Olivia Hussey: timeless beauty

The New Neo Posted on by

What is it about Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet about fifty years ago in Zefferilli’s movie version of the classic? Here’s a video that features photos of Hussey when young and her daughter at a similar age (it can’t be embedded, so click on the link).

Hussey’s daughter India Eisley is also an actress, and although she’s a pretty girl her attractiveness is far more ordinary then her mother’s was. India’s looks are of a type popular these days: pouty and sexy at the same time it’s baby-faced. But Hussey had a timeless and classic quality that transcended her own moment, and made her perfect for the role of Juliet. She is young yet ageless, and when you look at her face you believe in a gravitas beyond her years. Her Romeo, Leonard Whiting (on whom I had a terrific crush), had it too but not to as great an extent. It’s that quality that made that particular pair perfect for their roles. They could act, too—really really well.

I am not the least bit objective because, as regular readers here know, Zefferelli’s R&J is one of my absolute favorites. But if you look at the comments to the video, you’ll see that people seem to agree; they still respond strongly and positively to whatever it is that Hussey had.

[NOTE: At the beginning of the video you can see a few photos of Hussey now, with her grown-up daughter. Age has thinned her face and sharpened her features somewhat and of course she doesn’t retain that achingly poignant quality, but she looks mighty good for her age.]

It’s hot here in New England

The New Neo Posted on by

And humid. Ugh!

Until now we’ve had a really good summer, though. The extreme heat is supposed to let up on Monday.

ADDENDUM: I just saw this article on the wonderful invention of air conditioning.

Today I am especially thankful for it. I can well remember the days when it was highly unusual. When I was a child, AC wasn’t in my house; it first appeared in my parents’ bedroom when I was eight or so. After that, on certain especially sultry nights, my brother and I were allowed to drag mattresses in there to sleep. But till them, we sweltered in our rooms, where neither fans nor open windows helped more than a teeny tiny bit.

And cars! We once traveled through the Mohave desert in the summer in a car without air-conditioning, circa 1960. Memorable. And awful.

The long slow march of leftism

The New Neo Posted on by

On this blog we’ve talked many times about the Gramscian march, the slow and steady and dedicated work of the left on the hearts and minds of Americans. This work has borne tremendous fruit, and may have reached a critical mass among the younger generation.

Much of this work was originally generated by the Soviets, who understood that the mind is a powerful weapon, and that influencing American thought over the years would be crucial.

So I recommend this piece, which although old (written over 13 years ago) was linked today by Instapundit. A few excerpts:

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions.

I would observe that although the Nazis were rather poor at it—their philosophy didn’t travel all that well, being based on (among other things) the tremendous supposed superiority of the Germans— the Communists and the Islamists (who are sometimes allied despite their differences, because after all they have some of the same enemies) have been remarkably successful.

Especially the Communists:

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya…

…[Here are] some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons…:

—There is no truth, only competing agendas.
—All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
—There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
—The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
—Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
—The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
—For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
—When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

We have become all too familiar with these principles as the years go on and we see them demonstrated by the left time and again.

Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia…

This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

To that last part, I would add that many of the people now pushing these ideas are unaware of their origins, as well. Those of us who oppose them may not know the exact origin of each thought, but we certainly know their far-leftist and often Soviet provenance, as well as the intensity of the Soviet desire to “bury” us.

The essay continues:

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion.

And note this, and recall that it was written early in 2006 [emphasis mine]:

In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.

The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.

Mission accomplished, at least on the Democratic side. And the left would like to label everything that has occurred lately on the right as an example of that same struggle, with Republicans representing the evils of “white supremacy” (which would be that “except the ‘ruling class'” exception referred to in the excerpt).

I know a great many liberals. And I would guess that, although most of them ascribe to the principles on that list of “the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons,” they are unaware that what they are espousing is far leftist propaganda, and remain ignorant even now of its origins and purpose.

And if I were to send them a link to this particular post, they would think I’d gone bonkers.

