All hail the Tango apple

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve sung the praises of the Jazz apple, still a great favorite of mine. But recently I’ve been hard-pressed (hard-pressed, get it?) to find any in my local stores, and so I’ve been forced to try other varieties.

Most of my experiments have been failures. I prefer very hard apples, and most aren’t hard enough. And I prefer apples with a complexity of sweet/sour flavor. The Jazz has both of these characteristics, and what’s more the Jazz batches don’t differ too much in quality from each other.

But I’m happy to say I’ve found a new contender: the Tango (is it an accident or not that both have names that are musical and dance references?). The Tango is very crisp, and the taste is very aromatic, almost like roses (or like I’d imagine roses would taste). Love it.

The Tango was first marketed in 2009 and has been widely available only since 2013, although my first encounter with it was just the other day. It’s a cross between a Honeycrisp and a Zestar (interestingly enough, I just had my first Zestar about two weeks ago, and although it had a good taste it was too soft for me):

The name SweeTango is a brand name of the ‘Minneiska’ apple, and is a registered trademark owned by the University of Minnesota. Like the ‘Honeycrisp’, the ‘Minneiska’ has much larger cells than most apples, which shatter when bitten to fill the mouth with juice.

Indeed. About that taste:

The ‘Minneiska’ has a texture similar to ‘Honeycrisp’ with a slightly tart and citric quality. The name “SweeTango” is a portmanteau of the words sweet and tangy.

There’s that complexity of taste I look for.

Here’s an article from the 2011 New Yorker:

Like Honeycrisp, SweeTango has much larger cells than other apples, and when you bite into it the cells shatter, rather than cleaving along the cell walls, as is the case with most popular apples. The bursting of the cells fills your mouth with juice. Chunks of SweeTango snap off in your mouth with a loud cracking sound. Although a crisp texture is the single most prized quality in an apple””even more desirable than taste, according to one study””crispness is more a matter of acoustics than of mouthfeel. Vibrations pass along the lower jaw and set the cochlea trembling. Biting into a really crisp apple, one feels, in the words of Edward Bunyard, the author of “The Anatomy of Dessert,” “a certain joy in crashing through living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.”…

By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn’t taste very good, and as a rule people didn’t eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider. President John Adams drank a tankard before breakfast. Babies drank it before going to bed. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Carry Nation took up her axe in the service of the temperance movement, she likely employed it on apple trees as well as saloons. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the apple had a serious public-relations problem.

The solution, as Michael Pollan relates in his book “The Botany of Desire,” was to promote the eating of apples as a healthy snack. J. T. Stinson, a fruit specialist, first used the phrase “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” at the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. (He adapted the slogan from the traditional English proverb “An apple before going to bed keeps the doctor from earning his bread.”) Many cider-makers had long prized the chance seedlings, discovered in their fields and orchards, that yielded unexpectedly delectable eating apples.

I happen to like pursuing these so-called heirloom apples. But Tango isn’t an heirloom; it’s relatively new.

That New Yorker article goes into the story of how supermarket apples had devolved (by the time of my youth) into the mediocre Big Three (or two, depending on how you count): Macintosh, and red and yellow Delicious. Although yellows could sometimes be very good if crisp, I stopped eating apples a long time ago because I found the taste and texture of the supermarket apples of the time to be bad. But now we have an embarrassment of apple riches, not just at farmstands but in the supermarkets, and not just at fancy markets such as Whole Foods but at our local neighborhood chains.

According to the article, it was the Granny Smith that turned the tide. My trademark.

[ADDENDUM: And here’s a job I think I’d like:

In the fall, during the apple harvest, Bedford tastes apples from blossom times past, up to five hundred apples a day, in the hope of finding that one apple in ten thousand that will be released as a commercial variety. I spent an afternoon with him in early September, walking through long rows of young trees, and tasting apples of every imaginable size, shape, hue, and flavor, from musky melonlike apples to bright lemony apples and apples that tasted like licorice. “We don’t actually swallow, and we don’t really even have time to spit,” Bedford explained. “You just kind of hold a bit in your mouth for a while, until you get the flavor, and then let it fall out.”

