be ruled out), the timing would have been especially coincidental—the catastrophic event began only a few minutes after the pilot had radioed that he was entering an area of highly unstable weather:

The last message from the pilot was a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time Sunday saying he was flying through an area of black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning.

Although that was the final message from the pilot, it was not the final message from the plane:

At 11:10 p.m., a cascade of problems began: the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems. Then, systems for monitoring air speed, altitude and direction failed. Controls over the main flight computer and wing spoilers failed as well. At 11:14 p.m., a final automatic message signaled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure as the plane was breaking apart.

So although the possibility of a bomb remains, it does not appear to be the most likely explanation.

And then there’s the phenomenon that seems to come with every tragic crash: the many “there but for” tales of those who were supposed to be on the plane but missed it for various reasons only to subsequently hear that the plane went down and took the lives of all aboard. Some people find such a near-miss very difficult to weather, despite their relief at being alive.

This tale of four people who might easily have been on the doomed Air France 447 is typical of those that emerge after nearly every crash. Inability to get a ticket despite Herculean efforts. An early arrival at the airport allowing a departure on an earlier flight.

The psychological repercussions are varied, but a certain percentage of such people have lasting problems:

“Survivors” like these often need psychological counseling, said Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, whose father was among the 170 people killed in 1989 when Libyan terrorists downed UTA Flight 772 with a suitcase bomb. He now heads an association that helps victims of airline disasters.

“They can have big psychological problems. We meet a lot of people like that,” said Denoix de Saint-Marc, who was asked by French authorities to counsel relatives of the victims of Flight 447 at a crisis center at Paris’ airport.

In the case of UTA flight 772, some of the pilots and cabin crew who had flown the French DC-10 jetliner before handing it over to the doomed crew “couldn’t resume their careers,” Denoix de Saint-Marc said.

“They lost their flying licenses because of big psychological problems or alcoholism,” he said.

The Lockerbie crash has a similar story, particularly spotlighted in the case of the “271st victim”:

Jaswant Basuta, a Sikh of Indian nationality, was checked in for Pan Am Flight 103, but arrived at the boarding gate too late. Having attended a family wedding in Belfast, Basuta was returning to New York where the 47-year old car mechanic was about to start a new job. Friends and relatives from nearby Southall came to see him off at the airport terminal, and bought him drinks in the upstairs bar. When “gate closing” flashed on the departure screen, Basuta hurried through security and passport control and sprinted to the departure gate, but the room was empty except for Pan Am ground staff who denied him access to the aircraft.

Basuta was initially considered a suspect as his checked baggage had been on the flight without him. After questioning at Heathrow police station, he was released without charge. Twenty years later, in an interview with the BBC, Basuta talked about his narrow escape from death: “I should have been the 271st victim and I still feel terrible for all the other people who died.”

One of the things that went unmentioned in the Wiki article is why Basuta may have been considered an especially suspicious suspect. The Lockerbie crash occurred in 1988 over Scotland, a mere three years after Air India Flight 182 was brought down by a terrorist bomb over the Atlantic Ocean in Irish airspace, killing all 329 people aboard, most of them Canadians of Indian descent. The death toll was therefore even higher than the dreadful total of 270 (including those on land) who died at Lockerbie.

The perpetrators of the Air India bombing? Sikhs separatists based in Canada, bent on revenge for the 1984 attack on the Sikh shrine known as the Golden Temple (that event also served as motivation for the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; I’ve written at length about both here). And the bomb in the Air India crash had been carried on the plane in a suitcase that was unaccompanied by its owner, just as had happened with Basuta and the Lockerbie flight.

The Air India crash has other commonalities with the current Air France situation, especially the recovery operation. The former broke apart over water 6700 feet deep, and finding the black box was very challenging. The Air France flight is estimated to be in waters that are between 9,000 and 14,000 feet deep, an even more daunting situation.

It’s not an impossible one, however, even if the black box is not found within the 30-day window of opportunity in which it emits “pings” to help with its location:

n 1987, a South African Airways 747 crashed into the Indian Ocean off the island nation of Mauritius, sinking to a depth of about 16,000 feet. After an unsuccessful two-month search by the South African military, the U.S. Navy was able to locate the wreckage and the cockpit voice recorder. The accident was eventually blamed on cargo that caught fire.

Let’s hope that some answers are found before too long, so that the families and loved ones of the dead do not have to continue to endure this terrible uncertainty along with their grief.

The hegemony of the low-rise pant

The New Neo Posted on by

Until recently, I hadn’t really minded the fashion known as low-rise pants—you know, the ones that fit so far down on the hips that they only look good on that tiny (in more ways than one) subset of the female population that’s completely lean, hipless, and stomachless, a group usually found only between the ages of eleven and twenty, and relatively rare even in that cohort.

