Poor Santayana. Didn’t have a clue. Whether you remember the past or not, you will relive it, because some other SOB doesn’t.
George Santayana—for those of you who know your history—was the philosopher who declared, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (And by the way, according to Wiki, Santayana had a mother named Josefina Borré¡s, “better known as Jo Bo”—could this be someone having a little fun with history and Wiki at our expense?)
Santayana’s aphorism is famous because it’s not only elegantly expressed, but because it seems true as well as tragic. But, as zhombre points out, it takes more than remembering the past to be able to avoid a repetition of its worst themes.
In public matters, it’s the aggregate of the population—and/or the leaders—who must remember the past in order to prevent a recurrence. For the individual who remembers and even foresees but is relatively powerless, all he or she can do is protest, endure, emigrate, or in extreme cases try to stage a revolt.
Perhaps that’s why George Bernard Shaw was able to offer another pithy observation about history: “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
I was reminded by all of this by a comment by “E” in a recent thread about Obama, to wit:
More worrisome than Obama’s ignorance about geography and culture is his ignorance about history. He seems to recognize no reality and no narrative but the one he creates, with the willing collusion of the mainstream media.
This is where we’ve gotten to – from a lying President who manipulated the meaning of the word “is,” to a self-centered, self-important twit who thinks the meaning of the word “is” is whatever he says it is.
The real problem is, he may be right. In a world where perception is reality, those of us on the side of logic and history are getting shut down by a delusional mob with their fingers in their ears, chanting “la la la la la!”
So once again it seems highly appropriate to quote the great Humpty. With the passage of time, Obama has only grown to sound more like the famous eggman (or is it the Walrus? koo koo kachoo) rather than less. Here’s the relevant dialogue from the Lewis Carroll work, in which Humpty arrogantly tells Alice he can manipulate words and make them do whatever he wants:
“[T]hat shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents ”” ”
“Certainly,” said Alice.
“And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,'” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t””till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,'” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean””neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master””that’s all.”
[NOTE: In that post from a year ago, I was discussing Obama’s claim that he wasn’t really a liberal. Sounds pretty funny now, doesn’t it?
It’s interesting to revisit it now, I think:
When asked if he’s comfortable with the liberal label, [Obama] says, “This is what I would call old politics. This is the stuff we’re trying to get rid of . . . Those old categories don’t work, and they’re preventing us from solving problems.”
Here is another interesting indication of Obama’s belief in the power of mere words. It works on two levels. The first is that he is very eager to distance himself from the label “liberal” while continuing to advocate the policies. The second is that he asserts that it’s these labels themselves that get in the way of “solving problems,” not the ideological differences behind the labels.
Are disagreements actually real to Obama? Or does he think that just changing the “dialogue”””and the terminology””would be enough to solve them (including, of course, our disagreements with the likes of Iran)?…
At the time, Obama was quoted as having said, in answer to accusations that he’s a liberal, “Let me tell you something. There’s nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics. It’s common sense. . . . There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has health care.”
This seems even more ironic with the passage of a year. It was only two months later, in June of 2008, that Obama threw out his public financing pledge in favor of running the most expensive campaign in history. And there’s something very liberal about making sure everybody has health care—especially if you’re willing to break the bank to do so, and have the government be in charge rather than the private sector.
The underpinnings of Obama’s reasoning were illogical, anyway. Even if those particular two things were not liberal, and even had he actually stuck to both instead of tossing out the first, it would not prove whether or not he was a liberal. It’s the aggregate of a candidate’s policies that indicate such things, particularly once elected.
Although, come to think of it, maybe Obama was right. He’s no liberal—he’s a Leftist.]
Researchers have found that women can smell men—especially their underarm odor—better than men can smell women.
It’s not that men’s odor is necessarily worse. It’s that women are more sensitive to this particular smell. When researchers tried to mask each type of odor with other scents, men were less able to detect the lingering female sweat odor whereas women were more likely to continue to perceive the male sweat odor despite the attempt at coverup.
And lest you think this is because women are just plain difficult, think again. It seems that Mother Nature has arranged it so that women get important genetic information from male body odor. If we can believe this research, for example, the Pill blocks this all-important function:
…[A] woman’s flowery fragrance or a guy’s musk the body sends out aromatic molecules that indicate genetic compatibility.
Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are involved in immune response and other functions, and the best mates are those that have different MHC smells than you. The new study reveals, however, that when women are on the pill they prefer guys with matching MHC odors.
MHC genes churn out substances that tell the body whether a cell is a native or an invader. When individuals with different MHC genes mate, their offspring’s immune systems can recognize a broader range of foreign cells, making them more fit.
Past studies have suggested couples with dissimilar MHC genes are more satisfied and more likely to be faithful to a mate. And the opposite is also true with matchng-MHC couples showing less satisfaction and more wandering eyes.
So, can we blame the Pill for the higher divorce rate? At least we can’t point the finger at deodorant, since women seem to be able to ferret out the telltale smells despite the masking scents.
It seems impressive that the terrible earthquake in Italy was forecast by scientist Gioacchino Giuliani.
Or was it? He predicted one in the general area but not the exact place, and he thought it would come a few days earlier. He based his calculations on emissions of radon gas, a factor which has been studied for many decades and has not been found all that helpful.
The problem with earthquake prediction is this: it’s only over time that it could be proven that someone such as Giuliani was onto something rather than merely lucky. He would have to reliably predict more than one earthquake for his method to gain credibility. And even if a scientist was correct in general, he/she would have to be correct in particular: exact date and time and place. Otherwise, there would be constant evacuations and panic.
I watched it last night. And lest you think this was some sort of joke, let me say the show was in deadly earnest—and quite fascinating.
How could these women have been so stupid, you ask? Easy. Almost all of them were somewhat heavy to begin with (although only one was what you might call obese, and she was not so very obese at that). They gained very little weight during their pregnancies, and several actually lost weight.
All of the women had a history of very irregular cycles, and so the absence of a normal period was normal for them. Quite a few of them also had spotting during their pregnancies, which they interpreted as their own typically irregular cycles. Some had been previously told they were infertile. One had had two negative pregnancy tests. And most of them had very few other symptoms of pregancy, such as nausea.
In fact, their very first symptom was usually labor, which they interpreted as some deathly illness—and which in several cases sent them screaming to the ER. One woman, on hearing there for the first time that she was pregnant and about to deliver, thought (as they were frantically wheeling her to the delivery room), “What kind of hospital is this? How can they be so stupid?”
A few moments later—a full-term baby was in her arms.
I was expecting some naivete and pandering to the Left from President Obama’s foreign policy. But so far it is trending worse, much worse, than I thought it would.
A misty spring sun on his back, US President Barack Obama stood before a crowd of more than 20,000 in a square beneath the walls of Prague Castle yesterday to lay out his goal of forging a world free of nuclear weapons, while acknowledging that he may not see it in his lifetime…
“I am not naive [if you say so. Perhaps a better description would be “delusional”].This goal will not be reached quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime [your naivete is not just a timing problem, it a conceptual one],” the 47-year-old leader said…
“Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be checked, that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction,” Mr Obama told his audience. “This fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable [nice ring to it, but that doesn’t mean the logic works. Sometimes it is good to acknowledge the truth and try to deal from there in a realistic manner. If it is impossible to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, you have to craft a policy that deals with that fact, not dream that you can put the cat back into the bag].”
The speech began with almost Disneyesque staging as the President and Mrs Obama climbed hand-in-hand on to the outdoor stage to string music, the skyline of Prague’s domes and spires behind them and a thick bank of carnations and roses at their feet [wow. Just wow]. But the message the President offered was grave and weighted with unexpected new urgency by the firing overnight of another ballistic missile by North Korea [oh, and I’m sure they’re listening, and trembling in their shoes. Fortunately, they don’t seem to be very good at the science of the thing—at least, not yet].
Among Mr Obama’s specific proposals was the creation of an international nuclear energy bank, from which nations would be able to draw nuclear fuel for the generation of energy and steps to support Iran in seeking nuclear energy if it proves it is not, in fact, pursuing nuclear weapons. He will also seek a new treaty to end all production of fissile material suitable for nuclear warheads.
Not naive, Obama says? Profoundly naive to the point of delusional, I say—unless Obama is just throwing some fish to Leftist and pacifist desires here and abroad, and fooling them as he fooled so many during the campaign by saying one thing and meaning another. Maybe he’s playing the deception (or, as Frank Barnes calls it, “misdirection”) game he plays so well. There’s some evidence for that, although it’s a bit meager:
The President meanwhile admitted to a significant let-out clause for the United States. Until all the world is rid of nuclear weapons, the US will be obliged to maintain a safe and secure nuclear capability “to deter our adversaries and reassure our allies”.