If a tree produces exceptionally good apples for several years in a row, it achieves élite status and is awarded a number. Four clones are made from the mother tree’s wood, and those trees are grown in another orchard on the property, under commercial conditions. To evaluate the élite trees, Bedford carries a field notebook with twenty categories on a page, which, in addition to the “organoleptics”””all the sensory stuff, like flavor, texture, and color””include tree size, shape, and yield. He scores each category from one to nine. He generally continues these yearly evaluations for a decade or longer, in order to subject the trees to a representative range of extreme summers and winters and drought and flood, and in the hope of ferreting out all the quirks that apple trees are heir to. Some are wild in their youth but eventually settle down, while others bear fruit every other year; some bear smaller fruits as the trees age, while others drop their apples before they’re ripe.

Finally, a truly outstanding apple is named, the tree is patented, and clones are released to nurseries, where thousands of copies of the trees are made and sold to growers, for which the university collects a royalty of around a dollar per tree during the life of the patent. Large color posters of the five apples released during Bedford’s time at the agricultural station decorate his office, their swollen flesh glistening with beads of moisture, like centerfold pinups in a mechanic’s shop.

Much, much more good stuff at the link.]

Blogger burnout

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t worry. This post isn’t about me—or at least it’s not primarily about me. I’m not planning to quit blogging, and I’m not fishing for comments that beg me to stay.

But every now and then I think about quitting, because blogging takes its toll. It is a ridiculously time-consuming activity for the amount of money I get. And for most bloggers—at least, most bloggers who aren’t among the few extremely successful mega-bloggers—it remains for the most part a labor of love (or of obsessive-compulsive disorder).

But I can identify with what Jim Treacher has written about why he’s quitting his post as blogger for the Daily Caller:

Daily blogging can be a fun job, but it can also be a grind. Living on the Internet 24/7 has turned out to be kind of a bad idea. It seems to have driven everyone utterly insane. Everyone except me, of course! But spending every waking moment online, for years at a time, has taken its toll on me. Wading nostril-deep through the endless hostility and madness and dishonesty, being expected to have an instant “take” on every single thing that happens, every minute of every day, is exhausting.

I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?

I plan to keep writing, because otherwise I’ll need to get a real job. But I just can’t maintain the manic, unrelenting pace required to keep a blog viable in 2017. At the beginning of the year I was told to go from three posts a day to five (I did), on the theory that it would boost my traffic (it didn’t). I just don’t know how else to get more clicks. Recently I was given a month to do so, but I can’t crank out even more posts in a day, day after day, without sacrificing the minimal level of quality my readers expect.

Yep, I’m often tired. One of the things I’m tired of is the amount of junk that so often passes for news in the MSM and elsewhere, the same-old predictable and transparent propaganda. So much is a tempest in a teapot, or unreliable, or opinion journalism masking itself as objective. I’m tired of feeling the need to monitor all of that verbiage and sort out the wheat from the chaff.

One thing I believe is going on with Treacher is that his bosses seem to think that quantity is the answer to getting more clicks. Of course, I’m probably not the world’s authority on how to get more clicks; my traffic is steady but moderate. But from what I’ve observed around the blogosphere, going from three to five posts a day isn’t going to change a thing. These days blogs are considered somewhat passe; the dogs have barked and the caravan moved on to social media, and no doubt will move on to other platforms someday soon. Bloggers, the hot new commodity when I started out, are the old dinosaurs now, especially individual bloggers. Group blogs are really the only way to generate a lot of content—which people seem to want, because the most popular blogs these days are generally group blogs.

I’m pretty sure that there have been big news days on which I’ve put up as many as five posts. More often it’s three, and even that’s pushing it. To regularly churn out five posts a day, as Treacher was asked to do, would either require the “living on the Internet 24/7” to which Treacher refers, or the content of each post would pretty much have to shrink to a sentence with a link in it and then maybe a short quote. That’s fine if that’s the type of blog a person wants to run, but anything much longer than that and it becomes very labor-intensive to produce a large volume of commentary by oneself.

As I said, I have no plans to quit. But sometimes I think that maybe, perhaps, I should try to actually write that change book I thought I’d write many years ago. To do that, I’d probably have to take the number of posts I write a day down to one, with more posts than that only on big news days, with a few more hours each day devoted to the book.

I have no intention of being chained to my computer 24/7, although some days it may seem as though I already am. But that way lies madness.

Scalise is back

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s so much bad news I thought I’d highlight some good news—Rep. Steve Scalise returned to the House today:

…Scalise, flanked by staff and U.S. Capitol Police, emerged from a room off the House floor and slowly made his way through the speaker’s lobby. He leaned heavily on two canes at each arm but seemed cheerful. When someone greeted him, he responded over his shoulder: “It feels good to be back!”

