What I wrote about COVID and fear – in May of 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Here it is, and I think it holds up quite nicely]

I have gotten to the point where I no longer put any trust in the prognostications of scientists about COVID-19 and the comparison of various social policy tactics for dealing with it. These people have lost credibility – and I was already skeptical in the first place.

Some no doubt are well-intentioned and trying their best to do a good job. Others probably have a political agenda. But at this point I think even the first group simply doesn’t know. The country-by-country data gives us some information, to be sure – enough to bring me to the conclusion that there is no simple relationship between any of the rules and the outcomes claimed to be a result of those rules. But it doesn’t tell us what to do going forward.

Sweden is encouraging in terms of relaxing the rules, but the US is not Sweden. Georgia, likewise. But it still doesn’t tell us enough.

However, I also concluded a few weeks ago that we must go forward and open up the economy or the amount of human suffering as a result of the shutdown will be absolutely enormous, too. In fact, it already has been. Those at greater risk (like me) will have to make our own decisions about how and when we’ll venture forth. But the greater good requires that we end this stalemate.

I’m with Rand Paul who said this today to Dr. Fauci:

We need to uh, observe with an open mind what went on in Sweden, where the kids kept going to school. The mortality per capita in Sweden is actually less than France, less than Italy, less than Spain, less than Belgium, less than the Netherlands, about the same as Switzerland. But basically I don’t think there’s anybody arguing that what happened in Sweden is an unacceptable result. I think people are intrigued by it and we should be, I don’t think any of us are certain when we do all these modelings, there’ve been more people wrong with modeling than right. We’re opening up a lot of economies around the, around the U S and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying, Oh, we can’t do this, there’s going to be, the surge will admit that they were wrong…

…We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there’s not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy and the facts will bear this out.

About two months ago [that is: March, 2020] I wrote a post entitled “Gone are the days: assuming the risk.” In it I wrote:

Of course, I wasn’t around in 1918. I wasn’t around when smallpox and tuberculosis or the Black Death killed far far more of the people on earth than any of the plagues of my lifetime have come close to killing. I cannot even imagine how terrible those things were; I don’t even want to imagine. And I doubt that people took them in stride at all. And I think a good part of the dread and fear now is that in the back of our minds – or for some people, even the front of our minds – we know that such catastrophes are still possible. Human beings know they are intensely vulnerable.

But COVID-19 is not shaping up to be that sort of event, and there’s no reason to think it will be. However, although many measures are prudent – handwashing, increased testing, hospital preparedness, some measure of social distancing at least for a while – the degree of fear I see and hear is far greater than anything I can recall in my lifetime around a medical event.

And COVID-19 still isn’t shaping up to be that kind of event. We have a lot more information now. It seems, though, that people have become less able to assume any risks at all, and more demanding of total or nearly total safety. Meanwhile, to achieve that safety, many advocate the continuation of measures that are bound to sink this country – not to mention causing people to die of or suffer from other diseases or phenomena such as domestic abuse or suicide.

Of course, some who advocate continual shutdown have other motives than near-total safety. Some on the left would like the economy to sink and are merely using the fear sparked by COVID to achieve those aims. And there are plenty of people who would like to use all of it to destroy Trump’s and the GOP’s chances of victory in November.

Entrapping the Proud Boys?

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Julie Kelly – who has done the best work on the January 6th defendants and the evidence against them – writes:

It’s week five of the Justice Department’s most high-profile—and high-stakes—criminal trial related to the events of January 6, 2021. Five members of the Proud Boys face the rare “seditious conspiracy” charge. Guilty verdicts—almost certain given the government’s near-perfect conviction rate for January 6 defendants—would build legal momentum for a similar indictment against Donald Trump…

Last week, Judge Timothy Kelly allowed prosecutors to play a clip of Trump’s extemporaneous comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark uttered during a presidential debate in September 2020 more than three months before the Capitol protest…

The clip is just another thin reed of evidence in the government’s landmark domestic terrorism case. In fact, much of the “evidence” amounts to nothing more than worthless trinkets, braggadocious group chats, and otherwise protected political speech.

