Chopin and me

The New Neo Posted on by

My favorite composer is Chopin. My love for his music began when I was a four-year-old child in dance class, although I didn’t know it was Chopin at the time. All I knew was that the music I heard—performed on a tinkly old piano by my British dance teacher, who never looked at the instrument at all but watched us like a hawk as she played—was part of the reason I loved the lessons so much.

It never occurred to me at the time that the music had a composer; it just seemed to spring from the piano and my teacher’s hands, fully formed. But later on I’d hear a familiar piece on the radio or at a concert, and it was attributed to Chopin. Then I’d hear another, and think, “Oh, that’s Chopin too; what a coincidence!” That led to the slowly dawning realization that a great deal of that dance music I had loved was also Chopin.

By the time I came to purchase some of my very first records (I was in graduate school at the time, because until then I hadn’t had discretionary funds for such frivolities—how strange does that seem, in this day and age?), Chopin led the way. The waltzes were acquired first, followed in short order by his nocturnes. Then I got a boxed set of his entire oeuvre, and still have it somewhere, even though I no longer have a record player setup.

I had quit piano lessons around the age of nine, before I had mastered much of anything except the early John Thompson books. But in graduate school I lived in a house with four other women and an upright piano. In my spare time (mostly gained by procrastination on my work) I decided I would learn to play a piece by Chopin.

I bought the sheet music to his waltzes. And that’s when I learned that this was going to be a lot harder than I had thought. There were a great many notes there, and a great many sharps and flats, far beyond what John Thompson had prepared me for.

But I persevered. I taught myself one of Chopin’s waltzes, measure by laborious measure, over about a year’s time (yes, I was/am a strange sort). I chose this particular one not only because I liked it, but because it was in the least complicated key (no sharps! no flats!) and had a deceptively simple beginning.

The piece was Opus 34-2, and I knew it cold after a year of that lengthy learning process. For about a decade afterward, I could have played it in my sleep—which didn’t make me Horowitz, although it made me a one-trick pony sensation at gatherings that included a piano:

Somewhere along the line I lost access to a piano, and my skills degenerated. But at my peak I had also mastered the fast part of this one (it begins at 00:56 and repeats later). I got pretty good at it; practice makes—better. But it sure didn’t make me Rubinstein:

Or Horowitz:

The Obamacare cost-savings mirage

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember that promise the Obama administration made, that health care reform would be financed by cost-saving machinations that would eliminate waste while maintaining quality? Turns out that those measures are unspecified and unknown, theoretical and untested, and that major players such as Jonathan Skinner “mused recently that ‘the key lesson’ from a new study challenging some of his findings ‘is how little we know about the science of health-care delivery.'”

That’s no surprise, really; I’ve explored the problem at some length previously, here and here.

What may be news is that it has become apparent that the Obama administration has known about the difficulties of cost-savings for quite some time, and has been grasping at the straw of waste-cutting in order to sell a program it knows will cost the American people a great deal of money. The track record of such cost-saving measures in the past is dismal:

The new cost-control apologists concede that there isn’t any actual plan for controlling costs: Throw enough speculative policies against the wall, they say, and some breakthrough will stick. Yet Mr. Orszag’s no-less-confident predecessors spent decades trying to pull down Medicare spending with little to no success…More relevant examples include Medicare’s “relative value” payment scale, which was designed in 1985 by the Harvard economist William Hsiao to encourage more primary care. That’s this year’s rallying cry too. “Diagnosis-related groups” were introduced into Medicare in 1983 to alleviate hospital cost growth, and what a monumental success that turned out to be. With only brief periods of relatively slower growth, nominal Medicare spending has risen on average at an annual rate of 9.6% since 1980. Over the same period total Medicare spending has grown 13-fold, climbing from 1.2% of the economy to 3.2% today.

The real problem?

(a) Modern state-of-the-art health care is expensive.

(b) To insure everyone would be very expensive.

(c) There is no magic rabbit to pull out of a hat; no free lunch.

But liberals and the Left like to pretend otherwise.

The blame duck blames the fat cats

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama says “”I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”

No, of course not. He ran for office to be helping out his own fat cat friends and special interest groups, as well as to destroy the incentives for bankers to lend money to small businesses and get the economy growing again.

Obama displays either a profound misunderstanding of the way capitalism works, or a profound dislike for it, or perhaps both. Bankers are neither social workers nor saints, nor are they expected to be. They are in the business of making money. If you want them to lend money to others, you have to create a climate in which that seems like a profitable idea.

Part of the process of creating that atmosphere would be to refrain from demonizing them, especially when you have absolutely no experience in the business or private sector yourself. Another part might consist of sending the message that you are working in an intelligent and focused manner to solve the problems that led to the meltdown last year, rather than to spend us into ever-increasing debt by funding your pet projects and ignoring the cost to the economy.