The chamber erupted with applause when Scalise walked through the door. Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Pa.) wiped away tears, as did multiple other members. Rep. Cedric Richmond, a Democrat and longtime Scalise friend from Louisiana, walked over to the Republican side of the chamber to clasp hands with his buddy.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) came over from the Senate to see Scalise. He sat in the front row on the edge of his chair for much of the address.

Though he’s been absent from Congress, Scalise has worked the phones to try to help the House prepare for a hectic fall agenda.

Scalise’s office said he will be resuming his work at the Capitol, while also completing an extended period of out-patient rehabilitation over the coming months.

In case you don’t remember, Scalise was shot and nearly killed last June by a Republican-hater while Scalise and others were practicing for a Congressional baseball game.

Jerry Brown and the troglodytes

The New Neo Posted on by

Almost two weeks ago Jerry Brown came up with this lovely gibe: “You should check out the derivation of ”˜Trump-ite’ and ”˜troglodyte,’ because they both refer to people who dwell in deep, dark caves.”

And I say Brown’s supporters are Elois.

So there.

The Time Machine:

…[T]he Time Traveller [in Wells’ The Time Machine] tests his device with a journey that takes him to A.D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, doing no work and having a frugivorous diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline, and he speculates that they are a peaceful, communist society, the result of humanity conquering nature with technology, and subsequently evolving to adapt to an environment in which strength and intellect are no longer advantageous to survival.

Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller is shocked to find his time machine missing and eventually concludes that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Luckily, he had removed the machine’s levers before leaving it (the time machine being unable to travel through time without them). Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Within their dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi. His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock and ranchers. The Time Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak.

There’s much more at the link, of course. In case you haven’t read the book, it’s not a real cheerer-upper about the fate of humankind.

Hugh Hefner dies at 91

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure what to say about the life of Hugh Hefner, who has died at 91.

In some basic way, Hefner’s world never interested me, although I couldn’t help but notice it. Many of the Hefner obituaries talk about how he revolutionized the way people looked at sex, and give him credit (or blame) for much of the sexual revolution, or at least for sparking it.

I never got that impression, although I got the impression that he wanted to give that impression. The way I looked at it was that he was a marketing and publishing genius, who invented a brand and pushed it brilliantly, riding the wave of the sexual revolution for many decades and fading out only in recent years when his prime was past. Yes, he probably helped the so-called sexual revolution along in many ways too. But I believe it was a phenomenon that would have happened anyway without him, although perhaps not in the same exact way.

Hefner didn’t invent the marketing of sex, after all, or the girlie magazine. But he knew America was ready for a different kind of girlie magazine, a more mainstream one with nudity that featured what looked like the girl next door and wasn’t frankly pornographic but skirted on the edges.

That wasn’t all the magazine was about, although it was the main attraction. I was one of those people who really did sometimes read Playboy for the articles (the interviews in particular). But I obviously wasn’t Hefner’s target audience, to say the least.

Hefner described himself as having been proudest of this accomplishment:

That I changed attitudes toward sex. That nice people can live together now. That I decontaminated the notion of premarital sex. That gives me great satisfaction.

Hefner had described his childhood home as a puritanical one where sex was never mentioned. It’s not so surprising he might rebel against that and be proud of striking a blow for sexual freedom, but not only do I not think that he played that big a role in “decontaminating the notion of premarital sex,”—as I wrote earlier, I think he was just one part of a big movement that was bound to happen—but I don’t know why he’d be so very happy about it, given the societal negatives of out-of-wedlock children and social instability that have gone along with it.

Hefner always seemed an overgrown boy to me—albeit a boy who functioned very well indeed in the business and PR world. It turns out that he very much agreed:

“I’m never going to grow up,” he said in a CNN interview when he was 82. “Staying young is what it is all about for me.

“Holding on to the boy and long ago I decided that age really didn’t matter and as long as the ladies … feel the same way, that’s fine with me.”

Hefner was in some ways a boy who liked to play—at adult games. Unlike many playboys, however, he also liked to marry (three times in all), and when married he professed to be faithful to his wives.

RIP. I’ll leave it there.

On anthems and demonstrations: remember the 1968 Olympics?

