California has become a third-world country…

The New Neo Posted on by

…according to Victor Davis Hanson:

By many criteria, 21st-century California is both the poorest and the richest state in the union…

…[B]y some indicators, the California middle class is shrinking — because of massive regulation, high taxation, green zoning, and accompanying high housing prices. Out-migration from the state remains largely a phenomenon of the middle and upper-middle classes. Millions have left California in the past 30 years, replaced by indigent and often illegal immigrants, often along with the young, affluent, and single.

If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks he would have been considered unhinged…Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse…

California’s transportation system, to be honest, remains in near ruins…

California’s cycles of wet boom years and dry bust years continue because the state refuses to build three or four additional large reservoirs that have been planned for more than a half-century, and that would store enough water to keep California functional through even the worst drought. The rationale is either that it is more sophisticated to allow millions of acre-feet of melted snow to run into the sea, or it is better to have a high-speed-rail line from Merced to Bakersfield than an additional 10 million acre-feet of water storage, or droughts ensure more state control through rationing and green social-policy remedies.

Much more at the link.

However, on the issue of building more reservoirs, there’s this, which contends that the picture is far more complex than ordinarily painted (and more complex than what VDH has written in that article). It seems like a no-brainer to build them, doesn’t it? But maybe not.

However, now I’m getting into one of my many fields of non-expertise. But I’ll give it a try. VDH speaks of building reservoirs, and the link in the paragraph above talks about building dams, but I am under the impression that the two are ordinarily linked and that the dam is constructed to form and control the reservoir which is the result of the dam (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong on this).

At any rate, here’s an excerpt:

Think California should build a lot more dams to catch these deluges? Forget it.

Yes, the next severe drought is inevitable. And after California dries out and becomes parched again, we’ll wish we’d saved more of the current torrents. Instead, the precious water is washing out to sea.

There’s one dam being planned north of Sacramento in Colusa County that makes sense: Sites. There are also some dam expansion projects that could work.

But California is already dammed to the brim. Every river worth damming has been. And some that weren’t worth it were dammed anyway….

In total, California dams can store 43 million acre-feet. We’re nearing the practical limit for what water geeks call “surface storage.”

We’ve about used all the good dam sites.

And dams have become almost unaffordable, like a lot of other things in California. People may like the idea of a brand new reservoir — until they realize who’s going to pay for most of it. They are, through higher water bills…

“Right now everybody thinks all this water is rolling out to San Francisco Bay and there are missed opportunities,” Mount says. “That’s the traditional ‘wasting into the ocean’ argument. But then ask yourself, how much of the time does that happen in California?…

“If you use these reservoirs only about every 10 years, if they don’t fill often enough, then they’re not paying for themselves.”

Water sales are how the dams mostly get paid for.

Dams also get silted up, and that reduces their capacity. De-silting them is a big project that costs a lot of money, too.

The article ends abruptly with this sentence: “the future for California water storage is underground.” What does that involve? And how much does that cost? Probably plenty, as well.

I tend to think any solutions to the California water problem aren’t so very simple. California is a place that supports a much larger population than can be easily sustained, and providing water has always been one of the biggest issues. It will almost certainly remain so.

But as VDH describes, California has many many more problems than that, and some of them are indeed of California residents’ and government’s own creation. The waste of money and effort involved in the high-speed rail fiasco is an excellent example.

As our left demands socialist health care, the Scandinavian countries move towards increased private coverage

The New Neo Posted on by

Fancy that:

The Scandinavian systems are similar to Medicare for All in the respect that they use regional offices to administer reimbursements to providers.

Yet they differ in critical ways: They employ cost-sharing for certain services, they are less comprehensive in their coverage, and they allow for private health insurance plans to complement or supplement the government system to cover out-of-pocket expenses and to circumvent wait times or rationed access to specialists.

These are precisely the things Medicare for All would abolish. It’s intriguing that while socialists in America would rush to nationalize the health care system, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes are all gradually increasing their use of private health insurance.