Observational nutritional studies: garbage in, garbage out

The New Neo Posted on by

Observational nutritional studies are inherently unreliable. I think that’s rather obvious.

And most nutritional studies are observational.

So we have this situation:

…[N]utrition research critics, such as John Ioannidis of Stanford University…point out that observational nutrition studies are essentially just surveys: Researchers ask a group of study participants — a cohort — what they eat and how often, then they track the cohort over time to see what, if any, health conditions the study participants develop.

The trouble with the approach is that no one really remembers what they ate. You might remember today’s breakfast in some detail. But, breakfast three days ago, in precise amounts? Even the unadventurous creature of habit would probably get it wrong. That tends to make these surveys inaccurate, especially when researchers try to drill down to specific foods.

Then, that initial inaccuracy is compounded when scientists use those guesses about eating habits to calculate the precise amounts of specific proteins and nutrients that a person consumed. The errors add up, and they can lead to seriously dubious conclusions.

At times researchers try to control for this by asking people to track their eating by writing things down. People still are unreliable about what they eat, and/or what they write down. It’s not just that they lie to researchers, it’s that they delude themselves as well. And it makes sense, because most people don’t want to concentrate on tracking in great detail what they actually eat, minute by minute and day by day, even when asked to do so.

Not only that, but I would guess that being studied can actually change the eating habits of some people, who eat more “good” foods and fewer “bad” ones for the duration of the study.

Lastly, the science is generally correlational, which is a weak way to study something.

That doesn’t mean that every single thing we know about food and health is wrong. It just means to take it with a grain of salt.

Now, about salt…

[NOTE: More details of the nature and scope of the problem can be found here.]

“You dirty rats”

The New Neo Posted on by

Los Angeles is experiencing an increase in its rat population:

At a press conference at Los Angeles City Hall on Tuesday, DeMaio there were two particular reasons behind the rodent explosion.

“First, the homeless population increase, which provides a source of food which supports population growth,” he said. “Second, many local governments, including Los Angeles, have banned the most effective practices for detecting and eradicating rats.”

Nice going.

Iran escalates

The New Neo Posted on by

Iran appears to have seized a British tanker.

This is a relatively recent story, so go there for updates.

A Whitehall source told the Telegraph of the Stena Impero: “It does look like it has been hijacked. Ships don’t follow that pattern. It turned right and straight into Iranian waters. It is really concerning that this has happened.

“It looks on the face of it as though the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have boarded and taken a UK-flagged ship. It appears to be linked to events around the Grace 1 tanker.”

British authorities seized the Iranian Grace 1 supertanker off the coast of Gibraltar on July 4, on suspicion it was carrying crude to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions.

The fate of the tanker has been at the centre of escalating tensions between the UK and Iran…

So, why have the Democratic leaders defended the Gang of Four?

The New Neo Posted on by

They (we’re primarily talking about Pelosi here, but I doubt she was alone in her decision) didn’t have to do it. After all, they started out either ignoring them or belittling them.

But they chose to defend them in response to Trump. Why?

Although Pelosi had earlier pointed out that the Four were only four votes, she had to already have been well aware of how many members of the House were in solidarity with them. It doesn’t seem to have been a majority, as Wednesday’s “impeach Trump” vote failure amply demonstrates. So, what gives?

I’ve heard people say in explanation, “Bernie Sanders changed the party.” No he didn’t. He did well in 2016, much better than expected, but he didn’t change anything except perceptions. What he did do was to move the Overton Window way to the left, and the sky didn’t fall. So it became possible for a candidate to voice leftist beliefs and think that he/she still had a chance of support on a national level.

If Sanders had actually run in the general election of 2016 instead of Hillary, how would he have done? No one knows, although he polled quite well (so did she). It’s too late now for him to win the nomination in 2020, because he’s got fresher leftist competition, but the party is very afraid of losing his enormous bloc of leftist supporters—and that of AOC and the Four—by not defending the Four.