The New Neo Posted on by

Being as old as I am, the bended-knees of the NFL immediately brought this incident to mind:

For those of you who weren’t around back then or who’ve forgotten, here’s what it was all about.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. There’s a lot of rhyming between the late 60s/early70s and now, isn’t there? One big difference, though, is that Smith and Carlos acted during a time when the struggle for black civil rights still had quite a way to go (for example, the landmark Voting Rights Act had only been passed in 1965). Another difference is that they were disciplined heavily by the Olympics as a result. Still another difference (and one that I doubt most people remember; I didn’t) was that they had some specific things they were protesting, and some specific demands, in addition to their more general complaints about racism:

As people railed against Apartheid in South Africa and racial segregation in the United States, Smith and Carlos raised their fists to show solidarity with people fighting internationally for human rights. They were booed and forced out of the Games by the president of the International Olympic Committee at the time, Avery Brundage. The third man on the podium, a white Australian named Peter Norman, was vilified by his home nation for wearing his OPHR badge in solidarity.

As a member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) he originally advocated a boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games unless four conditions were met: South Africa and Rhodesia uninvited from the Olympics, the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s world heavyweight boxing title, Avery Brundage to step down as president of the IOC, and the hiring of more African-American assistant coaches. As the boycott failed to achieve support after the IOC withdrew invitations for South Africa and Rhodesia, he decided, together with Carlos, to not only wear their gloves but also go barefoot to protest poverty, wear beads to protest lynchings, and wear buttons that said OPHR.

Some people…(particularly IOC president Avery Brundage) felt that a political statement had no place in the international forum of the Olympic Games. In an immediate response to their actions, Smith and Carlos were suspended from the U.S. team by Brundage and voluntarily moved from the Olympic Village. Brundage, who was president of the United States Olympic Committee in 1936, had made no objections against Nazi salutes during the Berlin Olympics. The Nazi salute, being a national salute at the time, was accepted in a competition of nations, while the athletes’ salute was not of a nation and so was considered unacceptable.

A mere four years later, in 1972, there was a similar protest by two American athletes, sometimes called “The Forgotten Protest.” They went a bit further than Smith and Carlos:

The 1972 Olympics Black Power Salute was a political protest by two US Olympic runners Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett…

Both runners refused to stand for the US National Anthem. They subsequently stroked their beards, and twirled their medals as they left the stadium. The crowd booed both runners for their display.

The Associated Press noted that the casual behavior of Matthews and Collett during the playing of the anthem as “disrespectful”…

The pair were banned from future Olympic competition by the IOC; since John Smith had pulled a hamstring 80 meters into the final while leading and had been ruled unfit to run, the USA were now unable to field a team in the 4 é— 400 m relay and were forced to scratch from the event.

The visuals:

These sorts of displays ended; I’m not sure when, but I think some time during the 1970s. In recent years, black athletes have stood tall and proud while accepting their medals. I haven’t done research on whether there might have been some isolated protests during the ensuing years, but I don’t remember any of note until Colin Kaepernick decided to revive the genre and change the body language into a kneel.

Here’s some trenchant commentary on today’s NFL goings-on:

[NOTE: Of course, there were other much more sobering events at the Olympics of 1972 that grabbed headlines from Matthews and Collett].

Wishful thinking: hoping for the Trump Katrina

The New Neo Posted on by

The MSM can hope for a Trump Katrina equivalent, can’t it? It can also try its level best to create one. There have been no shortages of natural disasters this year, after all. Maybe Puerto Rico will be the charm:

Monday evening, Trump began tweeting about Puerto Rico, talking about its poor infrastructure and financial problems from before the hurricane hit. Naturally, Leftists weren’t happy, and the media was again able to attack Trump for his tweets being “not well received.”

Because, apparently, the only thing Trump does is tweet.

Article after article condemned Trump for focusing on the NFL (in tweets) instead of Puerto Rico (in tweets). Leftist after leftist also began claiming the damage in Puerto Rico would be Trump’s “Katrina,” in reference to the hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast during President George W. Bush’s administration…

As it turns out, it was the media ignoring Puerto Rico””not Trump.

PBS’s John Yang spoke to Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello about the help he has received from the states. Rosselo immediately said he was “very grateful for the administration” and that “they have responded quickly.”…

More at the link. And if you want to see a sampling of “Puerto Rico is Trump’s Katrina” articles and/or discussions, go here.

