Demonizing: never should be heard a discouraging word

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no surprise that a professor has written a piece that goes even further than the NIE in its assessment of the nuclear tameness of Iran. Cinnamon Stillwell reports that Dr. William O. Beeman, chair of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, says that Iran never had any nuclear weapons program at all.

Not a surprise, really. But what’s of much greater interest to me is the fact that Beeman has written a book entitled The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. I haven’t read the book, I must admit; it’s the title that fascinates me. Continue reading →

Say it isn’t so, Roger: steroids and baseball

The New Neo Posted on by

The news is out, and it’s only the tip of the major league steroid iceberg. Roger Clemens, former Red Sox star pitcher and turncoat on joining the archenemy Yankees, has been named by the forthcoming Mitchell report as one of many baseball players using anabolic steroids to enhance performance.

It’s no surprise. Rumors have been rampant for years about Clemens and many other baseball players. The report seems to be based mostly on the testimony of two trainers who were their major suppliers.

I remember Clemens well; he was the beefy hope of Red Sox fans back in the Bad Old Days when all they had was hope—and hope dashed, over and over. Clemens was especially frustrating because he was so very, very good during the season, and yet often seemed to choke just when it mattered most. And then, playing for the Yankees! And even more infuriating was that the business of failing to deliver when it mattered most didn’t seem to follow him when he put on the pinstripes. Continue reading →

Behind the scenes at the NIE

The New Neo Posted on by

This Washington Post article gives us a little bit of behind-the-scenes information on the background to the latest NIE report on Iran’s nuclear program.

What we find there isn’t especially reassuring. The agencies involved are connecting some mighty distant dots, which can lead to incorrect conclusions. As this piece in American Thinker puts it, the Left, the Right, and the Europeans are all quite skeptical of the findings:

When all these parties can agree on any topic whatsoever there are certainly grounds for curiosity. The NIE conclusions deserve scrutiny. Unfortunately, this analysis has been hampered by the intelligence community’s desire to keep their methodology hidden from public view under the pretext that disclosure of their sources of intelligence might imperil them.

I certainly see the need to protect sources. But it’s hard to analyze or trust a report without having access to the underpinnings of the conclusions drawn. Continue reading →

Padma’s keeping busy

The New Neo Posted on by

I must say I’ve been remiss in keeping up with Padma Lakshmi’s career now that she and Salman Rushdie are no longer one.

Is she lonely? Does she miss these days?

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If so, she’s bravely bearing up. Apparently she has managed to fill with friendly correspondence whatever aching void may have been left by Salman’s absence. What am I talking about? Why, just this afternoon I received a comment from her on this very blog!

It was signed by Padma, and went like this:

Hi”¦Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Wednesday.

I know it’s a bit short, but then again, Padma’s a busy lady. And I know it’s not too personal, considering all I’ve written about her. But still—as Salman said in happier times—she’s a very mirthful gal.

I think, however, it might be time to fine-tune my spamguard.

[ADDENDUM, 12/13: My spamguard must be falling down on the job again, because I heard from my new buddy Padma again today. She writes, in a sort of breathless teenage voice:

Hi”¦Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts about I guess mirth was not enough: Rushie and Lakshmi comin..holy Thursday .]

Preemptive strikes: are they possible anymore?

The New Neo Posted on by

The recent NIE report could be considered a sort of verbal preemptive strike on any military preemptive strike that might have been aimed at Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

I’ve already written about the NIE report itself, so I won’t repeat myself here, except to say that I fault it for its attempt to make a big deal of the distinction between Iran’s capacity to produce weapons and to use power for peaceful means. As long as a country has the capacity to enrich uranium to the proper degree it can produce weapons, if the intent is there.

And with Iran, there’s no indication that it lacks intent. Au contraire, there’s every indication that its leaders have the requisite state of mind to develop nuclear weapons and perhaps even to use them without specific provocation.

Of course, some in Iran (and elsewhere) consider Israel’s mere existence to be provocation enough. Others consider the dreadful sins of the US sufficient.

The Iraq War had an effect on our faith in intelligence about the nuclear program of a country such as Iraq or Iran. The buildup to the Iraq War did not depend solely on the intelligence that said Saddam was continuing to develop WMDs, but there’s no doubt that this was a large part of the war’s justification, at least in people’s memories. Forgotten now by most is the idea that Saddam’s lack of cooperation with post Gulf War inspections—his noncompliance with same, and the resultant difficulty of verifying whether he had such weapons or not—was enough reason for action against him, whether or not WMDs actually existed.

Why is this important? Continue reading →

Diva? Moi?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been nominated in the competition for the august title “Grande Conservative Blogress Diva 2008″ at Gay Patriot.

Whew. A mouthful. I tried to comment on the thread, but somehow the spam filter (or one of the other diva wannabes?) kept throwing my comment away, which was an observation that the word “blogress” contains the term “ogress.” And then both of my commenting attempts suddenly showed up, making me seem both redundant and pushy. Sabotage, as I said.

If you’d like to go over there and vote for me, the poll should be up tomorrow.

Although it still takes some getting used to for me to hear myself called “conservative.”

Longwinded

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t set out to write long posts. It just happens.

I get an idea and start writing, and often think it will take only a couple of moments to wrap up a few succinct thoughts, and then…and then…it grows.

