Events both inner and outer: how’s it going?

The New Neo Posted on by

For the past few months not only has a lot of the news been extremely depressing, but it’s been appearing on so many fronts that I have at least thirty stories to choose from each day for my blog posts. I’m not superwoman and just can’t cover them all, so I pick the ones that either interest me the most or on which I think I have the most interesting things to say, and I leave it at that.

But the residue of all the bad news sticks to me, to a certain extent, even though I try to shed it. And then of course there are personal matters: trying to work on Gerard’s book launch (which seems to involve a thousand surprisingly time-consuming tasks), planning a summer trip out west that should end up being fun but requires juggling the schedules of many people (another surprisingly time-consuming – and frustrating – task), and of course the continual absence of Gerard now that over a year has passed.

If only the news of the world were better. For now we see through a glass, darkly, and so I try to be optimistic. I certainly realize I can’t see the future, and it might be better – even much better – than it looks now. However:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself; …
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

That last poem, by Robert Frost, is especially laconic and deceptively simple – almost like a child’s nursery rhyme. But it says a great deal.

All of the poems convey a sense of foreboding, and it’s hard not to feel that sort of dread today. I don’t think that emotion is the province of one side or another; from what I can see among the people I know, it’s shared by both, although exactly what they dread and their idea of the mechanism by which it could and perhaps will occur is quite different.

And yet, spring is here. I took this photo a few days ago near where I live. What’s unusual about it isn’t apparent in the photo, but it was a bunch of teeny miniature daffodils that had apparently seeded themselves in an area where nothing had been cultivated or purposely planted. They were just standing there alone, a real surprise:

The ballet Raymonda: a sampler

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re not a ballet lover, you may never have heard of the ballet Raymonda. I’ve seen it quite a few times, and although it’s not my favorite it’s still enjoyable, and I very much like the Glazunov music.

I well remember two ballerinas from American Ballet Theater whose performances in the role were stellar. Luckily, I found videos of each of them doing one of the solos. But unfortunately, the quality of the videos isn’t good; they are blurry and sometimes the music is flat. And yet, unless one goes to the Lincoln Center library and watches videos there (they can’t be taken out), it’s all we have of these great artists.

The quality of these videos makes it seem as though these performances were from 100 years ago. But these are people I saw perform when I was already an adult. The videos appear to have been taken during live performances and have some annoying buzzing and clicking sounds.

But enough complaining.

First, we have Cynthia Gregory, who was tall and elegant, restrained but lovely. This is probably from some time in the early to mid 1970s:

And then we have Martine van Hamel, who was also elegant but had a more delicate and charming quality. She is from the same era. The music is flat, the picture is blurry, but I think she is amazing:

Here is a Russian dancer from the 1980s; actually, she’s Georgian. You can see that her movements are sharper and far more dramatic. She gives it that Russian/Georgian angst. Although her variation lacks the charm and centered stillness of the first two, I like it for its drama. The video quality is much better, of course, although the first few moments of the variation are missing:

And here is a very well-known French dancer who was a technical marvel, circa 1990 or so. Her version is too austere and severe for me, and I get that sense of posing rather than flow:

I had trouble finding more recent performances, but maybe it’s just as well. I assume they’re available, though.

Foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel passes the House

The New Neo Posted on by

Republicans are more split on aid to Ukraine, while Democrats are more split on aid to Israel. That means, however, that aid to both countries is supported by the majority of Congress through the mechanism of bipartisanship. That’s the way Congress used to function, to the best of my recollection:

The House Rules Committee voted 9-3 to advance the package, with Democratic support being a rare occurrence for Republican bills.

Republican Reps. Chip Roy, Thomas Massie, and Ralph Norman voted against the rule, expressing frustration that aid to Ukraine was not paired with conservative border security provisions.

But that pairing would have meant that it didn’t pass, because it would have lost Democrat support, and it needed Democrat support to pass at all.

Various parts of the package are expected to pass with bipartisan coalitions this weekend.

And that’s what happened:

Speaker Mike Johnson risked his political career to shepherd through over $60 billion in Ukrainian aid on the House floor on Saturday as part of a $95 billion aid package for U.S. allies.

The package in total gives $26 billion to Israel, $60.8 billion to Ukraine and $8 billion to the Indo-Pacific through a combination of military and humanitarian aid.

The package consisting of three separate aid bills was voted on alongside a fourth ‘side car’ that includes a potential TikTok ban and a vehicle to repurpose seized Russian assets for Ukraine.