Between 2006 and 2016, the portion of the population covered by private insurance increased by 4% in Sweden, 7% in Norway, and 22% in Denmark…

Private plans in Sweden and Norway are mainly designed to supplement the government-run plan.

In addition to covering out-of-pocket costs, these plans also guarantee prompt access to specialists or elective procedures, which the state plans often fail to provide.

Denmark also allows “complementary” insurance plans, which cover services that are partially or not at all covered by the national system, including dental and vision services.

This growing European interest in private health insurance typically stems from dissatisfaction with the state-run systems, which often provide poor or incomplete coverage and long wait times…

This would all be illegal under Medicare for All. Private health insurance would be abolished for everyone.

I was first exposed to the problems with government health care coverage in the 90s, when as a result of my chronic arm and back injuries I participated in an online forum for chronic pain sufferers. We had some members from Canada and Great Britain, and their stories stood out in marked contrast to those in the US. The foreigners not only had to wait unconscionable amounts of time for appointments, they sometimes did not even qualify for tests or surgeries that they needed. The treatment of chronic pain in this country is hardly perfect—and treating chronic pain is inherently difficult—but in Canada and Great Britain the suffering of such patients seemed immensely greater than the suffering experienced by those in the US.

It was an eye-opener for me at the time. Prior to that, if I’d thought about the British or Canadian health care systems at all, I thought they were pretty good. But even back then in those countries there was a two-tiered state of affairs in which the rich often hot-footed it out (most likely to the US) for treatment, and the rest of the population stayed put and was greatly underserved.

So the developments in Scandinavia are no surprise, nor should they be.

A little history lesson for AOC on camps, concentration and other

The New Neo Posted on by

Not that AOC actually cares about history.

AOC is a rabble rouser and a demagogue. She may be ignorant about a particular fact or she may actually know the truth and be blatantly lying about it. But either way, she is a smooth operator who knows exactly what she’s aiming for in terms of effect. She has many admirers who are simpatico with her inflammatory rhetoric and cheer her on.

Recently AOC got a lot of criticism (and attention, which she almost certainly has as a goal) for the following remarks of hers:

In her social-media remarks, the freshman congresswoman said she wants to talk to those “who are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”

“The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it,” she continued.

Ocasio-Cortez warned, “We are losing to an authoritarian and fascist presidency.”

“I don’t use those words lightly,” she continued. “I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that.”

Well, I guess the US has long been fascist, then, including during the administration of President Obama, because detention centers have been in operation prior to Trump and under the previous president. And I suppose we’d have to include as “fascists” the victorious allies over the Nazis in World War II, with their postwar displaced person camps:

Displaced persons camps in post-World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A “displaced persons camp” is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians and Czechoslovaks.

At the end of the Second World War, at least 11 million people had been displaced from their home countries, with about seven million in Allied-occupied Germany. These included former prisoners of war, released slave laborers, and both non-Jewish and Jewish concentration-camp survivors. The Allies categorized the refugees as “displaced persons” (DPs) and assigned the responsibility for their care to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).

These camps were an enormous undertaking and involved an enormous number of people, and it took a long while—commonly longer than people are held in a detention center in the US—to sort it out.

And I suppose that all the countries of Europe and Asia and Africa that hold refugees in camps are fascists as well.

In fact, everyone except AOC and her supporters are probably fascists.

AOC later pointed out to her critics that she didn’t say present-day camps were like “death camps” during WWII, and she didn’t. But of course she knows that most people are unaware of the distinction between WWII work/labor camps and death camps, and she’s aware that death camps are what is conjured up by the phrase “concentration camps” and the words “fascist” as well as the phrase “never again” (which refers to the Holocaust).

What AOC may or may not know is what the Nazi concentration camps (or labor or work camps) of WWII (as opposed to the death camps) were actually like. They were usually a form of death camp, too. Although the Nazis had various ways of treating different populations within these camps, some were mistreated more than others. But the basic idea of a Nazi concentration/work/labor camp was to work people to death and then replace them with others, who would in turn be worked to death. That’s different than gassing people outright on arrival, to be sure. But it’s horrific, vicious, and evil nonetheless (you can find more information and links here).