It now appears that one key piece of evidence was not the work of any defendant in this case but rather written by a one-time government intelligence asset with unusual ties to both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another group involved in January 6.

Please read the whole thing.

Why is Nikki Haley running for president?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are the reasons Haley herself gives:

“It’s time for a new generation of leadership,” Haley stated.

Yeah, but Ron DeSantis is even younger

“[Other countries] all think we can be bullied, kicked around. You should know this about me, I don’t put up with bullies, and when you kick back it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”

Sorry, but even without high heels, Trump would certainly be a stronger deterrent.

But I actually don’t think Haley is running for president at all. I think she is positioning herself to become somebody’s vice-presidential nominee.

Valentine’s Day: some thoughts and a poem

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is Valentine’s Day and I’m feeling somewhat raw, for obvious reasons.

And yet I’ve never been really big on Valentine’s Day celebrations. After all, for the last thirty years or so I haven’t been able to eat chocolate without getting a migraine, so chocolate is out even though I love it. I like flowers, but red roses are one of my least favorites, and that’s what they push on Valentine’s Day.

But for many years I would give Gerard a poem on Valentine’s Day, and of course as of this year that’s over. I’m also faced with the dilemma here of how much to write about Gerard, given what a private person I am. He was much more revealing in his own writings, but not completely so. The actual person is always different than the writer as self-presented.

But I’ve decided for this Valentine’s Day to publish one of the many poems I wrote for him. Some were far more serious than this one, which is definitely meant to be on the light side. A lot of them were sonnets, as is this one; I consider the sonnet a special challenge and a lot of fun when it comes out right. Sort of like a puzzle or game.

Poems were the very best present for Gerard. This one is from many years ago – I don’t know exactly when – and I’ll explain at least one of the references. When Gerard decided it was time to do some cleaning, the first thing he’d concentrate on were the kitchen counters. He’d suddenly go into gear and sweep everything off the countertops, putting the things away with a clatter and bang, and then spray the empty counters down with Windex. Why Windex? I don’t know, but that was part of the ritual. Then he’d replace just a few items – setting them up with artistic symmetry – and admire the view.

The floors were a different story. Gerard didn’t seem to like to look down and notice what was going on there until it was absolutely necessary. So that’s one of the things I was teasing him about in this particular Valentine’s Day poem.

TO G, A SONNET FOR VALENTINE’S DAY

The king of gleaming Windexed countertops,
he cooks with flair and tantalizing ease.
So what if he ignores the brooms and mops?
His eyes on higher things, he aims to please.
His closet brims with clothes and savvy style,
his brain with bon mots, literate and keen.
A thousand times a day he makes me smile
(though in the morning, he requires caffeine).
His forte isn’t sleeping. To unwind
is almost hard as going to a gym.
And yet you must believe me—he is kind,
tender, and loving (I’ll not mention slim).
Though Valentine’s Day’s not his cup of tea,
I think he’ll grin and bear it to please me.

The Ohio train derailment

The New Neo Posted on by

What on earth is going on here? A February 3 train derailment in an Ohio town has spewed a bunch of dangerous chemicals into the air:

Hazardous material expert Sil Caggiano told WXBN, “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open.”

Caggiano also provided details about the chemicals:

“Caggiano says ethylhexyl acrylate is especially worrisome. He says it’s a carcinogen and contact with it can cause burning and irritation in the skin and eyes. Breathing it in can irritate the nose and throat and cause coughing and shortness of breath.

Isobutylene is also known to cause dizziness and drowsiness when inhaled.”

As for our intrepid Transportation Secretary, he’s on the case as usual – not:

Funny thing – Buttigieg’s incompetent tenure in the job is probably the first time I ever really noticed the post of secretary of transportation. It’s remarkable how many transportation problems there have been during the Biden administration.