The bill providing cash for Kyiv – by far the most contentious of the day and the one Johnson could lost his job over – passed 311 to 112.

‘We would rather send bullets to the conflict overseas than our own boys, our troops,’ Johnson insisted after the vote.

The Israel aid bill passed 366 to 58, with opposition largely consisting of progressives who wanted the aid conditioned on a ceasefire.

Many Republicans wanted it paired with border security; I would have strongly preferred that myself. However, you can’t always get what you want:

House Speaker Mike Johnson had previously pushed to pair aid to Ukraine with border security provisions. However, his efforts were met with resistance, leading to several rules failing on the floor, largely due to objections from the right flank of the party. Despite calls from several members of the Republican conference to raise the threshold to bring a motion to oust the speaker, Johnson announced that the House “will continue to govern under the existing rules.”

Those who are against aid to either country (Republicans who oppose Ukraine aid; Democrats who oppose Israel aid) are angry. People want what they want. The reality is the razor-thin Republican House majority and the razor-thin Democrat Senate majority, and the division within Republican and Democrat ranks. The Republicans who oppose what happened can get rid of their Speakers over and over, but that won’t get them what they want either, because the reality of the situation blocks it.

And then there are the people who would be happy with aiding neither Ukraine nor Israel. That’s a much smaller group – nearly entirely in the GOP, as far as I can tell – and it’s not going to get what it wants either, because a bipartisan majority wants something quite different.

NOtE: The Byzantine machinations of Congress are hard to follow, and very few people do so. I can’t say I’ve followed every single back and forth, either.

China’s baby problem

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve watched many videos on the reluctance of the young people of China to have children. The problem affects other countries in Asia and the West as a whole as well, but in Europe and the US it’s nothing like as bad as in China – although who knows, we may be headed China’s way.

I’m not sure everything in these China videos is correct in terms of causes or details, but they paint a very grim and similar picture, and they all agree on a couple of things: that the younger generations in China work extremely hard at mostly unrewarding jobs and are exhausted, that they reject family life because they see it as a money and time drain, and that they are narcissistic and very materialistic.

These videos indicate to me that a significant part of the problem is that the Chicoms purposely weakened the family without replacing it with anything else except consumerism, an empty substitute. It sounds as though depression is very widespread there, whether clinically diagnosed or not. Their forced one-child policy meant that many in the younger generations have been only children, with all the indulgence, pressure, and loneliness that sometimes entails. Bigger families would be somewhat foreign to them, and I bet that many have never even been around babies all that much, or learned what the rewards of parenthood or siblinghood can be.

I think refusal to have children may also be a way to rebel in a society that doesn’t offer all that many avenues for rebellion.

Take a look:

I hadn’t seen the following video when I first wrote this post, but it has a great deal of information on how the one-child policy may have influenced the current worrisome phenomenon. That portion begins at minute 10:18, but I think the entire thing is interesting:

“Equity grading”: forced regression towards the mean

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Ace.]

We can’t have students feeling bad about their grades – unless they’re smart and high-achieving students. Then it’s okay.

So let’s eliminate the tails, says California. All students will be equally – or almost equally – mediocre:

No D’s and F’s? No extra credit? Will Bay Area schools’ switch to equity grading help or harm students? Dublin Unified School District says the public school grading system is unfair
Hrihaan Bhutani is already thinking about college. The Dublin High freshman is taking four Advanced Placement classes next year and has crammed his schedule with extracurricular activities to better his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.

But a change at the high school designed to get students less focused on grades has done the opposite. Suddenly, in some classes, A’s are almost unachievable, unless you score 100%. And F’s don’t exist. For high-achieving students like Bhutani, the pressure to be perfect is even more of a burden.

“I feel more stressed … now with this new system,” said Bhutani, who is especially sweating his biology class, one of dozens trying a variety of new grading scales under a two-year experiment. “Even if you’re at a 99, you would get moved down to an 85,” he explained, which translates to a world-ending B.

Dublin Unified’s new grading policy will go into effect for all 6th through 12th grade classes next year and is part of a national shift toward “equity grading” — a controversial concept that moves away from traditional grading to better measure how well students understand what they are being taught.

Traditional grades measure how well students understand what they are being taught, if tests are decently designed and assignments for writing papers are relevant.