But still, Pelosi’s original calculus about this was different. Not too long ago she didn’t seem to think it was necessary to defend them much, and she seemed to believe that marginalizing them would be good. She must have known (or believed) that siding with the Four might cost the eventual Democratic nominee (and those Democrats running for Congressional seats) dearly in the general. A great many Democratic voters have gotten way more leftist than the general public seems to be ready to tolerate yet, despite decades of the Gramscian march that has helped swell the ranks of the left immeasurably, particularly among young people, so Pelosi knew a candidate must beware of appearing too leftist.

So, what’s going on? One thing I noticed is that a possible turning point occurred when AOC played the race card against Pelosi herself, saying, “the persistent singling out … it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful … the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”

The initial reaction was for many fellow-Democrats to jump to Pelosi’s defense. Why, the very idea of using racism accusations as a tool like that! Shocking! Of course, it’s the favored tool against the right and Democrats have no problem with it when it’s used that way. But against Pelosi? Not done, except by the Four.

Initially it seemed that Pelosi had won that round, too. But it may nevertheless have struck some sort of fear in her (at least, that’s my theory), because it told her that the Four were going to strike back with every weapon at their disposal rather than give in. Pelosi well knows the potency of the race card with the Democratic voters; there is probably no worse charge. So she was wary.

Then, when Trump singled out the Four (without naming them, but he certainly was talking about at least one of them, Ilhan Omar), and did it in terms the left wanted to cast as irredeemably and vilely racist, Pelosi almost had to defend them or risk a racist accusation herself, and risk losing the votes of the racial groups on which the Democrats now depend for victory.

Pelosi may well end up tacking back and forth between supporting the Four and keeping them in check, for the rest of the 2020 election cycle.

[ADDENDUM: In addition, some House members from deep blue districts are probably afraid of being perceived as insufficiently leftist, and of being primaried by younger and more telegenic Justice Democrats. So they may desert Pelosi, as well. Is even Pelosi immune, in her own district, if she decides to run for re-election?]

A Republican who’s challenging AOC

The New Neo Posted on by

Scherie Murray, a Republican challenging AOC for her House seat, almost certainly doesn’t have a chance of winning a district with so few Republican voters. But Murray is a very impressive candidate, and if AOC keeps on the path she’s currently on, who knows?

Miller also may be somewhat immune from charges of racism or being anti-immigration, although hers is a “black face” that speaks with a voice that isn’t the sort of “black voice” that Ayanna Pressley wants to hear.

So meet Scherie Murray, a black woman born in Jamaica who came here at the age of nine:

This deserves a post of its own: the MSM protected Omar for years

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though I wrote an earlier post today about the allegations that Ilhad Omar is guilty of multiple legal violations, including marrying her brother in order to commit immigration fraud, this article at PJ by David Steinberg on Omar deserves a new post of its own.

It’s titled “Ilhan Omar Happened Because Media Chose to Lie to You.” Steinberg is the writer who’s been investigating Omar for years, and trying to inform the press in order to publicize her history and the suspicious elements in it. All to no avail. He also wrote this post at Powerline that I linked to in my earlier post today on the topic.

Busy guy.

And if you read that PJ article, you can well understand why Steinberg is on fire with this. He’s been working for years on getting the word out, and has been continually frustrated by the MSM’s refusal to cover the story.

Here’s an excerpt from Steinberg’s PJ piece:

Three years ago, most American newsrooms picked Ilhan Omar — despite her crawling Jew-hatred and evidence of an extensive criminal past — to be the transcendent face America needed to fight bigotry and federal corruption. Reporters apparently chose to lie about Omar to help birth a more trusting country…

In the first hours after Omar was elected to Congress in November 2018, the media — literally, the media in its entirety — made a similar choice…

No outlet besides the Star Tribune seems to bear more fault for marching national disgrace Ilhan Omar into office, where she promptly stirred a global rise in anti-Semitism. Yet in finally covering Omar’s past, the Star Tribune did not mention the reporters whose work comprised virtually the entire case against her. Or that it had seemingly done nothing with our private offers to share evidence.

We were referred to as nameless “conservative activists.”

