Sleeping Beauty over time
I often complain about how ballet has lost much of its charm and art, sacrificed to ever more spectacular technique and tense gymnastics. The greatest of the olden-day dancers didn’t raise their legs as high, and didn’t perform as many turns, but they were more enjoyable to watch because they transcended the doing of steps and they conveyed the fluidity of dance. The greatest of the newer dancers – most of whom I don’t consider great, but others do – show off their poses and extensions (that’s a term for how high the leg lifts) but tend to ruin the line in the process. Who wants to see a 180-degree split in a tutu? Not me.
I think this video shows some of what I’m talking about. You can see a general decline (in my opinion anyway) from the fluid charm of the elegant Fonteyn and the effervescent Sizova in the first two clips, to a more stop-and-go and slightly static sort of movement (is that an oxymoron?) later in time – although the very last dancer does somewhat better than the ones in-between; and Cynthia Gregory, a dancer from the 70s whom I usually like, is somewhat miscast in this role because of her natural restraint and regalness.
The ballet is “Sleeping Beauty” – not one of my very favorites, but it’s good for illustrating what I’m talking about. The occasion is supposed to be the 16th birthday celebration of Princess Aurora, and this is her first entrance. These dancers aren’t 16, of course, but their art is supposed to aid them in suggesting the innocent and radiant joy and energy of a 16-year-old.
Note particularly what Fonteyn does between minutes 1:42 and 2:17. The steps are simple, but it’s the use of the arms and upper body that is so magical (unfortunately the film quality is blurry). Sizova’s clip starts at 2:41, and you can see her amazingly light and airy jump. Her arms movements are more simple for that same portion I called attention to with Fonteyn, though; you can view Sizova’s version from 3:56 to 4:16:
What the Russians left behind
As I’ve said before, I haven’t posted much specific Russia/Ukraine war coverage – battles, atrocities, troop movements, weapons used – because of a combination of the fog of war and the purposeful fog of propaganda. But the topic keeps coming up, especially in the comments.
It’s with that background that I offer the following video. It’s from the BBC, and relies on British reporters in Ukraine. You and I may disagree with the politics of the BBC, but in this case the video seems quite bona fide as far as I can tell. It does appear to portray some of what the Russians have been doing in certain cities, because it was filmed shortly after the Ukrainian troops retook the town from Russian occupation.
It seems to me that either the Russian troops have been told to be brutal to civilians, or they’re doing it on their own due to poor discipline and generalized rage.
You may have a different opinion of what you see here, but that’s mine.
Arab states and Israel unite against the US
The policies of the Biden administration have done a lot for Israeli/Arab relations:
A summit was held in Israel over the weekend between Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Israel and the United States. The meeting was designed to back the U.S. into a corner. The United States wants to reach a new understanding with Iran, roughly built on the negotiation platform that was abandoned by President Donald Trump in 2018 as insufficient in dealing with the Iranian threat. Israel and the four Arab countries, plus some others, oppose the Biden initiative, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was there to persuade them. It did not seem to work. A paper in Dubai headlined that a new Israeli-Arab front had been created. The question has been frequently asked if unity among Arabs and Israel might be reached. The answer seems to be that it’s possible due to fear of Iran and hostility toward American plans for Iran.
That cooperation was something Trump was able to foster and to capitalize on. Biden and company seem to be furthering it despite themselves and against their own intentions.
[NOTE: The rest of the post at the link contains a really interesting and intelligent discussion of the possible outcomes of the Russia-Ukraine war. It’s fairly succinct and well worth reading.]
Eye surgery scheduled for Monday
Like many people “of a certain age,” I have cataracts that have gotten to the point where they impede my vision quite a bit. But unlike a lot of people, I don’t have a simple situation. Probably as a consequence of an iridotomy I had about fifteen years ago (and which I briefly mentioned in this post from 2017), I have significant adhesions in my left eye which make the cataract removal more challenging.
Right now I’m on the west coast, staying with relatives, because the eye surgeon I chose is here. I’m scheduled for the surgery in my left eye this coming Monday. It could go any number of ways, and it’s hard to predict the recovery time because it’s not the ordinary uncomplicated cataract surgery. If things go smoothly it could be quite a quick recovery, or it could take longer even if things do go smoothly otherwise.
So this post is just to let you all know what’s going on. If I have time before Monday, I may schedule a few posts for Monday and maybe Tuesday. Certainly the open posts, anyway. I’ll be planning to give you an update as soon as I can.
Open thread 4/2/22
My grandfather holds me up, aged 3.