Sowell on multiculturalism

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday, commenter “Paul Nachman” kindly drew our attention to this talk by Thomas Sowell on multicultualism. It was given some time in the 1990s, and displays Sowell’s characteristic sharpness of observation and clarity of expression He grasped the problem long before most people even noticed the phenomenon.

An excerpt:

But is there any evidence that colleges that have gone whole hog into multiculturalism have better relations among the various groups on campus? Or is it precisely on such campuses that separatism and hostility are worse than on campuses that have not gone in for the multicultural craze?

You want to see multiculturalism in action? Look at Yugoslavia, at Lebanon, at Sri Lanka, at Northern Ireland, at Azerbaijan, or wherever else group “identity” has been hyped. There is no point in the multiculturalists’ saying that this is not what they have in mind. You might as well open the floodgates and then say that you don’t mean for people to drown. Once you have opened the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to do.

By the way, it was in the early 1990s that I went back to the university to get my MFT degree, and I noticed that things had changed tremendously since my last foray as a student in the 1970s. Wokeism, post-modernism, the elevation of feelings over thought, and various “critical studies” teaching philosophies were very much in the ascendance, and the pernicious effects were already becoming noticeable, although I did not understand their full ramifications.

The Met jumps on the “even abolitionist anti-slavery artists were actually celebrating slavery” bandwagon

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Heather Mac Donald describes the latest art-world insanity, this time at the Met. You may have to concentrate very very hard to follow it:

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

It’s the old “black bodies” fixation of the woke.

More:

It turns out that if a white artist depicts a black slave, he participates in subjugation himself. Such a depiction suggests, according to the Met, that slavery is the primordial condition of blacks. Elyse Nelson and Wendy Walters explain in their catalog introduction: the “enduring visual culture of abolition and emancipation” posits that “Black persons must first have been enslaved in order to be free.” A wall label in Fictions of Emancipation notes disapprovingly that Carpeaux’s interpretation of the “injustice of enslavement remains embodied in a bound woman.”

I can’t quote the entire article here, but it’s worth reading the whole thing to get the flavor of the “logic” by which the Met’s curators operate. Apparently, white people cannot possible have anything to say or to create about the horrors of slavery that does not implicate them in perpetuating those very horrors, even as they condemn them. White people, and certainly white artists, cannot absolve themselves of their guilt and sin, which consists of being white. And black people must constantly act as though every black person today continues to be a slavery victim in a way that also cannot be healed and cannot be ignored.

Curiously, all three Met officials responsible for this exhibit are themselves white: Sarah Lawrence (in this case a person, not a college), Elyse Nelson, and Max Hollein. Probably they are protecting their own jobs this way, because the art world apparently requires this sort of thing and in particular the destruction of any veneration or reverence for art of the past. In addition, they hired the help of a writer named Wendy Walters to assist them. Walters is apparently black or mixed race (it’s not totally clear; on this page her photo bears a slight resemblance to me when I was younger, but my assumption is that she is black). From an interview with Walters:

As a virtuosic display of artistic achievement, this bust [featured in the exhibit] is probably the best-known 19th-century sculpture of an enslaved Black figure. The composition was modeled after an unidentified woman whose features Carpeaux recorded in exquisite detail. But it is not a portrait of an individual person; rather, it depicts the Black figure as an eroticized and racialized “type.”

In the eye of the beholder…

From the Mac Donald article:

Walters’s closest involvement with art museums at that point had been limited to an obsession with white paint. White paint irritates Walters, especially on the “walls of educational spaces,” so she is writing a book on its “social and cultural implications,” as she put it in an interview.

That’s a fascinating pet peeve. I can’t quite imagine there’s a full-length book in it, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.

