It’s Monday – let’s have a roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Tucker Carlson will be airing shows about the January 6th videos tonight and tomorrow night. Democrat officials and pundits have been busy doing their “debunk ahead of time” routine. They are distraught at the prospect of losing their previous control of the January 6th “narrative” and evidence. They have been able to shape it and distort it almost at will for two years, and are bristling at the idea that the Republicans will get a chance to put out video that challenges that narrative.

This would not even be possible if the GOP hadn’t taken control of the House, if only by such a slim margin.

(2) Ethnic Asians in the US seem to be moving further to the right. I’ve long wondered why they were on the left in the first place; doesn’t seem to suit the general values of the group. Of course, it’s a large and varied group, with backgrounds from many many countries. Here are some figures:

In 2016, Republicans won 18 percent of the Asian-American vote. In 2020, they won 30 percent, and last November Republicans won 32 percent of it. That’s a massive shift in a pretty sure span of time, and another sign that perhaps identity politics and race-based rhetoric actually isn’t helping.

The more leftist “Asian” groups are people of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab descent. I guess it’s not a surprise that they are more to the left. The East Asians are less strongly to the left – but they were still to the left, except for the Vienamese. Here’s a link to the breakdown in 2020. It’s understandable that the Vietnamese aren’t big fans of the left. But what’s up with Koreans and Chinese, who also have had experience of the left and where it leads?

(3) Fauci commissioned a 2020 study that he then used to disprove the lab leak theory, a theory that stood to impliciate him, at least in part:

Newly-released emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic show the former head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases both commissioned and had final approval on a scientific paper which claimed it was ‘improbable’ that the virus leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China.

Just a few weeks later, he stood next to then-President Donald Trump at a press conference and cited that very paper as evidence that the idea of a lab leak was implausible – without admitting he commissioned it.

This should surprise no one.

(4) CNN actively suppressed the lab leak story because it was a “Trump talking point.” This is no surprise, either. The most important function of the MSM in recent years has been suppressing news stories, not airing them.

(5) AOC got some previously-unreported freebies.

Plisetskaya: Style. Musicality. Power. Flow.

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a variation from the ballet “Raymonda” that features a dance with a scarf (or shawl, if you prefer). It’s not a bravura variation, technically, although it requires strength and control – as all ballet does, actually. Also, the dancer has to master the prop, which can always be tricky. There are a lot of styles in which it can be performed: lighthearted? regal? slow-ish? faster?.

Here’s one that’s typical of what you might see today, from a fine dancer in her mid-30s, about seven years ago. She seems the epitome of the slow-ish regal style:

Here’s another recent dancer, also Russian-trained. She’s slightly younger than the first dancer, and her version is a bit warmer and lighter; more girlish:

This is another Russian dancer, a bit younger still than the previous one, and again in the mold of the first dancer – that is, regal and a bit cool, very elegant, long-necked, and slender:

I would describe all three performances as very careful and controlled. As with so many dancers today, these women seem to go from pose to pose, making sure their lines are beautiful all the while. The tempo is somewhat slow, the better to show off these poses.

It makes for a lovely picture, or rather series of pictures. You also might have noticed that, when each gets to the part where she must hop around in a circle on one leg with her other leg in arabesque, there’s a bit of effort to make it seem smooth and not thump-thump-thump (which is harder than it looks). But don’t you wonder – why are they dancing with a scarf? Is this an assignment of some sort, or what?

Now we go back in time to one of my favorite ballet dancers ever, Maya Plisetskaya. She does the same variation here, circa 1959, over sixty years ago. But what I find very different from the previous three – and from every dancer of recent vintage – are the four things I put in the title above: her style, her musicality, her power, and the flow of her movement. It’s somewhat faster, too; Plisetskaya doesn’t pose – or rather, when she does, it’s for a moment of quick emphasis to counter the flow of her dance.

And why is she dancing with the scarf? Why, she seems to be playing. She’s having fun. It’s as though she’s making up the movement as she goes along, in an impromptu game. She doesn’t worry, either, about making each moment elegant and pretty. She doesn’t worry about anything, or seem to. She dances.

See if you agree:

I’ll add one technical point about what gives Plisetskaya some of her freedom of movement: she doesn’t hold her body above the waist rigid. It moves and sways in every direction in a way that’s more extreme than the others, who seem to be afraid they’ll break or fall off-balance if they allow their torsos and heads to become more pliant.

Who was that masked man?

The New Neo Posted on by

Good luck with this:

Face masks, once an essential Covid-19 protective measure, are now being worn by criminals to conceal their identities, according to New York police who are urging businesses to unmask customers before letting them in stores.

Masks were never essential. They were required, however.

And it’s not just now that masks are being worn by criminals to conceal their identities. It went on during the COVID years. And of course, there’s a long previous tradition of criminals wearing masks, but pre-COVID such people stood out like the proverbial sore thumbs.

One problem with this remedy is enforcement. Must stores employ bouncers to get rid of masked would-be criminals? And if they are criminals, wouldn’t they perhaps be armed? There are fewer police around in many cities these days, too:

“We’re asking the businesses to make this a condition of entry: That people, when they come in, they should show their face, they should identify themselves,” Maddrey added. “And if they feel like they want to put their mask on after they identify themselves for their safety, by all means, they should do so.”

The NYPD’s appeal to businesses comes after a “masked up” criminal entered a Queens jewelry store and allegedly made off with $1.1 million worth of property after beating the 79-year-old woman who was watching the store.

A 79-year-old woman watching the store? Seems a bit inadequate to me, whether the assailant is masked or unmasked.

The COVID years, the gift that keeps on giving.