And those camps bear no resemblance whatsoever to detention centers for illegal immigrants to this country, and it’s obscene to say it does. Just for starters, those in our camps have only to return to their countries of origin and they’re perfectly free. They are kept under conditions that would seem almost paradisaical to those in Nazi work camps.

Unlike those people who think AOC is merely ignorant, I believe that AOC knows at least something of the truth and would prefer to lie for political reasons. I can’t prove that—maybe she really is a fool rather than a knave. But that’s been my impression.

[NOTE: And for those who would defend AOC by saying that concentration camps originated during the Boer War, that couldn’t be more irrelevant. AOC was clearly referring to WWII with the words “fascist” and the phrase “never again.”]

Straka sues

The New Neo Posted on by

Brandon Straka is the founder of the #WalkAway movement. A gay man and former liberal, Straka recently left the Democratic Party and made a YouTube video about his defection and the reasons for his change of mind. The video went viral and started a movement in which people who have made a similar political switch have made their own videos explaining their own paths to political change.

For obvious reasons, Straka and his group are a thorn in the side of the left and the Democratic Party, both of which count heavily on certain demographic populations and interest groups being almost 100% in the fold.

So Straka and his group have been under attack for a quite while in an attempt to discredit them. The latest skirmish in this campaign involves the cancellation of an event that was scheduled to have taken place at the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village. The cancellation happened just days before the event had been due to occur, and it was supposed to have involved Straka, two gay men, and a transgender woman talking about the reasons they left the Democratic Party.

Straka is now suing the LGBT Center:

“I’m considered a traitor. [The community] wanted to silence me, they wanted to roll over me and make me disappear,” said Straka, who is seeking $20 million in damages.

He alleges that the LGBT Center caved to pressure from liberal activists who, Straka said, “mounted a smear campaign.” Some 280 people signed an open letter to the center, demanding that the event be canceled. The letter refers to Straka and his panelists as “racist” and “transphobic.” (One of the panelists, Rob Smith, is black.)…

Per the complaint, “the LGBT Center, which ostensibly cultivates a welcome environment for all members … violated their own mission in addition to engaging in unlawful discriminatory practices by specifically targeting particular members of the LGBT Community whose … identity does not conform to the subjectively homogeneous community for which they advocate.”

The reason the LGBT Center gave for the cancellation is that the Center is able to cancel any event that “promotes discriminatory speech or bigotry; negatively impacts other groups or individuals … [and/or] would make many of our community members feel unsafe.” Straka in turn alleges that the Center’s statement about the reason for the cancellation of the #WalkAway event was “intentionally defamatory.”

It seems that the mere idea of gay people or transgendered people or black people being conservative or supporting Trump is considered so disruptive and unsettling that their reasons cannot even be heard in a public forum that is described as serving gay and transgendered people.

I cannot predict how Straka’s lawsuit will ultimately go. But although the idea that he and the other gay, transgender, and black members of his group are racist or transphobic seems preposterous, it no longer shocks. It’s the sort of story heard all too often these days; anyone who goes against the liberal line is labeled a bigot even if that person belongs to the group against which the person is supposedly prejudiced.

And the most terrifying people of all to the left are those who are members of groups the left feels it owns and yet who have dared, like Straka, to defy the party line. The left hates those who once were members but have since left the fold, and their very existence threatens the left’s reliance on the monolithic support of particular groups.

The latest on the disappearance of Flight MH370

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been five years since MH370 and all its souls on board seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, and although the mystery remains unsolved, we have plenty of information. This Atlantic article presents an overview of what’s known so far.

One thing in the article that is no surprise whatsoever is that the Malaysian government’s response has been inadequate at best and perhaps even negligent. Another is that the disappearance of MH370 has provided perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. Just a few of them are described here:

On the internet you will find claims that the airplane has been found intact in the Cambodian jungle, that it was seen landing in an Indonesian river, that it flew into a time warp, that it was sucked into a black hole. One scenario has the airplane flying off to attack the American military base on Diego Garcia before getting shot down. A recent online report that Captain Zaharie had been discovered alive and was lying in a Taiwanese hospital with amnesia won sufficient acceptance that Malaysia angrily denied it.