But I suppose that’s not what Obama was elected to do. He was elected to blame people, and to call on their sense of self-sacrifice. And maybe to have a little private chat with them, Chicago-style. As Larry Summers says:

[Obama]’s going to have a serious talk with the bankers…The country did incredible things for the banking industry. Those things had to be done to save the economy, but no major bank would be intact, in a position to pay bonuses, if that extraordinary support had not been provided. The bankers need to recognize that. They need to recognize that they’ve got obligations to the country after all that’s been done for them…President Obama is going to be talking with them about what they can do to support enhanced lending to customers across the country. We were there for them. And the banks need to do everything they can to be sure they’re there for customers across this country.

Outrage: the KSM decision

The New Neo Posted on by

The outrages perpetrated by the Obama administration have come so thick and fast that it’s easy to lose track of them. But for me, one of the worst has been the removal of the KSM trial from the military to civilian courts, and from Guantanamo to New York (see this for my previous post on the subject).

The decision is bad in virtually every way, and it’s been difficult even for supporters to come up with a benign but rational interpretation for it. The transparent reason for the removal appears to be the need to slam the previous administration’s treatment of terrorists and allow Obama to claim once again—an assertion he keeps repeating over and over—that he has ended the “torture” allowed by Bush and Cheney.

Andrew McCarthy was the prosecutor of the 1993 WTC bombing trial, and as such he knows the subject of terrorists and the law far more intimately than most—and certainly much better than Attorney General Holder, who disgraced himself during recent Congressional hearings on the subject when he seemed to know virtually nothing of the law and to care little about it as well.

McCarthy’s most recent piece on the KSM decision is an evisceration of the Holder/Obama decision. McCarthy writes that it was a highly irrational choice if you evaluate it in terms of Holder’s stated justifications.

It’s worth reading the whole thing; a short excerpt doesn’t do justice to the scope of McCarthy’s argument. But make sure you take a tranquilizer first, because your sense of outrage might just reach a fever pitch otherwise:

In sum, by moving the case to civilian court this far into the process, the Obama administration sinks down the drain the years of work that went into pretrial litigation in the military court ”” work that cost taxpayers untold millions of dollars. That is, despite that talk about avoiding delay, the administration has gratuitously saddled the public with years of wasted effort, years of extra work, and mountains of extra expense…

KSM & Co. were ready, a year ago, to plead guilty in their military commission and proceed to execution. If the Obama administration had gone forward with the case, it would already be over.

The administration has taken a case that was ripe and ready for a swift, successful conclusion ”” a case in which prosecutors and the public had invested enormous effort and expense ”” and turned it into what will be a years-long struggle. At the end of that struggle, after terrorists have used our courts for three or more years to put our government on trial, the outcome will be less sure. Yes, convictions still will be likely, but capital sentences will be anything but certain. Indeed, civilian juries have already declined to hand down death sentences for Moussaoui and for two of the 1998 embassy bombers.

I happened to watch Sean Hannity’s TV show last night, because he had a special on the KSM trial. It was excellent, and featured McCarthy (among others), as well as an audience of 9/11 families and first-responders. The outrage (there’s that word again) among them all was palpable. Quite a few members of the audience were liberal Democrats who had voted for Obama, and they were shaking their heads in confusion and anger.

My guess is that Obama and Holder are counting on the fact that the public is distracted by so many other crises that it won’t be paying much attention. But that calculation may change once the trial begins—although, at the current rate, that may not be for several years. Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that it occurs before the election of 2012.

Clocky: hitting that snooze alarm

The New Neo Posted on by

I am old enough to have been raised with old-fashioned alarm clocks. You know, the kind that ticked loudly, especially on nights when sleep seemed elusive and their sound echoed through the still bedroom air. Their alarms were harsh and jangling, startling a person out of sound sleep with a ring that caused the listener to almost leap out of bed to turn them off in self-defense—but, after all, that was the idea.

But then some genius invented the clock radio and allowed us to be awakened by sweet music from the station of our choice. I can’t recall whether the very earliest clock radios came equipped with snooze alarms, but pretty soon they did, an advance that revolutionized the waking habits of non-morning persons such as myself by allowing us to savor (over and over, if we so desired) that delicious interval between sleep and wakefulness, and the opportunity to plunge back into the former for just a few more minutes. And then just a few more.

Morning people, those who bound out of bed at dawn or shortly thereafter with little but their own internal clocks or the occasional lark to guide them, probably cannot understand what I’m talking about. But night people like me understand that the snooze alarm is one of the greatest inventions of all time, although it has its drawbacks, chief among them the fact that one can fall so very in love with the sleep-wake-sleep-wake short cycle it facilitates that the entire purpose of alarm clocks—to wake up at a certain time—can be effectively negated.