Most issues that draw me are not simple, and I seem to like to explore their complexities. That, of course, would take a book for each topic, not a blog post. So in a way I am being very concise—relatively speaking.

Each day I have a choice: to post or not to post. Life with all its joys, sorrows, petty annoyances, and chores calls and competes with writing, but ideas for posts have a very loud voice as well. I find I’ve grown accustomed to this daily discipline/exercise of writing down my thoughts, just as I’ve grown accustomed to physical exercise every day and try to make time for that. And so I write. And write. And plan to keep on writing.

Sometimes it’s about politics. Not usually. More often I’m interested in the larger issues behind the issues: war and peace, pacifism, historical parallels. And then there’s the category of “everything else”—especially poetry, dance, and the arts. Those are the fun posts to write, the ones that sometimes almost seem to write themselves. But they’re dessert rather than the main meal.

All this is my characteristically longwinded (reframe: reflective) way of saying I’ve got an idea for a post on one of those more involved topics but I’m busy today and may or may not get around to writing it before tomorrow.

Theater genes

The New Neo Posted on by

If you ever get a chance to see “Au Revoir Parapluie,” I strongly urge you to do so.

The work is impossible to describe, although this NY Times review (and this post of mine) try. It’s playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through next weekend, and then on to various non-US venues.

Let’s see: there’s dance, acrobatics, circus, slapstick, music, mime, and scenery; part Twyla Tharp, part Pilobolus, and part Julie Taymor, as well as countless other parts. But even though there’s really no story to speak of, all of it is riveting theater.

I hesitate to put this You Tube video up here because you might get the wrong idea; the video consists of brief episodes that don’t even begin to do the performance justice. That hanging rope at the beginning, for instance, which looks tiny on the computer screen—something like a tassel—is actually gargantuan, spanning the height of the entire stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, hypnotically overwhelming as it twirls and spins for what seems like many minutes.

No image represented in two small dimensions can ever capture an experience experienced live in three large dimensions. But the video will have to do for now:

Continue reading →

Whom do you trust? (or, how the NIE learned to stop worrying and love…)

The New Neo Posted on by

The best analyses of the new NIE report on the Iranian “now we see it, now we don’t” bomb can be found at Richard Fernandez’s Belmont Club. Please take a look at any and/or all of them: this, this, and this.

Oh, and you can add this American Thinker article to your reading list, too. Then come back here if you’re not too exhausted.

Highlights of Fernandez’s thoughts on the subject are hard to summarize; almost everything he writes is a highlight. He makes the interesting point that, if Iran did indeed stop its bomb development program back in 2003 (and it is by no means certain that it did), the most likely precipitating factor would have been the invasion of Iraq. In addition, the report itself indicated that the new information leading to the NIE’s conclusions may have been a psychops by the Iranians. And, if it was not, and if we do have a reliable source high in the Iranian government, Fernandez wonders whether the gratuitous publication of some of the details as to how that intelligence was obtained has compromised the safety of that person.

Oh, but who cares, if there’s a good story, and if it appears to hurt Bush? Well worth it. Continue reading →

How the Democrats can co-opt the surge

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s some reasonable advice for the Democrats on Iraq. It’s from Michael O’Hanlon, one of their number who first had the temerity to write that the surge was showing some positive effects in Iraq.

The gist of it? Take credit for the surge since it probably wouldn’t have happened but for their 2006 election, their criticism of how the war had been going, their previous calls to send more troops, and the pressure all of it put on Bush—even though, by the time the surge was proposed, they were set against it. Although that position seems a bit tricky (“I was for a surge before I was against this surge before I was for it again”), it seems the only one with any chance of making sense, especially if things keep looking better in Iraq. It even has the advantage—and the rarity, in politics—of probably being true.

Whether the Democrats will take O’Hanlon’s advice or not remains to be seen. The fact that even John Murtha has now said he thinks the surge is working is a sign that it may be time for them to do so.

Don’t tie yourself into knots

The New Neo Posted on by

I have a question for all you techies out there: how (and why) do the cords of earbuds for cellphones spontaneously tie themselves into knots in a single instant?

And I don’t mean modest knots, either. I mean large tangled masses of knots.

And how can this happen when I’ve done nothing more convoluted than to take my phone out of my purse and raise the bud to my ear?

Yesterday I was out doing an errand to help a friend’s daughter with her passport. This involved an unbelievable number of frustrating hours in the Post Office and elsewhere, including (but certainly not limited to) watching the nearly non-English-speaking clerk take a half-hour in an attempt to measure the oddly-shaped parcel of the man ahead of us, whose package seemed to have grown an extra appendage; a slight but constantly spitting snowstorm; MapQuest directions that did not correspond in any way to the territory traversed, a deadline of three o’clock that fast approached, finding someone’s lost cell phone in a pile of leaves in the gutter—and, finally, when all seemed lost, the successful accomplishment of our task.

Somewhere towards the end of it all, waiting for the umpteenth time while a clerk disappeared out of sight with our papers, I noticed the aforementioned knot in my cellphone earbud and thought, in the way bloggers often do, “Aha! A fitting subject for a post! I’ll write about this, and I’ll take a photo.”

That’s when I discovered that overnight my camera had developed a mysterious afflication. Here’s the photo I took, in which the lens seems to have tunnel vision. I’m sure some of you can instantly diagnose what ails the camera, and whether the disease is curable or whether the poor thing needs to be euthanized (the camera, that is, not the earbud):

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