The article points out that “sceptics may regard such a ‘you-first’ approach as a guarantee that his stated goal of a world without such weapons will never happen.” Of course, if a feint and then protection is his goal, gutting defense in this country is a strange way to go about deterrence.
On Obama’s proposal to end the production of fissionable material suitable for warheads:
The key to nuclear weapons is plutonium, and the technology to turn it into bombs. (and yes”“you can make nukes from enriched uranium, but this isn’t practical for large scale production.) The elaphantoid fact in the room is that”“even if you “destroy” all the nuclear weapons you still have to store the plutonium in SOME PLACE. Its toxic. It doesn’t occur in nature. You can’t just grind it up into dust and throw it into the wind. And if it is stored in some place, you can retrieve it and build another nuke in no time at all.
The Djinn is out of the bottle, and its not going back. The bottle is broken. And anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.
Please read this comment on the strategic advantages of nuclear weapons for countries such as Iran. One of the problems with disarmament is that everyone must do it at once, and be trustworthy as well. Does any serious thinker on earth truly believe this is possible? And, if it were possible, would not the world have reached such a wonderful and naturally peaceful state that the existence of nuclear weapons would have become moot?
Here’s some realism for you, in that same comment:
For Obama’s dream to be reality, unlike Reagan’s, SOME nation would have to conquer the entire world, and run it like a Stalin-esque nightmare, wiping out everyone of different ethnicities and religions who did not like each other….Yes World Peace is quite possible. Simply slaughter about 4 billion people, and rule the rest like Stalin.
There is a constituency that longs to believe we live in a word where we could just renounce our atomic weapons and everything would be fine. Obama wants their votes, and all they want in exchange is to hear him say the words, so he says them.
The rest of the Democratic Party is confident that he is just pandering to the kooks to further their own agenda. They are probably correct.
People who thought they were smart turned out on several occasions during the twentieth century to be wrong though, about who was pandering to whom.
Here’s my philosophical problem with all forms of weapons abolition. Almost every example of a practical, peaceful society ”” with the exception of monastic communities where all the monk’s cells are unlocked ”” are based on the idea of a monopoly of violence in the hands of a consensus ruler. It’s called the King’s Justice. The opposite of the King’s Justice is not Paradise on Earth, but Hell on Earth: barbarism.
Now for the last 60 years, we’ve had a kind of Nuclear King’s Justice. First, the US Nuclear Monopoly, then the Bipolar World in which there was a monopoly of nuclear violence, but it was held by two rational parties paralyzed by mutual terror. This is the reason Armaggedon hasn’t happened.
If we disarm the King’s Men without making absolutely sure that weapons are completely eliminated, then the result won’t be peace but instability. Now if the US disarms, who holds the monopoly of violence characteristic of the King’s Justice? Either it is some international institution or it is the idea that violence will no longer occur because all the instruments of violence will be abolished.
But it is not true that wars will automatically decline with the abolition of nukes. One of the reasons conventional wars have declined in frequency since the Second World War is that not only were they trumped by the King’s Justice, but they always risked escalating into a nuclear confrontation. War became momentarily too dangerous. With the removal of nuclear weapons ”” total destruction ”” from the game, limited war becomes possible again. It becomes cost-beneficial to think in terms of national conquest, where today the risks would be too high.
If I could flick the switch and abolish all nuclear weapons today, China and India would become the most powerful countries on earth because in a situation without WMDs, the nation without [sic; I believe this should be “with”] the greatest conventional warfare capacity and the brutality to use it, would become the dominant power. What it would achieve is not the abolition of military effort, but a sea change in the military balance.
The following is what Obama’s remarks—and the crowd lapping them up—brings to mind for me (although those dancing, prancing horses are still delightful, aren’t they?):
And the resume’ of conservtive foreign policy success of the last 8 years is what? And, as such, why should we listen to your advice?
If Obama isn’t pursuing that failed policy, then he at least is potentially on a different track.
Let’s see, the results of the foreign policy of the last eight years: a free Iraq that’s doing fairly well. No major terrorist attacks in this country. Al Qaeda much weakened. And I hadn’t noticed any significant problem between Bush and Sarkozy, or Merkel, or Brown, or eastern Europe, or any of the other European countries that Obama is presently sucking up to.