In the meantime, though: bliss! One of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera, understands. As he writes in Chapter 2 of Immortality:

I’m in bed, happily dozing. With the first stirrings of wakefulness, around six in the morning, I reach for the small transistor radio next to my pillow and press the button. An early-morning news program comes on, but I am hardly able to make out the individual words, and once again I fall asleep, so that the announcer’s sentences merge into my dreams. It is the most beautiful part of sleep, the most delightful moment of the day: thanks to the radio I can savor drowsing and waking, that marvelous swinging between wakefulness and sleep which in itself is enough to keep us from regretting our birth.

This in turn reminds me of an invention I first noted some time ago, shortly after I began to blog. And since it’s now the holidays (happy Chanuka to all my Jewish readers, and of course Christmas is following in hot pursuit), I’ll mention it once again, in case you missed it and would like to get one for yourself or a loved (or hated) one.

It’s called “Clocky.” The product description says it all:

Clocky is the alarm clock on wheels that runs away beeping! You can snooze one time, but if you don’t get up, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand up to 3 feet high, and run around your room as if looking for a place to hide. You’ll have to get out of bed to silence Clocky’s alarm. Clocky beeps in an R2D2-like robotic pattern so that you are sure to hear him. He’s kind of like a pet, only he will get you up at the right time! You can set Clocky to run away right when the alarm sounds, or set to snooze one time before he runs away. Clocky features a customizable snooze time up to 9 minutes long. You can also turn off Clockies wheels if you don’t want Clocky to run away one morning.

Disclaimer: I don’t have a Clocky. But I can see the advantages. With it, we’ve come full circle, back to the need to get up in order to silence an alarm clock.

In 2005, when Clocky was first invented, the prototype featured a carpet covering that protected it from damage were it to fall on a hard surface in its frantic attempts to get away. Now I see that the covering has been eliminated, rendering the first line of the limerick I composed back in 2005 inappropriate. But I still like the little verse, so here it is again:

Shag-carpeted, wheeled, it looks schlocky.
But don’t turn your nose up at Clocky.
So, snooze-alarm addict,
Buy one; it’s nomadic,
And plays hard-to-get, this tick-tocky.

Diane Francis offers a modest proposal

The New Neo Posted on by

Canadian Diane Francis suggests that China’s wonderful one-child-per-couple rule be extended to the entire planet, the better to combat all the environmental ills that the dastardly human race has inflicted on the earth:

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate…

For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.

You can’t make this stuff up (although apparently Ms. Francis can). And no, it’s not the Onion (I’m getting tired of having to add that disclaimer).

And lest you think Diane Francis is some crackpot on the extreme fringe of political thought, take a look at her bio, which appears fairly mainstream, including “Shorenstein Fellow in fall 2006 at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government….[and] Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University’s Rogers School of Management.”

Massive government intrusion into human affairs prompted by environmentalist panic? Check. No concern whatsoever about an outdated old idea such as liberty? Check. Know-it-all academic claptrap? Check.

And if you’re not aware of the source of the title for this post, “A Modest Proposal” was the name Jonathan Swift gave to his famous satiric essay of 1729, in which he proposed and fleshed out (pun intended) in great detail his suggestion for the alleviation of poverty and starvation in Ireland: that the Irish eat their own surplus babies.

(Hat tip: Drudge.)

No one too happy with Reid’s latest Medicare buy-in proposal

The New Neo Posted on by

First it was the WaPo, noticing that the Medicate buy-in that Reid announced as such a wonderful compromise substitute for the abandoned (for the moment) public option “could be a bigger step toward a single-payer system” than those rejected plans.

Now the NY Times has gotten into the act, with an article noting that the buy-in will create higher premiums for those who take it, as well as for those who want “the same health benefits as members of Congress.”

Rural states don’t like it. Federal employee unions and retirement groups, likewise. And then there’s this:

Republicans denounced the proposal, saying it would add new financial obligations to a program that could not afford its existing commitments.

“If the Titanic is sinking, the last thing you want to do is to put Grandma and more of your family on the boat,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.

One gets the distinct impression that this new proposal was not exactly well thought out.

But that’s been true of the entire enterprise from the start. Reid and Pelosi and company keep hoping we won’t catch on before they pass some terrible bill that will change health insurance for the worse rather than the better. But if they’ve lost the WaPo and the Times on this one so early in the game, I’d say the buy-in option presently under consideration is one of the worst in a long line of bad suggestions from House and Senate. Is it any wonder their approval ratings are in the tank?