More:

Next year, the district will restrict all letter grades to a 10% range and remove the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were “reasonably attempted.” The new policy will also remove extra credit and bonus points that elevated grades, and provide students with multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework’s impact on a student’s grade.

If an assignment is “reasonably attempted” it wouldn’t be getting a zero anyway. Zero is for not turning it in at all. And the new policy eliminates many opportunities for good students to do exceptionally well at the same time it gives more opportunities for poor students to do better or to seem to do better (“minimizing homework’s impact” – why?).

Here’s the bottom line:

“This will up kids graduating, it will up their numbers,” said Laurie Sargent, an eighth grade English teacher at Cottonwood Creek, a TK-8th grade school in Dublin. “They’ll have fewer kids failing and then that looks good. It’s strategic.”

It’s all about the numbers, and if you eliminate failing than your numbers automatically improve.

I have come to loathe the word “equity,” which has been used in an Orwellian manner for way too long.

Iran, Israel, and MAD

The New Neo Posted on by

So, what’s going on between Iran and Israel after Israel launched a limited strike against Iran?:

The primary target seems to have been air defense systems around the Khatami Air Base near Isfahan. This is one of the bases from which last weekend’s attack on Israel was launched. …

Concurrent with the attack in Iran, Israel hit air defense sites in Syria. There are no conclusive reports of damage caused by any of the strikes. The scope of the attack indicates that Iranian nuclear facilities were not the target.

Neither side is making a big deal of the attack.

Is this just some sort of theater? Or is it a prelude to something bigger? I’m not sure that either side is all that sure at the moment. They’re jockeying for position and sizing each other up.

I’ve long thought that Iran won’t do all that much to Israel – except through terrorist proxies as well as worldwide propaganda – until it has nuclear weapons. Even then, it might hesitate – accent on the might – if it thought Israel would destroy it in return.

I read this interesting article at Ace’s recently. It looks at the big picture:

… [T]he Iranian attack [on Israel] was a three-pronged event using slower drones, faster cruise missiles, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. This was different, not just in who was attacking, but the methodology. The success of the defense has got a lot of people thinking and planning and, frankly, worried.

Worried? Why worried? Wouldn’t a successful defense be a good thing? Well:

The creation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile systems (ABMs) [in the Cold War] resulted in a series of negotiations, because this was destabilized the MAD doctrine. A viable ABM system allows one side to defeat a first strike, then free it to launch a strike of their own– and win. So both sides agreed to stop building and limited themselves to one system. The US put its ABM system around some of the missile fields; the Russians put theirs around Moscow.

Now let’s consider a Regional Conflict. Over time nuclear weapons have proliferated. Pakistan, India, China, France, and Great Britian have nukes, and likely others such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, South Africa (maybe), and presumably, Israel. In the bipolar years, nobody gave much thought to Regional Conflicts. Why? Regional powers didn’t have nukes, so why bother. But not anymore. This begs the question then — and the reason a lot of thinkers are busy late into the night — can a Regional Nuclear War be fought, and won?

That would act as an incentive rather than a deterrent – if a country such as Iran thought that was possible.

More:

Can MAD exist in a regional context? I think it can, but the likelihood of weapon use in oneies and twoies goes up dramatically. More so given there are other delivery options: trains, cars, airlines, etc. Better question is can MAD exist in the Middle East? Just how crazy are the muzzies? This would keep me awake at night.

In the short run, a wider war with Iran doesn’t appear to be happening right now. But the situation is highly unstable, and you don’t need me to tell you that. It’s obvious.

And nukes could and almost certainly would change the whole picture.

ADDENDUM:

Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”

Fascinating take on it:

Trump at the Harlem bodega

The New Neo Posted on by

In adversity there can be opportunity. Force Trump to remain in New York City in order to attend his show trial, and he manages to make a clever – and symbolic – campaign stop:

Tuesday, after court, Trump went to Harlem. Talk about grabbing political advantage.

Trump went to the bodega, where, two years ago, a clerk, Jose Alba, stabbed and killed an ex-convict who was attacking him.

Alba was charged with murder. It took three weeks for the radical D.A. Alvin Bragg to drop the charge.

Note the the guy who persecuted Alba was the same person currently persecuting Trump in the NY trial: Alvin Bragg.

More:

Alba had to leave the country. New Yorkers were outraged at the crime and injustice.

That’s the backdrop to Trump’s bodega visit.

[Trump] was greeted by a large and diverse crowd that loved him.

I’m in awe of his energy.