That Atlantic article summarizes what we actually do know, based on the data. Most of it conforms to what I’ve read elsewhere, and most of it makes sense to me—if such an act can be said to “make sense”:

In truth, a lot can now be known with certainty about the fate of MH370. First, the disappearance was an intentional act. It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error. Computer glitch, control-system collapse, squall lines, ice, lightning strike, bird strike, meteorite, volcanic ash, mechanical failure, sensor failure, instrument failure, radio failure, electrical failure, fire, smoke, explosive decompression, cargo explosion, pilot confusion, medical emergency, bomb, war, or act of God—none of these can explain the flight path.

Second, despite theories to the contrary, control of the plane was not seized remotely from within the electrical-equipment bay, a space under the forward galley. Pages could be spent explaining why. Control was seized from within the cockpit. This happened in the 20-minute period from 1:01 a.m., when the airplane leveled at 35,000 feet, to 1:21 a.m., when it disappeared from secondary radar. During that same period, the airplane’s automatic condition-reporting system transmitted its regular 30-minute update via satellite to the airline’s maintenance department. It reported fuel level, altitude, speed, and geographic position, and indicated no anomalies. Its transmission meant that the airplane’s satellite-communication system was functioning at that moment.

By the time the airplane dropped from the view of secondary—transponder-enhanced—radar, it is likely, given the implausibility of two pilots acting in concert, that one of them was incapacitated or dead, or had been locked out of the cockpit. Primary-radar records—both military and civilian—later indicated that whoever was flying MH370 must have switched off the autopilot, because the turn the airplane then made to the southwest was so tight that it had to have been flown by hand. Circumstances suggest that whoever was at the controls deliberately depressurized the airplane. At about the same time, much if not all of the electrical system was deliberately shut down…

An electrical engineer in Boulder, Colorado, named Mike Exner…has studied the radar data extensively. He believes that during the turn, the airplane climbed up to 40,000 feet, which was close to its limit…Exner believes the reason for the climb was to accelerate the effects of depressurizing the airplane, causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin.

Much much more at the link. It makes for fascinating albeit depressing reading. It’s depressing because of what happened to all those people. It’s depressing that it was almost certainly done deliberately. It’s depressing that the perpetrator was almost certainly a member of the crew and most likely the captain. And it’s depressing that it’s still largely unsolved despite all the evidence.

The article goes into quite a bit of technical detail as to why a hijacker was not the culprit, and why the crew member most likely responsible for the plane’s disappearance and the deaths of all aboard was the captain Zaharie:

In the case of MH370, it is difficult to see the co-pilot as the perpetrator. He was young and optimistic, and reportedly planning to get married. He had no history of any sort of trouble, dissent, or doubts…

…The police discovered aspects of Zaharie’s life that should have caused them to dig more deeply. The formal conclusions they drew were inadequate…

…The truth, as I discovered after speaking in Kuala Lumpur with people who knew him or knew about him, is that…[h]is wife had moved out, and was living in the family’s second house. By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. He was also a romantic. He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children, one of whom was disabled, and to have obsessed over two young internet models…There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed…

Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone…

…[T]here is some suspicion, from fuel-exhaustion simulations that investigators have run, that the airplane, if simply left alone, would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, actively helping to crash the airplane…We know from that descent rate, as well as from…shattered debris, that the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.

I don’t think we will ever know any more than this. And I doubt any of this will change the mind of a single conspiracy theorist.

The families of the victims have gone through one of the worst nightmares possible, and there’s no end in sight. I hope they’ve found some sort of peace and comfort, but I can’t imagine that most of them have.

RIP.

Kyle Kashuv’s life sentence

The New Neo Posted on by

Kyle Kashuv, a conservative who is one of the young people who became somewhat of a celebrity for speaking out after the Parkland shootings, was recently accepted at Harvard.

And then Harvard changed its mind and rescinded its acceptance.