Nor do I see any concrete improvements as a result of Obama’s speeches in terms of what Europe is actually planning to do vis a vis the US. It’s all rhetoric; but that’s Obama’s style, anyway, so it’s a good match if rhetoric is Europe’s reaction, as well.
Oh, and saying “at least [Obama’s] potentially on a different track” is an absurdity. “Different” is not better—although those who voted for this dangerous man on the promise of “change” fail to understand that.
You might as well say “Well, at least Hitler wasn’t the Weimar Republic.” True, but hardly a point worth making. And no, it doesn’t mean that Obama is Hitler. But it does mean that the consequences of Obama’s policies could put us, and the world, in a situation a whole lot worse than we had under Bush.
I’m with Krauthammer on this—disgraceful. But liberals and the left will eat Obama’s words up; we all know how terrible America is, and how good it is to apologize.
This article documents a trend I’ve noticed for decades: ballet lines have become more exaggerated over time. This is especially true of what is known as “extrension”—that is, the height of the nonsupporting leg when it is raised. But it’s also true of the curve of the foot itself, the flexibility of the back, and the general shape made in space:
Daprati [a researcher based at the University of Rome] raided the archives of London’s Royal Opera House for photos and videos of dancers from 1946-2004…She reduced each image to a stick figure and calculated the angle between the raised “working leg” and the vertical supporting one. For each position, Daprati found that this angle increased as the years went by. Take developpe a la seconde – in the 1940s, dancers held their moving leg just above the 90 degree level, but today’s dancers effectively extend it straight up with an incredible 180 degree gap between their two legs.
This sort of thing results in a very different type of ballet dancer than the ones I saw as a child.
Although many arts contain elements of the physical—for example, musicians must use their bodies to coax a glorious sound from inanimate instruments—dance has always been the art that most seamlessly merges the athletic with the esthetic as well as the dramatic. But balance must be there or it becomes an empty physical exercise (what some of my dance teachers used to call circus tricks or nightclub acts), sensational in the physical sense, empty of the soul that makes it all meaningful.
One of the things I liked so much about a Russian dancer from my youth, Maya Plisetskaya (about whom I’ve written previously, here), was that her unique physical attributes—a powerful jump, pliant back, and sinuously flexible arms—were combined with extraordinary musicality and a rare emotional fire. It is unusual for these elements to be displayed in the same dancer; for example, strength and flexibility are natural antagonists in the human body, and dancers most often favor one over the other. The triple package—power, suppleness, and drama—is exceptionally rare.
But let’s start with the physical. As the raised legs get higher and still higher, the line of the body changes dramatically. Ballet was originally designed to feature more gentle poses involving curves, but lately those arcs have become more excessive, and other elements have become sharper and more angular. In ballet’s quest to achieve ever more sensational physical effects to make the audience gasp, the artist has all too often been sacrificed to the athlete, even in the most famous of dancers.
Take a look at a few examples of the pose known as “arabesque,” then and now. This first photo is of Sallie Wilson, who danced with American Ballet Theater during the 60s and 70s. She was a physically strong but not especially flexible dancer known for her intensely dramatic interpretations of Tudor classics.
Note the gorgeous sweeping curved arc Wilson’s modestly elevated back leg makes with her elegantly upraised torso, a line that is fully extended through the position of her arms and head. I saw this photo decades ago, when it was first taken, and remembered it all these years as a thing of rare beauty:
We have no photographs of one of ballet’s originators, Marie Taglioni, who in the 1830s perfected the art of dancing en pointe and making it look easy. But we do have this lithograph:
It conveys the essence of Taglioni’s art: to appear otherworldly and gossamer, a creature of clouds and air, perched on toe as a butterly hovers rather than balancing there like a circus performer. Her other leg is held quite low; no need to fling it skywards to create the effect she’s after.
But that’s just a drawing, you say; she didn’t really look like that. Well, here’s Anna Pavlova; no doubt you’ve heard of her. She popularized ballet by touring the world during the early part of the 20th century. She was a petite woman with a tiny foot:
Her leg is a bit higher than Taglioni’s, but it’s the same idea: delicate and weightless, she alights rather than poses. The asthetic is very different from today’s, when such a photo would be inconceivable except as farce. Pavlova often skirted the boundaries of kitsch, but she stayed on the side of art.