Puerto has been very hard hit indeed by Hurricane Maria. It will take a long time to recover, and they are in need of help. It would be wonderful if these things weren’t politicized by the MSM and those with an interest in doing so, but this has been going on for a long time.

Moore wins Alabama GOP primary

The New Neo Posted on by

Roy Moore has won the GOP Senate primary in Alabama.

There’s lots of coverage of the result that characterizes it as a defeat for Trump, who backed Moore’s opponent, Strange. And on that level, it is a defeat for Trump. But Moore’s history and personality indicates that, as the anti-establishment candidate, he is also a more natural ally of Trump. It seemed to me—and I did not follow this race all that closely—that Trump only supported Strange out of some sense of duty, and he is more temperamentally and even somewhat philosophically allied with Moore.

So I’m not sure what the results mean, except that (a) the right in Alabama is sick and tired of the GOP senators who aren’t doing what they want them to do; and (b) Moore himself is a very popular and idiosyncratic figure in Alabama.

The real question, for me, is who will win the general election. The impression I get from reading the MSM is that Strange would have had an easy go of it and for Moore it will be somewhat harder. That’s concerning to me, if in fact it’s true.

It’s the old old question as to whether candidates who are further to the right, who tend to appeal to party members in the primary, can appeal to the broader public in the general. In that last link I offered, it calls Democratic nominee Doug Jones’ chances of victory “newly competitive” now that Moore rather than Strange is his opponent. I haven’t seen any polls on this yet, but since polls have become more and more untrustworthy lately, I probably wouldn’t give them all that much weight, particularly this early in the game.

Conservatism and tyranny

The New Neo Posted on by

I think this might be as good a time as any to spotlight this comment by commenter “Kyndyll G.” It was made in early July, and it’s a discussion of conservatism and its relation to tyranny:

I would not presume to speak for all of the people on this forum, much less millions of people who, for any of a number of reasons, tend to hold the same opinions I have on some subjects or vote for some of the same candidates I choose to vote for. But I will define my political model, which is shared to some extent by many people you would call conservatives.

Let’s start by saying that American conservatives are conservative because they want to preserve the foundational beliefs and ideals of the United States. What would those be? What makes the United States different from the country it broke away from, or the European countries from which a great majority of its early population immigrated? Our nation was founded by people who put their lives and assets on the line to separate us from the tyranny of a government without representation, and our founding documents literally outline an idealization of individual rights with specifically enumerated and limited rights of the central government. Ours was designed as a nation of individuals, for whom our government works. Understand that: the government was written to be subservient to the American people, not the other way around.

In “the old country,” with centuries ”“ approaching millennia ”“ of toiling under monarchs and assorted tyrants, the political axis is based on a starting assumption of government control that our founders would have considered unappetizing. The royalty may now be gone or remain just as dusty figureheads, but a cultural mindset accustomed to living under boots measures its world by the tread pattern on the bottom of a boot. It suits those who live under boots to sort statist tyranny by flavors: with the extremes of “right” being characterized by tyrannies of nationalism and religion, and extreme “left” being tyrannies of communism.

The American political spectrum is different. We lack a history or desire for tyranny. Our true political axis is government vs. governed, with the extremes defined as complete government control on one end and complete lack of government control on the other end. By definition, American conservatives place themselves somewhere on the half that includes less government control, since that was the founding principle of our nation that we are seeking to conserve.

One of the online debate trends I’ve noticed in recent years is a general creeping into political debate on US-based forums, between largely US-based commentators, of the UK/Euro flavor-of-tyranny political spectrum. I expect this is due to numerous factors, including the globalizing effect of the Internet and the Europhilism that has existed within a certain subset of the US population since before the US was a nation. Part of it, however, is being forced onto conversation by the “Progressive” left, since it suits their purposes to stain their political enemies by conflation of UK/Euro “right-wing” (evil nationalists, personified by Hitler) with US conservatives, aka the “right”, who also tend to be American nationalists. Thus, anyone who is not in favor of every single part of the increasingly wacked-out, big-government ideology of the “Progressive” left is by definition, on the side of Hitler.

Like so many “Progressive” left ideas, it’s idiotic and absurd, but because it’s part of an incessant drumbeat it’s a lie that becomes truth with pounding repetition; and because conservatives are bullied into complete silence by violent nutjobs that froth at the mouth with their desire to harm physically, financially and in every other way anyone who harbors an unacceptable thought, there’s not much to counter it. But here is what makes it patently stupid to conflate conservatives with Nazis: Nazi Germany represents a literal cliche of unbridled government control and no individual rights. It is the opposite of what American conservatives want or idealize.