Why? Because some kindly and helpful soul brought to their attention the fact that two years ago Kashuv had made some racist comments (for which he almost immediately apologized) with some friends in a private text.

Some things cannot be forgiven, apparently (particularly if a person is a conservative). Youthful indiscretion? Growth opportunity? Fat chance. Harvard doesn’t seem to have much faith in its own diversity and tolerance education program, because apparently only those who have been pure of any thoughtcrimes of the racist variety for their entire lives can enter its sacred portals and be subjected to it.

As Ben Shapiro points out:

On Monday, Parkland survivor and outspoken conservative Kyle Kashuv announced that Harvard University had withdrawn his admission from the school over the revelation of racist, offensive, idiotic posts written on a private Google document with friends when he was sixteen years old. Never mind that Kashuv [had] apologized publicly for the comments; never mind that his public behavior has evinced no racism whatsoever…

There are ex-convicts who, quite properly, have been admitted to Harvard — they earned forgiveness. There are current students who undoubtedly have said things privately that would shock the conscience. There are likely administrators who have said things when they were 16 years old that embarrass them now.

But no one’s out to get them for their conservative politics, so their youthful indiscretions can be ignored. For Kashuv, it’s one strike and you’re out.

Kashuv also points out that he refused offers, including financial assistance, from other universities when he accepted the Harvard offer. So now he is left in the lurch. He’s a bright guy, and I think he’ll land on his feet.

The aims of leftist labeling and censoring of conservative pundits as extremists

The New Neo Posted on by

For a while, the phenomenon of leftist censorship of the right concentrated on potential speakers at college campuses. The mechanisms were boycotts, demonstrations, disruptions, and demands that they not be allowed to speak there at all because it was too disturbing, because it was hate speech, because they were fascists and bigots, and because people would be triggered—the whole panoply of accusations from leftist activists.

Lately, de-platforming and/or de-monetizing from various social media and internet sites such as YouTube is all the rage, and it’s driven not so much by students at a particular university but by those who control the sites. In the buildup to the 2020 election,this seems more important than ever.

Regarding YouTube:

On [June 5], YouTube announced a sweeping ban on all content it deems “hateful” or “supremacist,” resulting in a reported “thousands” of channels being shut down. The announcement came the same day that YouTube demonetized conservative comedian Steven Crowder — one of the most popular independent content creators on the platform — after a writer for Vox complained that he had repeatedly mocked him for his identity…

“YouTube has always had rules of the road, including a longstanding policy against hate speech,” the company announced Wednesday in a statement. “Today, we’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.”…

But conservatives have noted a pattern by YouTube, along with other dominate social media platforms, of focusing mostly on voices from the right —and often lumping in mainstream conservatives with the far-right. Among those blasting YouTube over ideological bias is outspoken conservative Dana Loesch, who declared the progressives pushing for deplatforming as “the modern day book burners.”…

“YouTube’s statement on [Steven Crowder]: OK, we admit he didn’t violate our standards, but people were mad at us, so we just backfilled a rationale for demonetizing him with Orwellian doublespeak,” [Ben] Shapiro tweeted Wednesday. “This is essentially YouTube admitting that they exercised the heckler’s veto. They can’t point to how [Crowder] broke their rules, so they just made up new rules based on the fact that a bunch of people whined to them.”

Here’s what Andrew Klavan has to say about the phenomenon:

On Sunday, just as YouTube was threatening to pull down thousands of “hateful” (i.e. conservative) videos, The New York Times printed a breathless and idiotic piece supposedly charting a YouTube viewer’s descent into right-wing radicalism…

This suspiciously timed piece — clearly designed to give cover to YouTube’s censorship plan — featured a collage of faces of right-wing radicals. These included such raving hate-filled alt-right evil-doers as mild-mannered gay centrist Dave Rubin and of course Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro — whom various left-wing outlets have repeatedly identified as the one and only orthodox Jewish Nazi in all the universes!