ADDENDUM:

By the way, in case you’re wondering whether the MSM is covering this, the answer is “yes.”

From CNN:

And what CBS has to say.

From the AP:

And what Politico has to say.

Trump knows how to get attention.

The UN once again proves how morally bankrupt it is by saying hey, let’s reward violent terrorists with a state!

The New Neo Posted on by

And the AP does its thing. I’m referring to the article’s headline: “US vetoes widely supported resolution backing full UN membership for Palestine.” You see, it’s “widely supported” – by the many tyrannies, corrupt banana republics (except ours), failed nations, and enabling and cowardly first-world countries.

The lede:

The United States vetoed a widely backed U.N. resolution Thursday that would have paved the way for full United Nations membership for Palestine, a goal the Palestinians have long sought and Israel has worked to prevent.

Nasty US, nasty Israel, harming the poor suffering Palestinians who so very much deserve UN membership. Actually, the Palestinians are already the greatest beneficiaries of the UN, having been financially supported by UNRWA – and educated in Jew-hatred by UNWRA – for pretty much the duration of Israel’s existence.

More:

The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 12 in favor, the United States opposed and two abstentions, from the United Kingdom and Switzerland. U.S. allies France, Japan and South Korea supported the resolution.

The UK and Switzerland have shown modified and tepid good sense by at least not voting for the measure.

Here’s the official position of the Biden administration:

Since the attacks of October 7, President Biden has been clear that sustainable peace in the region can only be achieved through a two-state solution, with Israel’s security guaranteed. There is no other path that guarantees Israel’s security and future as a democratic Jewish state.

There is no other path that guarantees Palestinians can live in peace and with dignity in a state of their own. And there is no other path that leads to regional integration between Israel and all its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia.

We also have long been clear that premature actions here in New York, even with the best intentions, will not achieve statehood for the Palestinian people.

“With Israel’s security guaranteed” is the important part. Until that happens, Palestinians will not be living “in peace and with dignity in a state of their own.” And I see no path to that except obliteration of Hamas, and occupation by some entity or entities that will be reshaping the minds of the people there and in particular the coming generations. Tall order, to say the least – taller, I believe, than in postwar Germany and Japan, although at least the number of people involved is much smaller.

At the moment I can’t find the link where I read it, but apparently the US announced in advance of the vote that it intended to use its veto. This had the effect of giving cover to the other nations to vote for admittance or to abstain, saying to the terrorist crocodile: “Please, Mr. Crocodile, please eat me last!” It also allowed the European nations in the Security Council to placate their sizable Muslim populations, knowing that because of the US’s veto there would be no real consequences.

I’m actually surprised that the Biden administration had the cojones to veto the resolution.

The UN has long been in the business of rewarding the worst terrorist attacks of the Palestinians, beginning with the Munich massacre that got so much notoriety and Arafat’s subsequent 1974 appearance there. He addressed the General Assembly, saying, among other things:

Our resolve to build a new world is fortified — a world free of colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism and racism in each of its instances, including zionism.

That’s what the Soviets taught him to say, and he learned his lesson well.

More:

Our world aspires to peace, justice, equality and freedom. It wishes that oppressed nations, bent under the weight of imperialism, might gain their freedom and their right to self-determination.

Sure thing; that’s what the Palestinians want. Every leftist buzzword is there – as far back as fifty years ago.

Actually, Arafat was laughing at them all:

In an article last week about dramatic moments at the United Nations (“Laughter at Trump among a long line of shocking U.N. moments“), the Associated Press covers up the most dramatic element of Yasser Arafat’s 1974 United Nations address: that he brought a gun to the international body and even delivered the address while openly sporting the holster.

In his Sept. 26 article, Tamer Fakahany obscures that Yasser Arafat actually brought his gun to the United Nations and wore the holster during his address, instead presenting the unprecedented nature of his appearance there as relating only to the statement: “Today, I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun.Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” …

(According to an earlier AP report, he was forced to deposit the gun before mounting the rostrum.)

AP’s Sept. 28 2012 account of the same speech explicitly stated in the heading “Yasser Arafat brings his gun to the U.N.” It also contained the key information omitted from last week’s report: “Arafat appeared wearing his gun belt and holster, reluctantly removing his pistol before mounting the rostrum.”

It was a threat from Arafat. He knew how to do political theater, and it has served the Palestinians in their bid to gain sympathy and support from the West while they nurture and act out their destructive and violent hated of Israel, the Jews, and the West.