Covering the Hunter Biden laptop story
The Hunter Biden laptop is the same, back in October of 2020 and now. All that has changed is the angle the media wants to take on it, and that depends utterly on politics. There is no truth; there is only politics.
When Biden was running for president, it was of the utmost importance to smother the story. That was done, and if necessary the media was more than willing to lie about things such as the provenance of the laptop. Former “intelligence” officers were enlisted to opine on the in-authenticity of a laptop they’d never examined or even seen. It was absolutely necessary to do this, and the MSM was willing to prostitute itself and violate whatever journalistic standards it still retained (very few) in order to cover for Joe Biden. Social media giants were all too happy to cooperate in this endeavor, as well.
And despite Biden’s terrible record as president, I doubt that many or perhaps even any of these people have had a moment’s regret or a pang of guilt about what they did. Anything to stop Trump. Anything to stop the right.
So now that they’re covering the story, I immediately thought it was because Hunter was about to be in big legal trouble and the MSM wanted to “get ahead of the story.” In the first post I wrote about that, I said this:
As for the question “why now?”, I think the answer might be found in that phrase “ongoing criminal investigation into Joe Biden’s son.” That investigation certainly doesn’t seem to have been fast-tracked, does it? But my guess is that the Times is now trying to get ahead of the story.
Others think it’s because the left is getting ready to dump and replace Biden. I don’t think so. I think they’d like to, but I don’t think they can because they’ve got an itty bitty problem: finding a replacement who would be even marginally acceptable, and what to do with Kamala Harris. I recently wrote about that dilemma in this post. I don’t think that has changed.
Now that the MSM is deigning to cover the Hunter laptop story, it’s significant that it’s only partially covering it. For example:
Of course, [those in the MSM] all avoid the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from evidence contained on the laptop that the president’s drug-addled son Hunter abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019: that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was aware of, and intimately involved in, a corrupt, multimillion-dollar, international influence-peddling scheme run by Hunter, and Joe’s brother Jim Biden, in the countries for which Joe was point man in the Obama administration, such as Russia, Ukraine and China…
But despite acknowledging that the material on the laptop showed that Hunter was “trading on his father’s name to make a lot of money,” as CNN White House correspondent John Harwood put it, both the Washington Post and CNN were at pains to absolve Joe Biden of any involvement in the scheme.
“There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done,” Harwood said…
…[T]he Washington Post curiously left out crucial facts in two detailed stories about the laptop on Tuesday that totaled a hefty near 7,000 words.
The rest of the article goes into quite a bit of detail about the important things that the MSM is still leaving out of its coverage.
See how it goes? Hunter, who is probably going to be indicted, is the guilty one – poor, troubled, drug-sodden Hunter. But Joe? Clean as a whistle.
If and when they start writing stories about Joe’s involvement in the corruption, then it will be time to conclude that the left has all its ducks in a row and that they’re ready to replace Joe himself.
Putin’s rattling those nuclear weapons
We’ve heard it from Vladimir Putin himself. We’ve heard it from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. But just in case we somehow missed the message, a political scientist and longtime supporter of Putin by the name of Sergey Mikheev went on Russian state television this week to make their point absolutely crystal clear. If the United States, NATO, or any other western nation sends any sort of military peacekeeping force into Ukraine, Russia will start unloading their nuclear arsenal on everyone. This time the warning wasn’t even subtle, though. Mikheev actually sounded excited or perhaps even exuberant over the idea. He also had a list of targets at hand. Near the top of the list was Warsaw, with Berlin and the capitals of some other EU members not far behind.
Don’t you dare interrupt us in Ukraine or you’ll be destroyed, too.
Russia has been threatening Sweden with nuclear weapons as well. Yeah, Sweden. And not just verbal threats, either:
Two Russian planes that violated Swedish airspace earlier this month were equipped with nuclear weapons, it has emerged.
The flyover near the island of Gotland on March 2 was a deliberate act designed to intimidate Sweden, according to Swedish news channel TV4 Nyheterna.
A total of four planes had taken off from the Russian air base of Kaliningrad.
They consisted of two Sukhoi 24 attack planes, which were escorted by two Sukhoi 27 fighter jets.
It was the two attack planes which were, according to TV4 Nyheter sources, equipped with nuclear weapons…
‘We assess it as a conscious action. Which is very serious especially as [Russia] is a warring country,’ added Air Force Chief Carl-Johan Edström.