But while branding Dave and Ben alt-right may be absurd, it’s not unintentional. It is part of a strategy. 1. Convince people that hate speech should be silenced. 2. Define hate speech as alt-right. 3. Label powerful mainstream conservatives “alt-right.” 4. Silence powerful mainstream conservatives…

…[A]s 2020 approaches and Trump continues to expose our corrupt press and reach the people, panic is beginning to set in and the next phase of Operation Don’t Speak is in play: a massive and collusive move to define mainstream right-wing speech as hateful and shut it down.

There’s another point that is a bit more subtle. Once a news outlet or a periodical or a pundit gets labeled as extreme right-wing or alt-right, and therefore (fill in the blanks) a purveyor of hate speech, a racist, a bigot, a religious zealot, a wild and crazy conspiracy theorist, etc., then even if that person isn’t actually blocked by the site, the hope is that people will react to the labeling itself by shunning that person’s work.

So one of the goals isn’t just actual blocking by the sites, but a de facto censorship by the individual consumer, in which people refuse to listen or read the work of a certain person because it’s been labeled extreme and hateful. Why waste time reading the work of someone bigoted or crazy or stupid? Don’t you have better things to do with your time?

That way it’s easy to keep the maximum number of people insulated and protected from any ideas on the right that are factually and logically correct and might even persuade a person to change a long-held idea—or, in some cases (such as that of left-to-right political changers) to change one’s mind politically in a more fundamental way. That’s why it’s even more important to label the more moderate, thoughtful conservatives as extreme and offensive than the ones who actually are extreme and offensive, because an open-minded reader or listener will probably be able to find out and decide on his/her own which pundits and writers really are extreme and offensive, and which ones are making good points. It’s that latter group the left and the MSM is most afraid of—the ones who could change the opinions of a lot of people, if they were to be given a forum and listened to with an open mind.

A favorite course at Oberlin…

The New Neo Posted on by

…appears to be Shoplifting 101. It goes a ways towards explaining some of the elements of the Gibson Bakery case.

And before you get too shocked by the seemingly high rate of shoplifting committed by Oberlin students, it appears they’re not atypical of society as a whole. Shoplifting is rampant in the US. And it’s done equally by men and women, and is not just the province of teens—75% of shoplifters are adults.

What’s more, there’s this:

Shoplifters are usually poor and/or uneducated? Not so fast. A 2008 study by Columbia University concluded that shoplifting was actually more prevalent among people with higher education and income, which made them conclude there were more psychological factors and less financial motivation that made people steal.

One of the items people steal most often (not at Oberlin, but in general)? Chewing gum.

And in 17th Century England, shoplifting was punishable by death. It certainly didn’t stop the phenomenon.

Franco Zeffirelli has died at 96

The New Neo Posted on by

Franco Zeffirelli died Saturday at the venerable age of 96. But to me, he was and always will be the director of the 1968 film “Romeo and Juliet,” a movie that breathed extraordinary life into Shakespeare. The sweep, color, costumes, music, and pageantry were wonderfully matched—and even bested—by the youthful energy and passion of its astoundingly gorgeous and age-appropriate leads, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting.

Zeffirelli accomplished a great deal more in his life—including a stint fighting with partisans during WWII. But if he never did another thing but “Romeo and Juliet”, that achievement still would have been more than enough to have made him a great director.

I wrote about the film previously, here. An excerpt:

…[W]hen I saw the Zeffirelli film version of “Romeo and Juliet,” I marveled at the [meeting] scene as it was acted out with suitable hand gestures (oh, so that’s the way it works!) by the achingly-young Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. If you’ve never seen that film, please take a look. Yes, it was roundly criticized for leaving at least half the play on the cutting-room floor and changing a few of the more archaic words here and there. And for including nakedness (as I recall, a rear shot of Romeo during the post-wedding rendezvous in Juliet’s bedroom). And for casting unknown actors who were so young they lacked the requisite Shakespearean gravitas.

But for me, the film made the play come alive. You believed they loved each other. You believed their desperation. And in the death scenes, you could not help but cry at the waste of these two beautiful young lives.

Here’s their meeting scene:

And here they are, close to fifty years later, talking about the film and the director:

RIP, Franco Zeffirelli. And thanks.

Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Friendship: who needs it?