NOTE: Of course, masks weren’t just for criminals. Sometimes the good guys wore them:

Facing old age

The New Neo Posted on by

Glenn Reynolds observes:

“Ozempic face” isn’t really a thing, it’s just the consequence of losing a lot of bodyfat. I’ve had a number of friends — and my dad — who lost a lot of weight post-40 and they all looked a bit droopy or funny for a while because it takes a long time for your skin to tauten up. And to some degree, a skinny face just tends to look older. So I believe that there’s no specific aging angle here, just what happens when you lose a lot of weight fast.

Perhaps when you’re closer to 40, your skin manages to “tauten up” over time. I’m of the age when 40 sounds practically fetal. In my age group, losing a lot of weight quickly or slowly does sometimes age people more than being at least slightly overweight does.

Or as my mother – who knew something about the aging process, having lived almost to 100 – used to say: You can be a skinny old lady or a fat old lady. In other words, once you reach a certain point, you’re still old.

As I get older myself, I’ve become more in awe of my mother’s attitude towards old age. Until just the last couple of years of her life, she remained active and somehow managed to stave off major depression as her friends died one by one by one. It helped that she was living in a community where she knew literally hundreds of people and felt very much at home. It helped that she lived near my brother and his family. It helped that she was relatively healthy and pain-free till those last few years. But it was also a decision of some sort on her part, that she wouldn’t look back too much.

My temperament has always been different.

My mother was widowed in her early 60s, and when she was around 80 she met a man of 85 who liked her and she liked him. They kept company till his death nine years later, and he was as active as she. They traveled and they had fun. I was so grateful for him.

Another one of my mother’s sayings: “Everybody keeps telling me how lucky I am to have him. Why don’t they say how lucky he is to have me?” Well, they both were lucky, and they knew it.

Peterson and Curry

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, so it’s long. An hour and a half long. You can speed it up by changing the settings (as I often do with interviews), but there’s no getting around the fact that, even then, it’ll be long.

Of course, you don’t have to watch the whole thing to get a lot of the gist of it. I think it’s well worth listening to at least some of the discussion. I find Judith Curry to be one of the best scientists today speaking about the subject. So here it is:

Twitter files blacklists

The New Neo Posted on by

More Twitter files from Matt Taibbi:

Journalist Matt Taibbi is back with perhaps the most bizarre installment yet of the Twitter Files.

Americans’ freedom of speech is increasingly endangered by a vast, federally funded Disinformation Industrial Complex…

In 2016, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13721 to establish the “Global Engagement Center” to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.”

GEC is based in the State Department but also partners with the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

Thanks to GEC, “America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against ‘threats’ in our own population,” Taibbi writes.

Disinformation became the most fashionable crusade.

Disinformation is so perfidious that the GEC tries to keep its operations secret…

GEC alerted Twitter to almost 500 accounts as “foreign” disinformation on ludicrous grounds, such as the users tweeting #IraniansDebateWithBiden — including personal acquaintances of The Post’s op-ed editor.

In June 2021, a GEC contractor sent Twitter a message: “Hi guys. Attached you will find . . . around 40k twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior . . . and Hindu nationalism more broadly.”

But the list was full of hapless Americans with no ties to India or its politics.

Maybe GEC’s involvement was a secret, but it was no secret – to anyone paying attention – that vast numbers of Twitter accounts were being censored for fairly ordinary viewpoints, the majority of them on the right. It wasn’t limited to Twitter, either – YouTube was heavily involved.

And of course, it was easy to notice changes in Google’s algorithm. That’s still ongoing.

Unreachable humans

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t mean in the psychological sense, I mean in the practical sense.

Over time, answering machines have made it nearly impossible to call a medical office and reach a human being. I’ve just spent a fair amount of time calling such offices and listening to recorded messages about how eager they are to serve you and get your calls, how important you are to them, and then a long list of things you might want or people you might desire to reach – always with the most unlikely ones first, and a warning about what to do if this is an emergency call. Then on hold with some usually dreadful music, then another chipper voice with a recorded message, this time saying you must state your name, birthday, phone number, reason for calling, and they’ll be oh so pleased to get back to you some time.

You know the drill.

I sometimes screen calls when I’m busy, or when it’s someone I don’t want to talk to. But some people never answer their phones, ever. And some don’t talk on the phone anymore at all. That’s their prerogative, of course. But I think it’s somewhat ironic that an invention that at first seemed to facilitate communication has ended up doing no such thing.

One of these phone calls of mine today involved a “breach” of one of the medical offices I attend, and the loss of some information about when I had a certain test and when I might be due for the next one. Apparently there’s a staff member whose sole job it has been to deal with the consequences of this breach, which happened several months ago. Breaches like that could only happen once medical records became computerized. It’s one of the reasons I never give my Social Security number in any medical office. They don’t all ask for it, but some of them still do.

Just now, the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number and I thought maybe it was one of the offices calling back. No such luck. It was some group asking for money – a recorded message. I hung up.

United Airlines brags about all LGBTQ+ crew

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s come to this:

United Airlines took to Twitter this week to proclaim that an all-LGBTQ+ crew had just completed a flight from San Francisco to Sydney. A video inside the tweet showed two employees unveiling the image of a koala bear – wearing heart-shaped sunglasses – waving an enormous LGBTQ flag on the side of the aircraft.

The airline may have been surprised to learn that for many passengers, safety trumps diversity. Although there were a few who applauded this momentous occasion, for those more concerned with reaching their destination in one piece, it landed like a lead balloon.

Why on earth would we care about the sexual orientation of a flight crew – unless, of course, they were hired in order to check some diversity boxes? And in that case the caring would probably go in the negative direction for the vast majority of people – except, it seems, airline executives.