Next is the Russian dancer Olga Spessivtzeva, who performed from 1913 till the late 1930s. Technically she’s in what’s known as “arabesque par terre” in this photo, because her foot is not raised at all but placed on the floor in tendu. But I have included the photo because the line she makes is so enchantingly beautiful despite the subdued nature of the pose. I submit that what she manages to accomplish here is more rare—and more moving, and more beautiful—than any arabesque with the leg pointing nearly to the sky:
Speaking of pointing nearly to the sky, here is contemporary Russian ballerina Svetlana Zakharova in arabesque (to be more exact, she’s between arabesque and attitude, because her raised leg is bent ever-so-slightly):
Now you can see what Ms. Daprati was talking about. As a static pose, Zakharova’s has an undeniable beauty. The curves are there but in highly exaggerated form, especially that of the supporting leg and foot which bow almost alarmingly in extreme hyperextension (most dancers—including me—are somewhat hyperextended, but Zakharova has a degree of reverse curve to the supporting leg that surpasses that of most).
The photo is of “Swan Lake,” a role in which the dancer is supposed to be a bewitched combination of swan and woman. Therefore the other-wordly qualities of Zakharova’s body work better in this ballet than they would in those featuring more human protagonists. My experience in watching dancers of this sort, however, is that after the first gasp of shock they elicit in the viewer, their lines begin to seem less interesting and more freakish, and one yearns to watch a body that seems to be an ordinary human doing extraordinary things, rather than an extraterrestrial made of new-age rubber.
The next image is not an arabesque. But I include it because it shows just how far this thing can go, and the negative consequences. It features Sylvie Guillem, a French dancer who is now in her forties (the photo is probably from a few years earlier) and who is known for her extreme flexibility:
Aside from looking as though she is in drag (not the impression she ordinarily gives), here Guillem’s line is just plain ugly. What is she trying to tell us? I only see a gymnastic feat. Everything else has been subsumed to the almost shocking physical effort. The dancers of old would have frowned on such a parlor trick.
Guillem started out as a gymnast, which is hardly surprising. But gymnastics bears only a superficial similarity to ballet. In many ways the two are opposites in terms of what the dancers are trying to convey, and what is considered esthetically desirable.
That’s not to say that there aren’t ballet lovers the world over who would disagree with me, and who think Guillem and her ilk to be spectacular artists who surpass the more subtle charms of dancers of the past. To me, however, their dancing begins to pall very quickly; what they are doing simply does not interest me.
Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report. The patients went to hospital emergency rooms 2,678 times from 2003 through 2008, said the report from the nonprofit Integrated Care Collaboration, a group of health care providers who care for low-income and uninsured patients.
“What we’re really trying to do is find out who’s using our emergency rooms … and find solutions,” said Ann Kitchen, executive director of the group, which presented the report last week to the Travis County Healthcare District board.
The average emergency room visit costs $1,000. Hospitals and taxpayers paid the bill through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, Kitchen said.
Eight of the nine patients have drug abuse problems, seven were diagnosed with mental health issues and three were homeless.
Let’s do the math. For each of these nine people, this represents an average of one visit to the emergency room every 7.3 days, year-round, for six years. No doubt some went more and some went less, but that’s the average.
Kudos to the folks at Integrated Care Collaboration for at least trying to study these shocking facts and to seek solutions. I wonder, though, why it took them to notice it. Surely the folks at the hospitals involved must have recognized what was going on, with this volume of visits by such a small number of people. Are there not social workers there who might figure out another way to handle this? Is there no way to refer these folks to primary care physicians or the mental health and especially the substance abuse treatment systems? Or is the taxpayer just eternally on the hook, because no one can be turned away if he/she appears at the ER door?
I also wonder how many of these patients were illegal aliens. The article is mum on that fact, so we have no idea whether it was an issue. But considering that the venue was Austin, Texas, it’s a good possibility.
I think this study points out a common problem, which is that a few people can be responsible for a great deal of strain on a system, and that government regulations often tie an organization’s hands even if those who work there might want to implement a more creative—and reasonable—solution.
I’m fairly sure that, when it was decreed that no person without insurance would be turned away from an emergency room, the idea was that ERs would actually be used for emergencies. But creating an entitlement often causes it to be used for purposes never originally envisioned, expanding it beyond all recognition into absurdity.