More:

The Met’s next critique of Why Born Enslaved! erases in one stroke a foundational component of Western art: the nude. The garment of Carpeaux’s captive has fallen below one of her breasts. This partial nudity turns the work into racist soft porn, according to the Met. Assistant curator Nelson describes Why Born Enslaved! as “an eroticized object for visual consumption” that gives form to “colonialist fantasies about the physical possession and containment of black women’s bodies.” A wall text echoes Nelson’s outrage at what she calls “so much flesh.” Carpeaux’s bust allows us to accept that the “Black female body can still be collected and consumed, be gazed at, desired, despised, dissected, and distorted by all.”

The curators’ willful ignorance is breathtaking. Since ancient Greece, the West’s greatest artists have portrayed the unclothed human body. This artistic lineage includes Lucas Cranach the Elder, Dürer, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Giorgione, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Watteau, Boucher, Ingres, David, Géricault, Goya, Courbet, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Rodin, Klimt, Picasso, and Henry Moore, among thousands of other artists. Cancel the nude, and you cancel art itself. Nearly 100 percent of those nudes have been white. Their state of undress has been far more revealing, and often far more “eroticized,” than the single unsheathed breast in Why Born Enslaved!. If that one black breast teaches us that the black female body can still be “desired, despised, dissected, and distorted by all,” those thousands of white breasts should carry that meaning, too. In fact, far from being a mark of contempt, the solo naked breast in Why Born Enslaved! places the work in the tradition of heroic rebellion, recalling, as it does, the naked double breasts of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

A wall text claims that the Carpeaux bust is part of the nineteenth century’s “representation, commodification, and fetishization of Black females and the disproportionate amount of attention aimed at their bodies.” This verbiage is pure black-studies boilerplate, unmoored from historical reality. There was actually little representation of “black females” and “their bodies” in the nineteenth or any previous century—unsurprisingly, given the racial demographics of Europe. The art-historical Left can’t get its story straight regarding the black nude. While the Met decries the “disproportionate” attention directed against the black female body, a feminist art historian blames racism for the “paucity of images of the black female nude in the history of Western ‘high’ art.” In reality, the representation of black females that did exist employed the opposite “binary” (to use academic jargon) more than the one lambasted by the Met: it was the white female who was nude and paired with a clothed black female, as in Manet’s Olympia or Félix Vallotton’s enigmatic La Blanche et la Noire.

It’s a rather long article; I’ve excerpted only a tiny part of it. It makes for depressing reading, but it’s well worth reading nonetheless.

When did Bermuda shorts become a thing?

The New Neo Posted on by

That highly pressing question has been asked in the comments on the open thread, and I will take it on myself to answer it without looking anything up. The Fifties was the height (or length) of the Bermudas craze. Only tiny children wore short shorts; everyone else wore Bermudas. They Bermudas were often equipped with little 4-inch belts in the back, with metal buckles, and madras print short-sleeved shirts were very popular for accompaniment.

It was in the latter part of the 60s that short shorts replaced Bermudas, and that was through the mechanism of jeans cutoffs. They were short to begin with, plus they unraveled over time, making them even shorter.

However, short shorts had long been required for certain sports, such as basketball. This had been going on for decades and continued for decades. In basketball (confession: I cheated and looked this particular part up) the sudden appearance of long baggy shorts was in the 1990s, and the sport hasn’t looked back since. People are so used to the baggy look now that the short-shorts of olden days seem very odd, but they weren’t odd at all at the time.

For women and teenage girls, short shorts never really went out. But they had a special heyday in the 70s as hot pants and became briefly (pun intended) okay for more dressy occasions. And yes, I had one hot pants outfit at the time.

Nikole Hannah-Jones takes on Thomas Sowell

The New Neo Posted on by

And makes a fool of herself:

Other than being Black, what exactly is Sowell’s expertise in slavery or history?

Yeah, it’s kind of funny. But it’s also tremendously sad, because millions more young people absorb Hannah-Jones’ utterly mendacious work than will ever become familiar with Sowell’s brilliant oeuvre. And it’s not just young people, either.

Over the years, I’ve asked many friends to read some of Sowell’s books. To date, as far as I know, not one of them has done so. It’s not just their loss; it’s everybody’s loss.