Fortunately, so far the Russians seem to be doing relatively poorly in its conventional warfare against Ukraine even without intervention by NATO troops although – as said many times – it’s hard to get a real bead on it or to predict the ultimate result. There’s this sort of thing, though:
In a clip shared on Twitter and in pro-Ukraine Telegram channels, a group of ten student soldiers in oversized helmets wielding AK-47s from the 1940s complain they’ve been ‘thrown into the s**t’.
One complains: ‘Know the truth! The Russian Ministry of Defence has no idea about us, or what we’re doing here.”
I can well believe it. I have no trouble believing this, either:
One Pentagon document described soldiers simply parking their vehicles and walking away from the war into woods.
As corrupt and bizarre as our own government has become, I think the Russians are more so – just in a different way.
Meeting the challenges: Biden and Harris
At today’s press conference, President Biden discussed the uneasy situation in Ukraine and issued a challenge to President Putin:
You know, Putin’s been in charge of Russia one way or the other since 1999. That’s almost as long as I’ve been around.
And he’s not so young, either. His days of riding around on a horse without his shirt on are over. I could still do it, you know. I’m mighty fit, and I used to be a jockey and once sat on Secretariat back in my prime. But I knew enough to keep my shirt on.
Now that coward, that bully, that wimp Vladimir Putin is attacking a country much smaller than Russia. I say to him, why don’t you pick on someone your own size, huh? Oh, I know, I know – you’re the biggest country in the world. You must think Russia’s a big f***ing deal.
Well, let me tell you, size isn’t everything. Russia’s a punk country, and you’re a punk. I can do more pushups than you. And I say if you’re so big, Russia, why ain’t you rich?
Then Biden turned on his heel and walked out, refusing to answer any questions and leaving analysts reeling. What would be Putin’s reaction?
Some pundits quickly opined that Biden’s harangue was a stroke of brilliance, and that he set the perfect tone to challenge the strident Putin. Tit for tat. Later, Nancy Pelosi delivered some remarks of her own in which she asked the rhetorical question, “Can you imagine what Trump, Putin’s puppet, would have done? And we all know that Trump can’t do a single pushup.”
In other news, Kamala Harris is due to appear tomorrow night on Saturday Night Live. Rumor has it that she’s going to do Al Franken’s old bit as Stuart Smalley.
Kamala’s got the starry-eyed smile, and she’s got the Daily Affirmations. In fact, she’s got a coloring book of affirmations entitled, Leadership Looks Like Me.
Such a relief that the adults are in charge.
Open thread
Is he making love to the piano? Caressing it? Melting into it? Casting a spell on it? Giving it a massage?
My favorite Gould version of The Goldberg Variations was also the later, slower, more soulful one from 1982 rather than the brash and brilliant early one.
Roundup time again
(1) There’s been a study of anomalies in the 2020 election, by John Lott. Here’s a summary of some of the main points, and here’s the paper itself. It points out many of the inherent problem with increased absentee voting. It also includes this passage, which is very similar to what I found when I researched how absentee voting is handled in other developed countries:
35 of the 47 countries in Europe ban absentee voting entirely for citizens living there. Another ten countries allow it, but require voters to show up in person and present photo IDs to pick up their ballots. Six of those ten countries limit the practice to people in the military or a hospital, and they require third-party verification. Another 16 European countries ban absentee ballots for voters living abroad on Election Day. Similar requirements are imposed in other nations.
Developed countries, with few exceptions, did not adopt emergency voting measures during the coronavirus pandemic.
Much much more at the link.
(2) The teacher’s union had input on determining COVID school policy for the CDC. Not a surprise.
Republican lawmakers who sit on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis are releasing a report Wednesday revealing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official’s testimony claiming that the agency coordinated with teachers’ unions at an extraordinary level in crafting its school reopening guidance, despite the agency’s earlier claims that such coordination was routine and nonpolitical.
In the interim report, exclusively reviewed by Fox News Digital, Republicans wrote that emails between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the White House, and the CDC showed that the AFT’s “cozy relationship with the Biden administration’s political leadership at the CDC positioned the union to impose line-by-line edits” to the reopening guidance, despite the CDC’s “past practice to keep draft guidance confidential.”
See also this from Powerline.
(3) And then there’s looming disaster on the southern border:
It has been a crisis since Jan. 20, 2021. Now, Biden proposes to make it much, much worse.
(4) Now you can officially travel internationally as neither man nor woman. I wonder how many takers there will be.
(5) The White House supports early treatment for kids who identify as trans:
“For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system,” the White House messaging says.
Federal oversight of local police departments: consent decrees
Recently in this thread the topic of federal involvement in local police departments came up, and there are some points I want to add.