Obama’s social skills and his political success

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Mrs Whatsit” asks how, if Obama is so lacking in understanding human interactions, can he be such a successful politician:

What mystifies me most is that the man is a politician and an extraordinarily successful one (until just recently, at least.) I would have thought, Before Obama, that any successful politician would know, if nothing else, what makes other people respond and how to manipulate that. Bill Clinton was a master of the form. But this one ”” how did it happen that someone could manipulate so many people so swiftly and successfully to get what he wanted, while apparently understanding so very little about how people work?

While it’s true that most politicians love being around people and pressing the flesh—Bill Clinton and LBJ were famous for this—some are quite different. Obama appears to fall into that latter, smaller group, which includes Richard Nixon. On the surface the two seem very different, and they certainly are. But what they share is a certain emotional offness, readily apparent in Nixon but hidden in Obama and covered over with a surface charm and smoothness, two words that could never have applied to Nixon.

Nixon received his nickname “Tricky Dick” early on, based on the way he dealt with political opponents. He had to work hard at charisma, and never developed at—he was elected in spite of his personality, not because of it. Obama is quite different on the surface. But, contrary to the hype about him during the campaign, he has always been at least as ruthless as Nixon was in mowing down the opposition (the Alice Palmer story comes to mind, as well as Jack Ryan and possibly Blair Hull). This accounts in no small measure for Obama’s political success, especially in the early years.

Most of Obama’s wins—from his very first state office to his US Senate race—were unusual and atypical, featuring the disqualification of his opponents prior to the election itself. Some of this was through luck, but much of it was by his own design and efforts. Remember, too, that all of these “disappeared” opponents except Ryan were fellow Democrats. Once they had been eliminated, by hook or by crook, Obama was the sole Democrat remaining in the race, usually in a safe liberal district, which made him the winner almost by default. This is a very unusual path to political success.

Because of these peremptory strikes and a little bit of luck, Obama never really faced a tough oppponent until 2008 (except for the only race he lost, contesting the US House of Representatives seat of the popular Bobby Rush). In addition, Obama’s “cool” characteristics—his articulateness in prepared speeches, cerebral mold, academic background, and his race, were profoundly positive and attractive to liberals, the main group to which he had to appeal until 2008.

During the 2008 presidential race, Obama’s luck held. Plenty of people liked those already-enumerated characteristics, and in addition he was helped to success by four more things: the financial crisis, a weak opponent, an incredibly helpful press, and his newcomer status, all of which made it difficult for people to see many of his flaws. Neither personal warmth nor psychological astuteness in the one-on-one sense were necessary for him to win any of these races or to become president. Town meetings were avoided, as was any other circumstance in which Obama got too close to people (those were the settings in which he seemed ill at ease, and where his more revelatory gaffes tended to occur, such as his “spread the wealth” statement to Joe the Plumber).

During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s coldness came out now and then: flatfootedness and the arrogance and petulance, as in the “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” incident. But such things didn’t end up mattering, partly because the press refused to make a big deal of them. As always in Obama’s life, people were bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt. And Obama certainly knew one big thing about the public and himself: how to accentuate his own positive characteristics—as well as keep some of them blank, the better for people to fill them in as they wished—in order to appeal to the widest possible number of voters.

Now that Obama has been president for nearly a year, some of those blanks have necessarily been filled in with deeds. Note, also, that many of Obama’s gaffes as president have been lapses of a personal nature involving ceremony. He is either too deferential (all those bows) or not deferential and thoughtful enough. This would appear to represent a difficulty in calibrating one-on-one human interactions and the messages they give.

Obama seems impatient with ceremony, which goes hand in hand with his arrogance. He thinks he doesn’t need that sort of thing. It’s possible that he’s truly afraid of one-on-one exchanges with people; after all, how many of his close friends have we heard about? He likes to be prepared in advance, and he likes to be in control, two things that cannot occur in more casual social interactions. But for the aforementioned reasons, this hasn’t stopped him from winning elections—yet. His appeal has been of a different sort.

Obama’s Nobel speech

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve said before that I don’t think much of speeches in general, unless the speaker happens to be Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln.

Obama is neither. But I certainly can’t criticize him for that particular failing. And the text of his speech today on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize appears to be far better than his usual. Somewhat surprisingly. it offered the most robust defense of American military action I’ve ever heard him give:

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason…

But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.

Perhaps Obama offers these words at this time because he feels the need to defend himself, since he’s just ordered more troops into Afghanistan. Still, the words are good ones, long overdue for this particular president. The problem is that they are just words, and this is just a speech—and Obama has given many other speeches, and spent much of the first year of his presidency, contradicting them.