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading this Althouse thread about friendship, I was struck by a few things, particularly in the comments.

There seem to be some rather sharp divides between groups of people on the nature and value of friendship. There are the loners, some of whom seem proud that they don’t want or need friends (they’re not “people who need people), versus those who freely admit to relying on and valuing friends and being sad when they don’t have enough of them.

I’m one of the latter group; friendship is very important to me.

Another divide is between those who prefer light friendships based on fun and activities, and those who need to be able to confide in their friends about the deeper things in life and are eager to give emotional support and get it.

I value and feel the need for both kinds of friends, and the best friends of all are those rarer ones who combine the two functions.

Does this reflect—at least somewhat—a natural man/woman divide? Perhaps. It’s not a strict divide, to be sure, but I think a sexual differentiation is probably at least a tendency.

There’s also the issue of how to end a friendship when it’s played out, and how to decide when that’s happened. I tend to hang on, for several reasons. The first is that I think friends can be important even if there are many flaws in the relationship, especially if the friend is one I’ve had for a long time. There’s something to be said for a shared and lengthy history—people who knew me when, who knew my parents and my old boyfriends, and who can understand my references to all those things. I don’t require some sort of perfection in friendships, or anything close to it.

That may be in part because I’ve lost some good, true friends because they died. That’s extraordinary painful for me, and I don’t have all that many friends to spare any more. What do they say about old age—there are no enemies, only survivors?

Some people see getting older as a chance to pare down, not just possessions but friendships as well, and to keep only the essential. That’s not my philosophy on people, although I’m trying to do it with the possessions. Of course I haven’t stayed in touch with every friend I’ve ever had; there’s a kind of natural attrition that does occur, and not just from death. But I don’t drop friends for capricious or trivial reasons,and certainly not previously good friends.

And if I ever were to drop a really good friend, I don’t think I’d do it by ghosting—that is, not calling or writing, and if the person tries to get in touch, not returning calls or responding to emails. I think that’s a cowardly way to do it, although it happens that way more and more these days. If the friendship ever meant anything, if you respect the past friendship, I think you owe it to that person to explain, even if the explanation is just something like “sorry, but I think we’ve grown apart and even though we were good friends in the past it just doesn’t seem to be that way anymore.” Acknowledge what’s happening, so they’re not left to wonder and to feel completely abandoned. And don’t tell yourself that the feeling of wanting to end the friendship is actually mutual, just in order to save yourself the trouble of making the break explicit.

My template for friendship seems to be my parents, who had a ton of friends. I couldn’t even begin to count how many, but probably a hundred good friends and hundreds more who were casual friends. They kept in touch, too—but it was easier because my parents and most of their friends had been born in the same community and lived there for virtually all their lives. They were a crowd of friends, and they had a lot of fun, too. They liked to get together in groups, to dance, play cards, and talk, talk, talk.

I suppose that sort of thing still exists in some places, but I’ve never been part of a community like that, and I think it’s far more rare now in general than it used to be.

Legalizing marijuana has not ended the black market

The New Neo Posted on by

Au contraire:

Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level—legalize the drug everywhere, advocates suggest, and the black market will go away. But California’s experience suggests otherwise. The state’s pot market has struggled because illegal growers are undercutting the price of legal weed, which must account for the cost of a license, taxes on sales, and the financial burdens of complying with state health regulations. As a result, legal growers want the state to step up enforcement against illegal operations. “We are the taxpayers. No one else should be operating,” one licensed grower told the New York Times. A big problem, officials note, is that growers who are reluctant to go legal, with all the attendant costs and procedures, don’t disappear—they just continue doing business the old way. As a result, production of illegal pot is increasing.

The law of unintended consequences seems to be at work.

And there’s a reason it’s hard for authorities in California to crack down on the illegal pot industry—yes, you guessed it; it’s SJWs, Jake:

Complicating the issue is that legalization was sold to voters as a social-justice imperative, to stop the war on drugs in minority communities. California officials say that they’re reluctant to crack down on the black market because that would represent a return to heightened enforcement in minority communities.