We give exactly zero f%cks if Hitler was a nationalist tyrant, a communist tyrant, a religious tyrant, or a highly inbred, syphilitic tyrant king. The result was a situation featuring murderous and crushing government control over a terrified citizenry lacking rights to live or speak freely, and in some cases, the basic right to exist at all. Anyone who tries to pin that on people who believe in limited power of government and preservation of individual rights, for all citizens, is a drooling moron. We don’t give tyrants the respect of placing them on different points of a political spectrum shared by normal people. We put them all in a box labeled “Evil F’ing Tyrant A’holes” where they can all rot in hell together, and then we put that box on the far end of a political axis that only the “Progressive” left wants to drag our country closer to: powerful central government stifling the life out of its populace.

Why I haven’t written about the NFL

The New Neo Posted on by

The short version is: I could hardly care less about football.

As a child, I used to glance at the TV when my father and brother were watching football, and I had no trouble walking on. Football games looked like a jumbled mess—a bunch of guys whose faces I couldn’t discern (the helmets covered too much) bashing each other all in a heap. Then every now and then there was the part I sort of liked, the ball being thrown with a high and slowish trajectory or a low and fast one either to miss its target, or be fumbled, or—best of all—caught.

And there were injuries in football—lots and lots of injuries. Later, when my brother played football in high school, I went to several games in which he was injured. It was no fun at all to see him lying on the field, writhing and being examined while the crowd cheered something else that had caught their attention.

The very best thing about football was the fall weather, crisp and clear and blue-skyed, with the leaves turning their autumn red and orange and gold.

So I don’t need to consider turning my back on the NFL over this latest flap, because I almost never watched or even followed NFL games in the first place. To me, the anthem-kneeling controversies are a case of politics intruding on still another arena that should be free of it. The NFL has the following guidelines in its operations manual, by the way:

The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem.

During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country. Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.

Note that the disciplines for infractions are discretionary, despite the fact that the text says that the players must be on the sideline for the anthem (not in the tunnel, as some were). But “must” doesn’t really mean “must” if there are no consequences for infractions. And there is little doubt that the NFL itself will not impose any negative consequences.

Freedom of speech is fine, but workplaces (and the football field is a very highly-paid workplace) have the right to enforce some rules about political actions while in the workplace. But since nothing will be done by NFL management, the fans may exercise their own freedom by voting with their feet.

Meanwhile, we have some elections in Germany and Iraq

The New Neo Posted on by

While we are being distracted by such things as the NFL’s knees and Weiner’s weiner, life goes on abroad with some elections.

Germany has re-elected Angela Merkel, for example. But the celebration was somewhat muted for Merkel:

Merkel’s Pyrrhic victory comes at a great cost to her Christian conservative party (CDU), which registered its worst performance in nearly 70 years ”” getting just above 33 percent of the vote. Merkel’s desire to extend her 12-year-old reign also pulverized her junior coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), in many of its traditional working-class bastions. At 20 percent, the SPD, Europe’s oldest socialist party, also clocked its worst performance since 1949.

The biggest winner of the Sunday’s election was the right-wing AfD party. The newcomer secured 12.6 percent of the vote, getting over 21 percent in eastern German states. With 90 members of parliaments, the AfD is set to form the third largest group in the German Bundestag.

This is part of a larger political trend across Europe, and is unsurprising—especially in Germany, where Merkel’s pro-refugee stance has been particularly obvious. The rise of far-right (or what is called “far-right” in Europe) parties across much of Western Europe is a double-edged sword, depending on what their endgame is.

After all, Germany has a certain history with this, and that history is not especially positive, to say the least (and let’s not quibble right now about whether the Nazis were on the left or the right, a topic we’ve certainly discussed before on this blog here, for example).

The rise of these nationalist parties on the right is not just about immigration; their growth is also very much a reaction to the increasing power of the EU:

The EU’s fears over the AfD’s entry into the German parliament are understandable. “The AfD’s entry into the Bundestag is a major shock,” EU’s Economic Commissar, Pierre Moscovici, was quick to point out.