Similarly, the Washington Examiner — having mostly passed on our Omar story for three years until the Star Tribune deemed it an acceptable topic — flew a reporter to Minneapolis. The reporter published an article on Omar which was a duplicate of virtually all of our work as well. It was touted by the reporter as an “EXCLUSIVE”. The reporter praised herself on social media for flying to Minneapolis and finding so much evidence in just 48 hours.

Please read the whole thing.

It illustrates the old adage (well, not so very old—written 6 years ago—but oft-quoted) by Iowahawk:

Did Omar marry her brother?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been following the ongoing reports about that question at Powerline for at least a year, but I’ve not focused on it before because it seems to me it’s been very much up in the air. Things have heated up a bit lately, though—partly, of course, thanks to Donald Trump’s offhand remark, which was probably very well-planned and timed. So here’s a link to the latest Powerline article.

I’m not even going to try to attempt to summarize it; it’s too complex, and cannot be understood without reading the entire thing. It makes a strong case but not a 100% convincing one. I don’t know what I think, but I do know that it doesn’t sound at all like a crackpot theory. Whether it’s true or not should be investigated further, although because of certain difficulties inherent in the history of convoluted relationships and name changes, the only way to determine the truth or falsehood of the claim would probably be a DNA test that’s almost certainly not going to occur.

The entire story has been predictably labeled by the MSM and the left as “unfounded” (see this as well as this). However, although it is certainly unproven, it is certainly not “unfounded,” as a perusal of that Powerline article will tell you. There is plenty of credible evidence to support it and it remains to be seen whether it is true.

By the way, what Trump actually said was this:

“There’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it.”

He added, “I don’t know, but I’m sure that somebody would be looking at that.”

I can’t argue with a single word of that, except perhaps the word “sure.” I’m not sure that anyone with any authority and power will actually be looking into it, although maybe Trump is correct even on that score.

Now, you might say that it’s “unpresidential” to bring up such things. But if one’s antagonist is possibly a tax cheat, a perjurer, and guilty of immigration fraud through a bogus marriage to her own brother, it’s worthy of mention as warranting further investigation.

Trump is already known for strategically bringing up something potentially damaging to an opponent, often with even less evidence—in some cases far less evidence, such as his ridiculous and vile charge concerning Cruz’s father and the Kennedy assassination, made by Trump during the 2016 campaign season. It’s not my favorite trait of Trump’s, to say the least. But in the case of Omar’s shady history he has a great deal more evidence and a great deal more ground to stand on in making his suggestion that this set of circumstances regarding Omar should be investigated.

It should.

Study: bystanders actually help…

The New Neo Posted on by

…much more often than previously thought:

Researchers watched footage and coded the nature of the conflict, the number of direct participants in it, and the number of bystanders. Bystanders were defined as intervening if they attempted a variety of acts, including pacifying gestures, calming touches, blocking contact between parties, consoling victims of aggression, providing practical help to a physical harmed victim, or holding, pushing, or pulling an aggressor away. Each event had an average of 16 bystanders and lasted slightly more than three minutes.

The study finds that in nine out of 10 incidents, at least one bystander intervened, with an average of 3.8 interveners. There was also no significant difference across the three countries and cities, even though they differ greatly in levels of crime and violence.

Instead of more bystanders creating an immobilizing “bystander effect,” the study actually found the more bystanders there were, the more likely it was that at least someone would intervene to help.

Fascinating, and heartening.

The article doesn’t say (and I can only find an abstract of the study) whether the cameras were visible, but my guess is that they were not easily visible and that bystanders did not know they were being filmed. Awareness of the cameras might have influenced the results, however, if the cameras were obvious.

In addition, I’d like to know much more about the typical situation and typical intervention, as well as characteristics of those who intervened. Young or old, for example? More men or more women, and did the different sexes intervene under different circumstances? Did it matter if there was a perceived danger to the person intervening, of if physical strength was needed? Did it matter if the dispute was between adults, a man-woman couple, two men, two women, or if teens or children were involved?