Commentary in the press about low-rise pants has mostly focused on the ubiquitous “cleavage” (of the rear variety) that occurs, whether on purpose or by accident, when the wearer sits or bends. But being the fashion libertarian that I am, I figure it’s up to the wearers. If they happen to want to expose us all to a portion of the anatomy heretofore only flaunted by paunchy middle-aged plumbers, it doesn’t upset me all that much.

Until now, the rest of us could easily manage to avoid wearing low-rise pants which make us look like dreck: blubby and chubby and a good fifty pounds heavier than we actually are. We just didn’t buy them.

But now the situation is getting serious. Now I must voice an objection. This year—as I discovered when I went to do a little shopping the other day—it has become well-nigh impossible to find any other sort of pants. The fashion powers-that-be have decreed that all of us—fat or thin, young or old—will be wearing our pants in a manner designed (literally) to accentuate and call major attention to the largest portion of our lower anatomies.

Okay, that’s not absolutely true; in fact, there are a few other types of pants to be found here and there, if one looks carefully. For instance, the petite section where I am sometimes known to linger offers—in addition to the low-risers—a fairly generous selection of elastic-waisted polyester monstrosities for the little old ladies who often shop there. When one has given up on fashion entirely, and the only function of clothes becomes to cover one’s nakedness with the least possible flair and expense and the maximum comfort, no doubt that’s the way to go.

But fortunately, I’m not there yet. And unfortunately, my pants choices have dwindled down to a precious few, none of them very good.

What’s more, it’s difficult to tell the lowness of the pants rise when the clothing is on the hanger; one has to go through the strain and ignominy of trying the things on. A very very very short zipper is one clue, but hardly an invariable one. I’ve taken pants with longish zippers to the dressing room only to find they’re a come-on, a decoy cleverly and insidiously designed to sucker people like me into trying them on in hopes of finding a more reasonable amount of coverage than they offer.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that slacks have to go right up to one’s waist (although they used to, for years and years and years, and I never saw anything wrong with it; after all, most women’s waists are smaller than their hips). But they need to arrive somewhere within an inch or two of the general vicinity to prevent the formation of an extra roll (or rolls), and the thousand natural shocks that female flesh is heir to.

In researching this post (yes, I researched it) I discovered that I am not the first to report this phenomenon. It even has a name: muffin top.

Now, a muffin top of the old-fashioned variety is ordinarily a very pleasant thing:

muffin2.jpg

Whereas a muffin top of the new-fangled sort is considerably less so:

muffin-top.jpg

Note that the photo of this particular lady was chosen because, although she’s hardly model-thin, she most definitely is not fat. In fact, in more normal pants, she would look just fine, thank you very much.

But alas, there are no normal pants anymore.

Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: the lasting legacy of insecurity

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent post, I wrote of affirmative action:

We all have subsequently paid dearly, including those whom affirmative action was supposed to benefit, because their achievements have forever after been tainted by the suspicion (correct or incorrect) that they might not have been able to earn them if the playing field had not been recently slanted in their favor.

This is one of the most insidious effects of affirmative action, and Michelle Obama—despite all her achievements and her current position as First Lady—may herself still suffer from it. In a recent commencement speech she gave to the graduating class of Washington Mathematics Science Technology Public Charter School, she had the following to say about Sonia Sontomayor and herself (unfortunately, embedding is disabled for the You Tube video; you’ll have to go here to view it) [emphasis mine]:

…And [Sotomayor] went to Princeton, and in the story she said that when she arrived (and this was nine years before I would even think about going) she said when she stepped on that campus she said that she flet like a visitor landing in an alien country. She said that she never raised her hand that first year because…she was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions…So despite all her success at Princeton—and then she went on to Yale Law School where she was at the top of her cass…and despite all of her professional accomplishments, Judge Sontomayor says she still looks over her shoulder and wonders if she measures up. And when I read her story I understood exactly how she feels.

Note that Michelle Obama does not say “how she felt.” She uses the present tense: “how she feels.”

Now, perhaps it’s not really affirmative action that’s at fault. I know that imposter syndrome (which is exactly what Ms. Obama is describing) is more likely to be felt by women (even, or perhaps especially, high-achieving ones) than by men. But it seems odd that these particular women might feel it so sharply even at this late date that they find it necessary to talk about it.

In addition, if you watch the video, you may notice that Michelle Obama speaks with a bitterness that appears to haunt her even today. I find it very sad; she seems to have not been able to put the insecurities of her past behind her no matter what heights she has scaled since.