Right-wing party’s presence in the German parliament makes it difficult for Merkel to extend bailouts and financial concessions to other European countries in the names of “saving Europe”. The nationalist AfD will be more than happy to throw a wrench into Merkel’s plans, especially if it means disrupting the EU.

There also was a vote in the Kurdish part of Iraq, a non-binding referendum on whether the Kurds should secede and form their own country. The full results have not been released yet, but there’s little doubt that the answer will be a resounding “Yes!” for the Kurds, who have been wanting their own country for about a century.

This will send a shudder of fear throughout the greater region, because several countries (especially Turkey and Iran) have their own restless Kurds, too. It’s possible to support the very understandable and valid desire of the Kurds to have their own country while realizing that the destabilization that almost certainly would result could be very dangerous, not just to the region but to our interests there as well.

If Iraq (or Iran or Turkey) has anything to say about it, the Kurds aren’t going anywhere:

Iraq Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared before the vote that he would take “necessary measures” to protect the country’s unity and he was due to meet parliament members on Wednesday.

Iraqi lawmakers voted on Tuesday to send troops to disputed areas where the referendum took place, but there have been no signs of a deployment so far.

The referendum took place peacefully, but has increased tensions between the Iraqi Kurds and their neighbors, raising fears of potential unrest.

Iran and Turkey have also made a string of threats against the leaders of the enclave, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warning of strangled oil exports, hunger and military intervention.

In the regional capital Erbil, a night of fireworks, flag-waving and dancing in the streets followed the vote.

“We made a Kurdish state today,” Erbil resident Ahmad told AFP during the celebrations.

“We’re Kurdish people, we’re not Arab, we’re not Persian, we’re no one else… We’re Kurds and we’ll remain Kurds forever.”

The Kurds really are different—for example, they support Israel and Israel supports them (and by the way, there are a couple hundred thousand Kurdish Jews, something I just learned today)—and their nationalist desires trouble many countries in the region. The reason is obvious if you look at this map showing the extent of the territory Kurds inhabit:

The fact that the Kurds are nationalist about being Kurds (they identify as Kurds before they identify as members of any religion or present-day country, for example) presents a threat to the entire region, but it is one of the reasons they are more religiously tolerant and secular in their society. They also are excellent fighters, which can’t make the countries they inhabit feel very secure when faced with the possibility of civil war if the Kurds don’t get their nation.

Anthony Weiner will be going to jail

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story.

One of the worst things about his offense was that it occurred years after his compulsive sexting behavior was first caught and led to his disgrace. His political career was over, his marriage was on life support, and yet he persisted in his behavior.

From Weiner in court: “I was a very sick man for a long period of time, but I am responsible for the damage I have done…I have no excuse.”

No, there really is none, although the story of the 15-year-old he was sex-Skyping with (is that a word?) is awfully strange, too. Let me say at the outset that her role in this cannot and should not affect Weiner’s guilt—he is guilty, guilty, guilty, both morally and legally, and in addition he knew she was only 15—but here’s the girl’s story, according to Weiner’s lawyers:

[Weiner’s lawyers] said he never sought out teenagers on the internet and didn’t engage in other predatory behaviors typical of those arrested in similar cases [of sexting with minors]…

The lawyers said the crime resulted from “untreated addiction and profit-seeking curiosity.” Then they explained that Weiner had caught the eye of “a curious high school student, looking to generate material for a book the government has disclosed she is now shopping to publishers.”

They said the high school student documented their interactions from the outset, selectively photographing her phone to preserve messages otherwise designed to vanish, before selling her story to a British tabloid for $30,000.

“After the election was over, the high school student told government investigators that [affecting the US election] had been one of her goals from the outset,” the lawyers wrote.

Well, that information came from Weiner’s lawyers, didn’t it? So perhaps it’s not true? I did a bit of research on that, and discovered a cesspool of information (a lot of it in the British papers) concerning the actual messages and photos and what was said by Weiner to the girl, and interviews she has later given. I’ve decided not to link any of it; if you want to look for yourself, be my guest. The whole thing is too revolting, but as far as I can see the lawyer’s statements I quoted above are basically true.

Weiner is certainly “a sick man.” That said, despite the compulsive nature of his acts, he is an adult with free will, and he should have thrown all of his computers and tablets and cellphones into New York Harbor rather than continue behavior so morally bankrupt.

And so likely to destroy him in the end. Which makes him not only a very sick man and an immoral man but a stupid man as well. And it’s that last part that may be the most puzzling of all.