The main way this is done at present is through federal oversight. And it didn’t just start with the Obama administration; it’s been going on much longer than that. Just to take one example (the article is from this past January):
U.S. District Judge William Orrick said during a hearing Wednesday that the police department still has a ways to go to meet court-ordered reform goals, reported the East Bay Times.
“Despite what I know have been the good-faith efforts and hard work of the chief and of the command staff, there still remain important areas of noncompliance, and some of them seem to have straightforward fixes and they need to be fixed in order to reach substantial compliance,” Orrick said. “I’m frankly disappointed they haven’t been as of yet.”
Orrick said he believes the police department needs to complete Internal Affairs and use-of-force investigations more quickly and make sure that officers consistently activate their body cameras.
The hearing also included top police and city officials including Mayor Libby Schaaf, and the attorneys who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Oakland in 2000 after a group of Oakland police officers known as “The Riders” were accused of beating Black residents, planting drugs on them and falsifying records.
Oakland has been under federal oversight for decades, it turns out. It’s not alone, although it’s one of the longest cases. That process is a way for the federal camel to get its nose – and a large portion of its body – inside the local police tent (the article linked is from May of 2021):
After a four-year hiatus under President Donald Trump, the federal government will once again investigate local law enforcement agencies for systemic constitutional violations, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last month. First in the queue are the police departments of Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.
Both cities were at the heart of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer…
The federal investigations and possible court orders to follow could take years to complete. Local police departments under federal oversight complain about the immense strain on resources and personnel it takes to meet court-approved benchmarks for accountability, training and amended use-of-force policies. Community activists sometimes feel federal oversight does not do enough to fix systemic issues…
“I never once in my time there saw DOJ launch one of these investigations unless they had determined there was a long history [of abuses] and the agency has either been unable or unwilling to fix those problems,” said Christy Lopez, a former federal attorney who led the Department of Justice team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after an officer shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014.
She also led federal investigations of local police in Chicago, Los Angeles and New Orleans, as well as in Newark, New Jersey, and Missoula, Montana.
“The government has a responsibility to protect people,” continued Lopez, who now co-leads Georgetown Law’s Program on Innovative Policing. “When you have state actors routinely violating people’s rights, of course you need a system for someone else to step in and protect those rights, vindicate those rights.”
Note the list of cities.
The practice begin as a result of a law passed by Congress in the wake of the Rodney King case:
Three years after the horrific beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, Congress enacted a law in 1994 that gave the Justice Department authority to investigate local police departments to see whether there is a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutionality or civil rights abuses.
The measure allowed the federal government to look beyond individual officers to root out systemic issues in local law enforcement agencies. The first investigation took place in 1997, examining the Pittsburgh Police Department.
The DOJ uses some sort of incident to claim systemic racism (or other problems I suppose, but my sense is that racism is the main one) and then to put the local police under a consent decree. These consent decrees last until the DOJ is satisfied – which can take a long long long time. Such a process is not uncommon, either:
Enforced by a judge and overseen by a court-approved monitor, consent decrees can take years to complete. The Oakland Police Department has been under a consent decree since 2003.
Over the past three decades, the Justice Department has conducted more than 70 investigations of local police departments. The Obama administration, for example, conducted 25 investigations and entered into 14 consent decrees.
And then there was Trump:
The investigations all but stopped when Trump was elected president. In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an order limiting the Justice Department’s ability to investigate and oversee the nation’s 18,000 local police departments, saying it wasn’t the federal government’s responsibility to oversee local policing. He also said the probes hurt police morale.
The Trump administration did not enter into a single consent decree.
But that approach changed last month, when Garland rescinded Sessions’ order.
This is the way the feds establish control, or partial control, and/or the constant threat of control, over local police forces.
[NOTE: The entire article is well worth reading. Here’s another fascinating tidbit that gives you some of the flavor of the process and the people who are involved [emphasis mine]:
There can be tension between the police departments under investigation and the federal attorneys instructing them on what amounts to a constitutional violation, said Sharon Brett, one of the lead attorneys for the Obama administration’s investigation of the Chicago Police Department. She also worked on consent decrees for Cincinnati; Seattle; Ferguson, Missouri, and other cities.
When Brett would sit down with officers during the investigation, she recalled, the first question she would get is whether she had ever been a police officer or served in the military.
“There’s a sense among the rank-and-file that, you don’t know what I’m dealing with if you’ve never been here,” said Brett, who now is the legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. “Law enforcement does not like people coming in who have no law enforcement experience and telling them how to do their job correctly.”
Now, why on earth would anyone resent that?]